DIALED IN
King of the Coast
Gaylon Rolison Jr. leads Gulfport
Dragway’s bracket series
By Van Abernethy
N
ot everyone knows their purpose
in life, but for Gaylon Rolison Jr., it’s
never even been a question. Talk to
him for any length of time and you’ll
likely hear of his great passion, a true
calling in life when it comes to operating the
family-oriented bracket racing series known as
King of the Coast, which unites on six week-
ends a year at the beautiful Gulfport Dragway
near Mississippi’s coastline. King of the Coast
is likely the longest running sportsman pro-
gram in the Deep South, with 2017 marking the
13th consecutive season for the series.
For Rolison, the first conscious thought of
launching the series was when his friend, Tommy
Castanedo, came to him with the proposal that
they should together look into forming a series
that caters to sportsman racers around their area.
Both Castanedo and Rolison were active in the
B&M Bracket series at that time and were no
strangers to the concept; they simply desired to
establish a sportsman series local to their native
coastal roots. Gulfport, Mississippi, may be fa-
mous for Cajun seafood and a quarterback named
Brett Favre, but one thing it didn’t have was a
robust amount of bracket racing opportunities.
Gulfport Dragway, they thought, would be the
perfect place to change all that.
Rolison was very familiar with the facility and
grew up watching his dad race there. “On Sat-
urday mornings when other kids were watching
cartoons, I was going to the track with my dad,”
Rolison fondly recalls. When Rolison and Cas-
tenado first pitched the “King of the Coast” idea
to track owner Theresa Reese back in 2005, she
was very receptive of the idea from day one. A
total of four events were scheduled for the 2005
season, but shortly after the second race was in
the books, Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf
Coast and derailed life as they knew it. “It was
a humbling experience for a lot of people, from
having no power for weeks, to limited gasoline,
to not knowing what was going to happen with
our jobs and pretty much everything else. Obvi-
ously, it was catastrophic, and to this day you can
still go down to the beach and see remnants of
it,” says Rolison.
Since every aspect of people’s lives were im-
pacted by the storm, wondering if they still had
a bracket series didn’t rank high on the list of
priorities immediately following Katrina. “Best I
can remember, Gulfport Dragway was so wrecked
that it remained closed for the remainder of 2005,”
says Rolison. By 2006 – and with the entire re-
gion still very much in rebuild mode – the track
reopened and King of the Coast penciled in some
race dates, not really knowing how things would
June 2017
transpire. Interest and desire were very much still
present, but the storm reduced car count to nearly
half from levels seen a year earlier. The local rac-
ers trudged through the 2006 season the best they
could and hoped for a brighter future. By 2007,
Rolison (who was now operating the series alone)
began to see it slowly recover from the impact of
Katrina and says that it has continued to grow
little by little ever since.
Presently, the Pro Electronics class alone has
seen car counts soar to 115 entries, while the
Footbrake class is also on a steady rise. Rolison
has also seen strong participation in the Junior
Dragster class. “We only had one class of Juniors
when we first started this deal in 2005, because
there were only a few cars in the area back then.
In 2007, TJ Nye came to me and told me what we
needed to do to ramp up the Junior Dragster class,
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