Marvin Pruitt: Redan High School
Pruitt was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame in 2013.
Marvin Pruitt was the first baseball coach from DeKalb County to win 500 baseball games. In fact, Pruitt and former Columbia High School basketball coach Phil McCrary are the only two coaches in the county to win more than 500 games in any sport.
He was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame in 2013.
Pruitt retired after the 2014 season and finished with a 510-300 coaching record. He guided Redan to a state baseball championship in 2013, the first time in Georgia High School Association history that an all-black team from metro Atlanta captured a state baseball championship.
The longtime coach, however, passed away on August 23, 2019.
The Atlanta native started his career as an assistant at Lakeside-Dekalb High School. He later became head coach in 1983 and led the Vikings to their only appearance in the state semifinals in school history. He finished with a 71-34 record during his four years at Lakeside.
He coached Rockdale County from 1987-1992, then took over at Southwest Dekalb where he went 53-28-1 with one playoff appearance in three seasons.
After not coaching in 1996, he help start the Stephenson baseball program in 1997 where he went 34-60-2 in four seasons before taking over at Redan in 2001.
Pruitt took Redan to the state semifinals in 2003 and 2010. He had just one non-winning season with the school, and the Raiders made the playoffs in 13 of the 14 seasons.
The longtime coach was an advocate for getting more African-American players involved in baseball.
“We try to instill pride in our kids that they’re furthering their development in baseball because of the lack of blacks at the major-league level,” Pruitt told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2013. “We’re losing our kids at a younger age to basketball and football, and we’d just like to build the baseball tradition back up in our community.’’
Some information in this article was used from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.