Marietta High School has a new head football coach - Scott Burton, a former assistant coach for the University of Richmond in Virginia.

He was approved by a unanimous vote of the city school board on Tuesday. He will succeed legendary Coach Friday Richards, who announced in January that he would retire at the end of the school year after leading the program for 16 seasons and a total of 33 years of coaching at the school, where before that he was the team's star running back.

The search team that found Burton - MHS principal Leigh Colburn, MHS athletic director Paul Hall, associate principal Ron Brookins, baseball coach/MHS Teacher of the Year Col. James Wilson and MHS Touchdown Club President Keith Davidson - seems to have found the right man for the job. Burton's resume is a good one. He has 11 years experience as a social science teacher, Master of Education degree from the University of Georgia, a successful record as a head coach at Highland Springs High School in suburban Richmond.

But more than that, Burton seems well aware that MHS is no ordinary school, and that Marietta's support for its high school and its independent system is not ordinary, either.

"I think the first thing I'd say is the community, the feel of a community that truly cares about its students, that cares about its citizens and cares about its football really appealed to me," he told the MDJ. "There's lots of schools in Georgia, but Marietta seems to be really a perfect fit for how my wife and I really wanted to raise our children with the marriage of also being a football town."

"This is a very, very proud historic, you know, thick, rich community, and so with that tradition, with that springboard and with some tweaks and some ideas for the future, we're in for some good things. I think all of us are."

Burton doesn't sound like a newcomer. Rather, he sounds like a lifetime resident - or else someone with an acute gift for observation:

"There's a distinct flavor of Marietta culture here and I think that's very important because in other places you kind of leave one subdivision and enter another, and you don't really get that true sense of where the community begins and ends. Here it's pretty distinctive. You know the Marietta culture is strong and the support for the athletics and the support for all students is strong. So it was important to me to be in a one-horse town, so to speak, because everybody focuses on that one horse. So we're excited to get this thing going, that's for sure."

Coach Richards spent decades building a good program and, more importantly, helping mold young men's lives. And Burton seems fully capable of following in those big shoes - or shoulder pads, as Superintendent Emily Lembeck put it.

In short, we think Marietta is going to like Coach Burton - and we think Coach Burton is going to like Marietta.