By TOM DIAL

Crawford Kennedy has resigned as head football coach at Druid Hills High School after five years in that position and Eric Fussell has been relieved as head coach at Briarwood High in East Point, it was learned Sunday.

In addition, Larry Muschamp reins at Druid Hills where his best team was 6-4 in 1967. East Rome High School to continue his pursuit of a doctorate degree at the University of Georgia. His backfield assistant, David Patterson, is the new head coach.

And Blakely Thornton, head coach and assistant principal at Ludowici High for the past 32½ years, has called it quits to accept a position as director of the Title III Project of the Health Physical Education Recreation for the Liberty County School System in Hinesville.

Kennedy was an all-state center for Brown in 1954 and went to the University of Miami on scholarship. Injuries sidelined him, however, and he eventually earned a degree from Georgia and went back to Brown as an assistant.

In 1963 he took over the head coaching position at Druid Hills.

Kennedy is expected to be replaced by Jimmy Rakestraw, currently an assistant at Druid Hills, but that is not official. Rakestraw is the brother of Chicago Bears’ Larry Rakestraw and a graduate of Presbyterian College in South Carolina.