Jacob Owens excited to take over as Lexington head football coach
· Yahoo Sports
LEXINGTON — It isn’t exactly how Jacob Owens saw his first head football coaching opportunity coming, but he is excited and proud as possible.
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Owens was unanimously approved by the Lexington School Board as the next high school football coach at the school on Wednesday, July 22. He spent the previous three seasons as the offensive coordinator for the Minutemen and will now take the helm of the program.
“I feel like God has put me in a position to do this,” Owens said. “I only ever started coaching because I love helping kids and this is a great step to further that mission. It is a huge deal in my coaching career and one I will not downplay at all. I am so excited for the opportunity.”
Owens is a 2009 Mansfield Senior graduate who played football, basketball and baseball for the Tygers. After high school, Owens attended Marietta College where he helped the Pioneers win Ohio Athletic Conference championships in basketball as a four-year player. He played semi-professional basketball before returning home to Mansfield to begin his mission of helping the youth of the area.
He began as a basketball coach at Mansfield before diving into a football coaching career in 2018 at his alma mater as a quarterbacks coach. He helped the Tygers make it to the Division III state championship game where they finished as runners-up after a 14-7 overtime loss to Trotwood-Madison. He took over as offensive coordinator in 2020 at Mansfield Senior before taking the same position at Lexington in 2023.
He takes over for Andrew Saris, who unexpectedly passed away on June 30.
“Coach Saris put me in a position to do this,” Owen said. “When he hired me, he basically made me the head coach of the offense, so I feel like I have done this before. Even when I was in Mansfield, Chioke Bradley empowered me to be the head coach of the offense and had me deal with scheduling and making big decisions.”
His first big decision as head coach was to dedicate the season to Saris.
“Every day,” Owens said. “We have our why as a team. We will hold Saris near and dear to our hearts and give it everything we have in every game, practice and lifting session for him. He was a selfless coach, and we want to embody that with everything we do.”
Owens admits there is no playbook on how to deal with the current situation, but he will put all of his energy and focus into helping the Minutemen be successful, no matter what that looks like.
“There is no easy way to do this,” Owens said. “The only way to look at it is there are kids who need a head football coach, and I am taking it upon myself to be the guy they need. All I have ever wanted to do was help kids be successful and get better every day. Our success will not be based on wins and losses. Will it be easy? No. Is it ideal? Absolutely not, but it is an opportunity, nonetheless. The Lexington administration has given me their confidence, and I think the kids believe in me as well.”
Last season, Owens helped the Minutemen offense average 39.5 points per game on their way to winning the outright Ohio Cardinal Conference championship, their first outright title since 2008 and their first conference crown since sharing it with Ashland in 2016. The Minutemen made the playoffs for the second consecutive year before falling to eventual Division III state runner-up Toledo Central Catholic in the regional quarterfinals.
Lexington graduated a talented 20-man class from last year’s OCC championship squad including two Division I players in Brayden Fogle, who is at Georgia, and Joe Caudill, who is at Michigan State.
Still, Owens couldn’t be more excited to get the season going and sees his players giving everything they have to prepare for their Week 1 game at Ontario on Aug. 21.
“My excitement level is through the roof,” Owens said. “The kids are preparing for the upcoming season and they are excited. We had our make-up Ironman Challenge yesterday where we put them through a very tough workout before hosting a pool party. We are at a point where we are trying to work on our off-field stuff. The kids need to know that we care not just about football stuff. We will continue building that and show them that is what Lexington football is all about.”
This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Jacob Owens excited to take over as Lexington head football coach