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Tim McGlynn

By Joe Scalzo

New coach, more players have Jackson-Milton off to a fast start in 2008.

Last winter, a few minutes before his first offseason lifting session, Jackson-Milton’s new football coach, Tim McGlynn, was on edge.

The Bluejays were coming off a 1-9 season in which they had just 19 players on the roster — including freshmen. They lost those nine games by an average score of 36-7. They hadn’t had a winning season since 1997, hadn’t won a league title since 1981 and hadn’t made the playoffs since ... well, since ever.

And their new coach wasn’t that much older than they were.

McGlynn turned to a few staff members and said, “Guys, I’m really nervous. I don’t know how many kids are going to come today.”

Within minutes, a few kids trickled in. Then a few more. Then a few more.

“We ended up with 62 in grades 8-12,” said McGlynn. “I was just blown away.”

The number dropped a little bit during track season, but he still had 40 players lifting consistently through the spring. By the time the season started, he had 38 on the roster.

“It’s been amazing,” he said.

McGlynn inherited a Bluejays team in position to win. Ten lettermen were back on offense and nine on defense.

Still, you can’t win with 19 players. (By comparison, McDonald had 18 seniors on last year’s team, which shared the Inter Tri-County League Tier Two title.)

When he was hired, McGlynn huddled with teachers and administrators to ask, essentially, Who are we missing?

“The biggest obstacle was just kids to come out,” said McGlynn. “You can have fun at baseball practice or even basketball practice, but football gets very monotonous.

“If you’re not winning, it’s not a lot of fun.”

Jackson-Milton’s last winning season came in 1997 when it went 6-4 under Dan Williams. Since then, the Bluejays have gone 35-58.

This year has been a different story. Behind two big games from junior fullback Wilbur Wilson, Jackson-Milton defeated Windham and Rootstown to start 2-0 for the first time in 21 years.

“The biggest thing we’ve been telling our kids since I was hired was to take it one game at a time,” said McGlynn, a 2001 graduate of Fitch High “The kids have bought into the that.

“And we’ve had some great senior leadership and most coaches just don’t come into that. Now I’ve heard rumors about a couple kids who really regret not coming out. They just figured we’d be getting our butts kicked like last year.”

They scored 7 points or fewer in seven games last year with a season-high of 20. They scored 30 in their first game this season.

“It’s so nice to have our freshmen playing special teams instead of being starters,” said McGlynn. “When they were getting beat last year, they were playing iron man football. This year, we don’t have to do that.”

McGlynn, whose cousin Mike is an lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was hired as an assistant wrestling coach for J-M before the 2005-06 school year. He also spent the last four years as an assistant football coach at Fitch.

When J-M’s head football coaching position came open last year, a few people told McGlynn he was crazy to apply.

“They said, ‘Oh, the kids there don’t want to win,’” said McGlynn. “But I knew the tough kids we have here. I knew the potential. I wanted the program to be like our wrestling program and our volleyball program. I want to bring back the pride that used to be here.”

The Bluejays still have a long way to go — it’s just two games, after all — but with a basketball team that’s gone 0-42 over the last two years, any taste of success is welcome.

“My kids aren’t walking around saying, ‘Hey, we’re 2-0,’” said McGlynn. “They know at any given minute they can go back to being 1-9, so they have to show up and play every week.”