Greenville native and former FDA head baseball coach Josh Beverly has just moved a little closer to home.

Beverly, formerly a coach at Lee-Scott Academy in Auburn for the previous year, has taken a full-time position as a teacher and coach at Sparta Academy in Evergreen.

“It was just an opportunity to get back in the area,” Beverly said.

“The football coach down there, Justin Chandler, was doing baseball, and he wanted to kind of step aside from that.  So he told the headmaster, if they hired me, to let me take over baseball.”

But Beverly added that the relative proximity to home wasn’t the only benefit to taking the position at Sparta Academy.

“We moved to Auburn for a year just to try it out,” Beverly said. “We found a house we like back here, and we made the decision that we liked it better here than we did up there.  And there’s more family, so we decided to do that and it just kind of fell into place.

“It’s hard to turn down a full-time job.  I was just part-time at Lee-Scott.  I helped with football and baseball, and I was working part-time elsewhere, so this is an opportunity to get back into teaching, which is hard to turn down.”

Beverly said that he would possibly be teaching middle school history and physical education, in addition to his duties as head baseball coach at Sparta Academy.

He would also be helping Chandler out as an assistant football coach in exchange for his help with the baseball program.

Though Beverly only recently accepted the position in early May, he’s already looking ahead to the impending season.

“We started workouts a few weeks ago.  It’s a lot smaller school than what I’ve been used to, so I’m trying to get used to the numbers,” Beverly said. “We’re also doing football right now, and I’ve got a little baseball camp next week for the little kids.”

His primary focus, alongside summer camp, is to improve Sparta Academy’s baseball facilities with a number of fundraisers.

“I’m trying to do a golf tournament in July to raise some money for the baseball program,” Beverly said. “We’re raffling off a Yeti cooler, and I’ve got the kids trying to sell those and sell them myself.

“We’re just trying to put some interest in baseball there; we’re trying to change the culture, so to speak.”