Peoples named Director of High School Relations

University of Arkansas head coach Bobby Petrino has announced the hiring of Kevin Peoples as Director of High School Relations. Peoples comes to Fayetteville after spending the last nine seasons at Arkansas State as the defensive line coach.Peoples has coached 11 all-conference selections in the last eight years. While at Arkansas State, he helped several players who were chosen as All-Sun Belt Conference honorees, including the following: Corey Williams (2002, 2003), Jon Bradley (2002, 2003), Myron Anderson (2005), Jonathan Najm (2006), Jammarrow James (2006), Alex Carrington (2008, 2009), Bryan Hall (2009). In addition, Carrington was named the 2008 Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year. Peoples, who joined the ASU staff in January 2002, was selected from 500 coaches as one of the recipients of the AFLAC National Assistant Coach of the Year Award for the 2002-03 season. The award is set up to recognize those coaches that made a significant contribution to their teams and have generally gone unnoticed. Prior to coaching at Arkansas State, Peoples spent the 2001 season coaching defensive tackles at Northwestern State University. He spent the 2000 season with the XFL’s Las Vegas team after coaching the defensive line and special teams at Northern Arizona in 1999. From 1997-98, Peoples was the defensive line coach at Central Missouri and in 1996 he worked with the defensive ends and the kickoff coverage team at Northwestern State. Peoples began his coaching career at Carroll College in Montana in 1993 for two years before joining the staff at Blinn Community College in Texas for the 1995 season. The team at Blinn went on to win the national junior college championship in 1995. He is married to the former Rebecca Chilton of Tucson, Ariz.