Jacobson hangs up coaching whistle

With Wednesday’s Creston boys basketball awards night for the 2021-22 season, the book closed on Todd Jacobson’s basketball coaching career.

For the past 28 winters, the Creston social studies teacher has been coaching either at the high school or junior high level. When he walked out of the Bondurant-Farrar gym after this year’s district loss as an assistant for head coach Bryce Schafer, it was his final exit as a coach.

Three years ago, Jacobson ended a long football coaching career as well. He had been head coach at South Page and Shenandoah before serving in several varsity assistant and middle school positions in Creston in the sport.

The 52-year-old Stanton native said it’s time to just sit in the stands and have options during the winter months besides scouting opponents, coaching JV games and helping the head coach during varsity games and practices.

He and wife Paula (Chubick), a Creston native, will continue to be teachers in the Creston district.

“I’ve had 28 straight winters full of coaching duties,” Jacobson Tuesday afternoon in his CCHS classroom. “I have some nieces and nephews who I’ve never seen play. I have friends in the coaching profession and I’d like to see their teams play. It’s a chance for my wife to discover who I am in the winter. We’ve never really spent much time together in the winter months. This is going to be nice.”

When Todd and Paula lost their first-born son Connor to sudden infant death syndrome at the age of six months while he was a teacher at South Page, Jacobson was head girls basketball coach. He still remembers the team huddle he held one night prior to the opening game.

“We were coming out of Thanksgiving break and it had just happened,” he said. “I was struggling for the words in trying to tell them I was going to coach them, that I needed something to take my mind off what happened. Those girls got me through it. They said, ‘we got this coach.’ They went out and beat one of our rivals, Farragut, and had a great season.”

To this day, Jacobson’s first girls team here in 2006-07 has the most victories in the five-player history of the program. That team went 15-9 and lost in the regional finals to a powerful Norwalk team, in a game played in front of a jam-packed crowd at Southwestern Community College.

Current girls basketball coach Tony Neubauer has the next highest wins with 14 victories in regional final seasons ending in 2020 and 2021, featuring all-time leading scorer Kelsey Fields and fellow all-stater Sam Dunphy.

Between starting and finishing his degree work at Northwest Missouri State, Jacobson was in the U.S. Army National Guard and served in the Persian Gulf War. He was part of Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91 for six months.

At the age of 20, Jacobson experienced Scud missile attacks that shook buildings he was inside. He was on the front lines picking up dead bodies and was in vehicles that went through areas of land mines and unexploded munitions.

“I tell all of my students, there is nothing that will get you to focus in on life more than having near-death experiences, and I had several,” Jacobson said.

So, upon returning, he gave college another try after a rough freshman year at Northwest Missouri State that led to a stint working at a Red Oak factory. With Paula then a student teacher in Creston, he enrolled at Southwestern Community College.

“I took intro to coaching taught by Bill Krejci,” Jacobson said. “It changed everything. He had total respect of everyone in the room and I saw how he treated everybody, and I thought I want to be a coach like that. Then I took college algebra and trig from DeeAnn Stults. When she saw I didn’t understand something, she had a way of going back through it so the light bulb would go on. I thought, THAT’S what I want to do!”

He was soon on track to pursue a social studies teaching degree and graduated from Northwest with honors. He taught and coached at Stanberry, Missouri; South Page and Shenandoah before coming to Creston for the 2004-05 school year.

“Paula said (social studies teachers) John Rose and Charlotte Roberts were both retiring and there were openings,” Jacobson said. “She said, here’s a chance to have family with family. I had coached against Mike McCabe and we had a good relationship, and I frequently saw official Brad Baker from Creston. It just seemed like a great opportunity.”

Now, only three CCHS teachers have longer service in the school than Jacobson. He was named the Iowa 2014-2015 VFW High School Teacher of the Year.

While he will miss coaching, Jacobson has found a second career in sports as a public address announcer. He succeeded Ron Pendegraft as the home announcer for softball several years ago, and more recently succeeded local legend Jack Davis as the home football announcer. He also works some events as a correspondent for KMA Radio, which he began during his time in Shenandoah.

Jacobson also works as a Department of Natural Resources seasonal employee for Creston graduate Jason Hyde at Green Valley State Park during the summers.

In his classroom there’s a framed quotation that summarizes Jacobson’s drive, based on a question by Superintendent Deron Stender asking the staff why they chose to be educators.

It says, “Build relationships with students and make a difference in their lives.”

Whether it’s been as a coach or classroom teacher, Jacobson has certainly achieved that goal while amassing a multitude of treasured memories.