Matthew Gullett has been with Warren Central’s volleyball program since day one. After 15 years, however, he’s decided it’s time to move on.

Gullett, who spent three years as an assistant and the past 11 as Warren Central’s head coach, announced Wednesday he is leaving for a job on the Coast. He will finish out the school year and then become the head volleyball coach and teaching at Hancock Middle School.

“We’ve always wanted to live on the Coast and my wife and I had talked about it and talked about it,” Gullett said. “I told her if we were going to do this, let’s do it while we’re still young, our girl’s still young, and see if there are any opportunities that become available. A few opportunities became available.”

Gullett has been a constant in Warren Central’s volleyball program since it started in 2011, and helped it become one of the better ones in the Mississippi High School Activities Association.

The Lady Vikes have had three winning seasons in a row. They finished 23-10 in 2024 and earned the first playoff victory in school history by beating Grenada in the first round of the Class 6A bracket. As a head coach, Gullett has a 155-136 overall record.

He acknowledged that leaving a successful, on the rise high school program he helped build from scratch to coach a middle school team seems like a step backward. The fringe benefits far outweighed that perception, however.

Gullett and his wife, Laura, have a 5-year-old daughter. A shorter season will allow him to spend more time at home, he said.

“The AD down there was sort of shocked that I’d be willing to take a junior high or middle school program,” Gullett said. “But it’s not as much of a season. It’s more developmental. And it gives me time I can spend with my little girl. She’s 5. We’re hitting those very formative years. It’s a little less travel and I’ll be able to spend more time at home with the family. That’s another one of the things that I was looking at when we started looking at making the move.”

Still, leaving Warren Central won’t be easy. The Lady Vikes are only losing four seniors and seem poised to build on last year’s breakthrough.

That just means, Gullett added, that he’s handing off the reins when the program is in a good place.

“It’s been a long ride. A lot of fun. The last few years have been really fun since we’ve had such good teams,” he said. “The program’s still going to be great next year. There’s an amazing team coming back and I know they’re going to do good. It’s just an opportunity my wife and I have been looking at. We’re looking for a new adventure.”

Besides his long coaching tenure Gullett has taught at Warren Central for 22 years. He thanked his current and former players, as well as fellow coaches and teachers for making all of them — even the bad years, he joked — good ones.

“I’m very proud. It’s been a labor of love. So many of the girls that have come through have been such a pleasure to work with, and the parents. It’s good years and bad years, and most all of them have been good years. Even the bad years had remarkable moments of growth,” Gullett said. “I’m really proud of the work that the girls put in. I just come out there and try to give them an opportunity to grow and I push them to get better. But they’re the ones that put all the work and sweat in.”