A year ago at this time, Leavitt athletic director Doug Conn thought giving an interim coach the keys to his boys’ varsity basketball team would give the program the stability it has been missing for decades.

Now, Conn is looking for the team’s third leader in 15 months.

Christian Gurney stepped down as head coach just before the Hornets’ season-ending banquet, following a season in which they finished a disappointing 1-17. Conn advertised the position and received nine responses and plans to interview five of those applicants in the coming weeks.

“I was very disappointed and hoped he would stay,” Conn said. “It caught me completely by surprise.”

Gurney, a 27-year-old physical education teacher at Turner Elementary, said he felt overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the varsity position and felt he needed more time on the bench to do the job correctly.

“I felt there was a lack of experience. I could have benefitted more from being an understudy a little longer,” Gurney said.

He had served one year as Leavitt’s freshman coach, spent another year coaching both the freshmen and junior varsity, then one more year leading the JV when he was named interim varsity coach in early 2007 after Leavitt dismissed fourth-year coach Mike Remillard for a halftime motivational tactic that school officials deemed inappropriate.

Gurney coached the final five games of the regular season, and the Hornets won three of them. Leavitt reached the Eastern A quarterfinals for the second time in three years by upsetting Brunswick in a prelim game, then fell to eventual state champion Bangor in their first-ever appearance at the Augusta Civic Center.

Leavitt lost all five starters from that season to graduation, but Gurney, who had coached almost all of the holdovers as freshmen and junior varsity players, thought they could still be competitive.

“I felt like that team was a lot better than we performed,” he said.

Gurney, who played at Lisbon, wants to coach at the varsity level again, but believes he needs to gain more knowledge of strategy and situational basketball and learn more of the ins-and-outs of running not just a team, but an entire program.

“I probably could have picked those things up as I went (at Leavitt), but I had to wonder at what expense,” he said.

“I don’t think this is the end of my coaching career, by any means,” he added, saying he’d like to return to a JV level or assistant varsity coaching position to gain the experience he needs.

With 680 students, Leavitt is one of the smallest schools in Class A basketball and will be moving down to Class B in 2009, according to Conn. He said he would like to have the next coach lead the team through that transition and build it into a Class B power.

“My frustration is in 30 years here, we’ve had about 10 different coaches,” he said. “I would like to find someone that is going to stay here and work with the program for awhile.”