Jim Mashek

FRANKLIN-SIMPSON’s MAX CHANEY: ‘MIKIE HAD A LOT OF PLACES HE COULD HAVE GONE …’

FRANKLIN, Kentucky — Monday’s non-contact practice had come and gone, at Franklin-Simpson High School, and the Wildcats’ coaches lingered on the field at Mathews Stadium with a handful of special-teams players.

Seventh-year head coach Max Chaney had to tend to some details, including Tuesday’s scheduled photo shoot and a 7-on-7 tournament at Barren County that night, but he was more than willing to stop and talk about the Wildcats’ first-year defensive coordinator, Mikie Benton.

Benton was dismissed as the Russellville High School head football coach in the first week of January. Chaney wasted little time in getting in touch with him, to gauge his interest in joining the Wildcats’ coaching staff.

“Mikie had a lot of places he could have gone,” Chaney said. “I feel like we’ve always had a good working relationship. He’s a good guy, a knowledgeable guy … I coached against him when he played (at Russellville) …

“Through the years, Mikie and I always talked, away from the field … The second I found out he was available, I was on the phone.”

Benton graduated from Russellville High School in the mid-2000s, before a solid career at the University of Kentucky as a defensive back during the Rich Brooks and Joker Phillips eras. He took Russellville to the KHSAA Class 1A championship game in 2021, when the Panthers tangled with tradition-rich Pikeville High School, only to drop a 30-27 decision at UK’s Kroger Field.

The Panthers had a couple lean years after that, but Benton and his coaching staff kept plugging away, and they’d finish with a 6-6 record in 2024, followed by a 5-6 season last year. Benton was given some directives about the future of the program after Russellville’s final game, a first-round loss in the KHSAA Class 1A playoffs to Louisville’s Holy Cross Academy.

Benton thought the Panthers were on track to meet those objectives, before he was summoned into the principal Drew Teel’s office in the first week of January.

He wouldn’t be coming back for a ninth season at Russellville.

“I really didn’t see it coming,” Benton said in an interview earlier this month at Vicki’s, a breakfast/lunch joint in Russellville. “It seems (the move) was made at an administrative level, and I had a chance to meet with the kids after school that day. I wanted encourage them to keep grindin’, after I left …

“I really didn’t have any regrets. Not at all. To be able to be the head coach, where I played high school football, was a great opportunity. So I started putting out some feelers …”

That turned out to be a two-way street, because Benton had plenty of options for the 2026-27 academic year, including jobs as the head football coach at different schools in Kentucky.

But he welcomed the chance to coach at a school located a short drive from his Russellville home.

Franklin-Simpson head coach Max Chaney likes Benton’s aggressive defensive approach, and the Wildcats always have been a physical football squad. Benton was able to bring his secondary coach, Christian Mullins, with him to Franklin-Simpson. The Wildcats return plenty of seasoned players, up front, but there’s a wide-open competition for the starting quarterback job, after the departure of multi-sport star Brady Delk.

Franklin-Simpson will open the season against Tennessee’s Whites Creek High School, in the first game of a doubleheader in mid-August at Warren East, in mid-August.

The Wildcats will be looking to improve on last year’s 7-5 record, which included a lopsided loss to perennial power Paducah Tilghman in the second round of the KHSAA Class 4A playoffs. Benton will be able to work with more available players at Franklin-Simpson, as opposed to Russellville, based on the school size alone, and he’ll be working in the school’s special education department for his academic duties.

“We like to play physical football,” Franklin-Simpson head coach Max Chaney said.

All of which suggests Mikie Benton should be a good fit as the Wildcats’ defensive coordinator.