Heacock making big moves

Spring football practice at Youngstown State officially gets underway Tuesday morning as the Penguins begin their early morning routines at Stambaugh Stadium.

Coach Jon Heacock, who begins his ninth season at the helm of the program, and his staff have decided to hold workouts at 7 a.m. throughout the spring because it enables everyone to be on hand and take part in the workouts.

“It was getting impossible to hold these sessions in the afternoon with everybody’s class schedules,” said Heacock. “There was always somebody who couldn’t be there.”

The Penguins began the early workout times this winter when they held all their weight training and agility drills in preparation for spring practice.

“It really worked out great,” Heacock said.

The early starting times might not be the best for fans or even family to get a good glimpse of the workouts, but those things were not at the top of Heacock’s list for getting his Penguins ready for the 2009 season.

More important to Heacock was the replacement of the two assistant coaches that he lost over the winter.

The hiring of Youngstown native Michael Zordich as a defensive secondary assistant coach just might be one of the best moves that Heacock has made in his nine seasons.

Zordich grew up on the city’s West Side and was a standout athlete at Chaney High School. He played four seasons for Joe Paterno at Penn State where he earned All-America status and then spent 12 seasons in the National Football League playing in over 185 games and starting 125 of them.

When Zordich gave up playing football he came back to Youngstown to make his home.

He loves Youngstown, the city, the schools and the people and he wants more than anything to give back to this community which has always treated him so highly.

It’s not like Zordich has been sitting around doing nothing since retiring from the NFL.

He coached a couple of years at his old high school, Chaney, and most recently he’s been an assistant coach at Cardinal Mooney High, where his oldest son Michael played for four seasons and earned all-state honors before heading off to Penn State where he was a redshirt linebacker for the Nittany Lions last year.

His second son, Alex, will be the senior quarterback for Cardinal Mooney this fall, while his daughter, Aidan, is a member of the Cardinals’ track and field team.

When I ran into Mike at Stambaugh Stadium last week the first thing I asked him was about his kids. Isn’t this going to curtail you from watching your kids play sports, I asked.

“Oh, definitely,” Zordich said. “But this is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and to get this opportunity I just couldn’t pass it up.”

The fact that Zordich has coached in the area the last several years and he has resided in the area (he now lives in Canfield) since he retired in 1998, only can help toward recruiting efforts in the area.

Heacock is excited to have Zordich on staff and excited that he’ll be working on the same side of the football as another former Chaney High standout and former NFL veteran, Jerry Olsavsky, who has been the Penguins’ linebackers coach for the past six seasons.

Another thing that excites Heacock is that this season he’ll be taking over as the Penguins’ defensive coordinator, a position that he held for six seasons under former coach Jim Tressel.

And that means that he’ll be working very closely with both Zordich and Olsavsky.

“I never realized just how much I missed being involved in the daily planning of the defense until I got back into it,” Heacock said. “I’m still the head coach and it will still be my job to make sure the entire process runs smoothly, but I think that this will help me get a better indicator as to what’s going on.

“I know I’ll know the offense better because I’ll be working against it every day.”

XPete Mollica covers YSU athletics for The Vindicator. Write to him at mollica@vindy.com.