L.A. team starts countdown to season without a coach
UPDATE: As is all too typical in sports reporting, Jordan officially named assistant coach Will Burnett the program's new head coach on Tuesday, on the second day of practice for the team. The move was first reported by the Los Angeles Times. He'll take over the program after serving as an assistant under former coach Sheron Butler.
Teams are kicking summer training camps into full swing this week across the country, and Southern California is no exception. After the annual City Section football coach's meeting on Saturday, the teams across the Los Angeles area that hadn't already started practicing get going this week.
That's the case at Los Angeles (Calif.) Jordan High, too, yet those practices are a bit more exceptional for the Bulldogs, for one simple reason: They don't have a head coach.
After months of the program operating without a program, Jordan took the rather remarkable step of kicking off the preseason without a coach, too. It's not as if Jordan is coachless at the moment because of a last second defection by its former head coach, either. Instead, Sheron Butler (pictured at right) who served as the team's head coach for the 2010 season, was fired in March after a disagreement with school administrator.
Butler landed a new head coaching job at nearby Ingleside (Calif.) Morningside High just more than a month later. He'll lead the Monarchs for the first time in 2011.
That abrupt departure left Jordan administrators and athletic department officials within the Los Angeles Unified School District a whopping four months to pick a new head coach. That's a third of a year, more lead-in than many programs across the country get when installing a new coach, whether he be a head coach or assistant.
Instead, according to the Los Angeles Times, the program is currently being run by former assistant coach Will Burnett, who may be a leading candidate to take over the program as head coach. If not, it will be a cruel trick to pull on Burnett, having him handle the reins of an entire program throughout the developmental spring and summer only to pull the rug from under him as the season nears kickoff.
That kickoff is only a calendar month away, too; Jordan faces Los Angeles (Calif.) Dorsey High on September 1. Here's hoping the school can get its act together in time to have an official head coach by then, at the least.
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