Sto-Rox hires football coach LaRoi Johnson as AD, opens coaching jobs

By: Chris Harlan
Thursday, June 25, 2020 | 11:48 PM

The Sto-Rox school board hired football coach LaRoi Johnson as athletic director Thursday night and voted to hand him a clean slate of coaches.

The board voted to open the coaching positions for all sports except football, board member Ken Hohman said. However, opening the positions to applicants doesn’t mean the current coaches won’t be retained.

“We wanted to give him a chance to go through and make changes,” Hohman said, “so we opened everything up to make everybody reapply.”

The Sto-Rox board has made similar moves in decades past.

Johnson, 35, is entering his third season as football coach at Sto-Rox. The 2003 Peabody graduate played college football at Cal (Pa.) and Malone.

“He can sit down with the coaches and tell them how he wants things done,” Hohman said. “If he wants to keep everybody there, he can.”

The Vikings sponsor teams in football, boys and girls basketball, baseball, softball and girls volleyball. The football and boys basketball teams both reached the WPIAL finals last season.

Johnson’s football team went 11-2 and lost to Clairton in the WPIAL Class A final.

The boys basketball team went 20-7 under coach Ryan Hughes and finished as the WPIAL Class 2A runner-up. The team remained active in the state playoffs when the PIAA canceled the tournament in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The girls basketball team went 6-16, and the girls volleyball team finished 2-12.

Baseball and softball seasons were canceled by the pandemic.

Chris Harlan is a TribLive reporter covering sports. He joined the Trib in 2009 after seven years as a reporter at the Beaver County Times. He can be reached at charlan@triblive.com.

Tags: Sto-Rox