Ray Lamb, the Hall of Fame Georgia high school football coach who won 249 games and state championships at two schools before spending nearly two decades as the University of Georgia’s coordinator of high school relations, died Thursday in Athens. He was 90.
His son Hal Lamb, the retired Calhoun High School coach, confirmed the news to AJC Varsity. “He touched a lot of lives on this earth,” Hal Lamb said. “He will be missed, but he lived a good life.”
Lamb finished his high school coaching career with a 249-103-11 record, 11 region titles and three state championships. He won back-to-back titles at Warren County in 1965 and 1966, then captured Commerce’s first state championship in 1981. That 1981 title made him just the fourth coach in Georgia history to win state championships at two different schools.
Both of his sons played for him at Commerce. Bobby Lamb was the quarterback and Hal was a wide receiver on that 1981 championship team. Both went on to become successful head coaches themselves — Bobby at Furman, Mercer and later Anderson University, and Hal during a long, decorated run at Calhoun that included multiple state titles.
Lamb spent 22 seasons at Commerce after arriving in 1967, turning a struggling program into a consistent winner. A Georgia House resolution later noted a 190-58 mark during his Commerce tenure and the renaming of the Tigers’ home field as Tiger Field at Ray Lamb Stadium. He closed his sideline career at Monroe Area in 1992.
In 1993 he joined the Georgia football staff as coordinator of high school relations, a role he held until 2011 under Vince Dooley, Ray Goff, Jim Donnan and Mark Richt. The job made him a familiar figure to high school coaches across the state and a connector between those programs and the Bulldogs. He was a past president of the Georgia Athletic Coaches Association and was inducted into the GACA Hall of Fame in 2006. He entered the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame with the Class of 2021.
The coaching tree did not stop with his sons. Grandsons Taylor Lamb (Virginia quarterbacks coach) and Trey Lamb (Tulsa head coach) have continued the family profession. In 2022, Georgia coach Kirby Smart served as keynote speaker at a Commerce banquet honoring Lamb, praising his high school legacy as friends and former assistants including Mike Bobo gathered to celebrate him.
Lamb often pointed to the 1981 state championship game — Commerce’s 28-14 win over Greene County with both of his sons in the lineup — as the most memorable of his career. He also liked to tell the story of a wild 1977 overtime game against East Rome that featured future Georgia signees Larry Kinnebrew, Sylvester Elkins and Greg Gordon.
Georgia high school football programs quickly offered condolences Thursday night, including Calhoun and Jefferson, reflecting how widely Lamb’s influence stretched beyond his own sidelines.He is remembered as a small-town coach who won big, built a family of coaches, and spent the last chapter of his career strengthening the bond between Georgia high schools and the university in Athens.