'It was a great ride.' Penn High School football coach Cory Yeoman heads into the sunset

MISHAWAKA — His gait gave it away.

For 21 years, anytime you saw head football coach Cory Yeoman in the Penn High School hallways, and you would see him everywhere, he was always on the move. Often moving faster than you. As the coach of a program known around the state for its sustained success, Yeoman always seemed long on tasks and short on time.

Especially during football season. From August to November, sometimes deep into November, Yeoman rarely stopped moving.

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Mondays meant team meetings in the Large Group Instructional room shortly after the final bell. Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays saw him hustling out Door E in the back of the building and out to the practice field, or over to Freed Field, where on Friday nights, he stalked the west sideline of a program saturated by the success of 18 conference championships, 13 sectional championships, nine regional titles, four semistate titles earned and one state championship appearance during his watch.

Even when the school year ended, Yeoman remained on the move. He was often the one responsible for making sure commencement ran smoothly (and it often did) over at Notre Dame. He took that role as seriously he did a third-and-3 call from the 5. Always the head coach.

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Walk and talk with Yeoman, watch him, study him and you could almost see the football wheels spinning in his head coaching head. Always working to ensure that every football base was covered before those Friday Night Lights again came on, and the Kingsmen would win another game, then another and another.

Sit with him in that glorified broom closet that served as his office just off the school’s second-floor fitness center and you felt that even if you stayed five minutes, you stayed too long. He was a man on a mission that never ended.

Yeoman was the head football coach of a place he loved, a role he loved every single day for 21 years.

That’s why he looked so different Thursday afternoon as he moved down a hallway that ran parallel to the school’s gymnasium. Yeoman didn’t walk that typical Yeoman walk. He moved slowly. His hands shook. He gripped a water bottle tightly. He seemed ... smaller. He looked like he wanted to run — out of the building, across the parking lot and back to the place that felt like home.

The football field.

Less than an hour earlier, amid tears of disbelief and a stunned silence, Yeoman gathered the football team and the coaching staff and the school support staff and informed them that after giving everything he had of himself to Penn High School football for 40 years – the last 21 as a head coach after 19 as an assistant to Hall of Famer Chris Geesman – he had nothing left to give.

The 2023 football season was the last for Yeoman. Even on a spring-like Thursday afternoon, you knew that fall would feel a lot different around the corner of Bittersweet Road and Jefferson Boulevard.

After 208 career wins, Coach Cory called it a career.

“Very hard; very hard,” Yeoman said, his voice already shaking as he tried to put into words what those last/life-changing 45 minutes had been like for him. “When you know that part of your life is going to change and how you’ve done it and all the great people you’ve worked with for all these years ... it makes you proud, but it tugs at your heart, too.

“I know it’s time, but you can’t do something for this long with passion and love without it hurting.”

It hurt him. Crushed him, even. You could hear it in the 62-year-old Yeoman’s cracking voice. You could see it on his face and his hands. Yeoman, who often would rather have his players answer questions from media during game weeks and after games on Friday nights, made it through all of two questions during an impromptu press conference (local media were given 40 minutes notice) before breaking down and having to gather himself, his thoughts, his emotions.

It was as if a slideshow of all those years, all those moments, all those players in that Long Black Line, in that job as the head coach of what Yeoman referred to as the “monster called Penn football” had come rushing back.

It sacked him like so many of his players on the “Wild Bunch” had done to quarterbacks.

It always was about more than wins with Yeoman

As Yeoman spoke, he stood in front of a trophy case he likely helped fill with all those Northern Indiana Conference regular-season championships and sectional wins and regional wins and semistate successes. For him, the job wasn’t about all that. Or any of that. Honestly.

Yes, Penn football is indeed a monster in this state, but all those wins, all those rings, all those trophies pale in comparison to what Yeoman did every afternoon after that 3:17 final bell.

He coached kids in a game he loved at a place that he loved.

He coached alongside his brothers. He coached his son. He coached his nephews. He coached the sons of former teammates. His staff was one big extended family. He took over the job from one of the game’s giants and never let that affect how he was going to run the program.

His program.

Yeoman was going to do it the right way. Also turned out that the right way meant a winning way. Cut corners? Yeoman wasn’t going to do it. Cut down kids who couldn’t read a defense? Couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it.

"He means everything," said Penn senior Nolan McCullough, who was the last starting quarterback for Yeoman. "The relationships he built with me and my family are inspirational. He's taught me how to grow up as a young man."

Yeoman was a football coach, yes, and a successful one and a respected one at that, but it was more important for him to be a teacher, a mentor, someone a kid from the right side or the wrong side of the Penn-Harris-Madison school system tracks could turn to for help, for encouragement, for guidance, for hope.

“If what we’re supposed to be trying to be doing here is help raise young men, what are we doing if we’re not doing it that way?” Yeoman said. “I’m going to make mistakes every day, but I’m going to get up and go for it hard the next day. We expect (our) guys to do the same thing. That’s important.”

Those guys. His guys. The kids he coached to be good football players, but even better people. That’s what got Yeoman out of bed every day with energy and enthusiasm. There wasn’t a time, not during the dark winter days of offseason conditioning or the sweltering grind of another August camp or those select seasons that went sideways where Yeoman didn’t want to get to school and get after it.

“I never had a day where I woke up and said, ‘Boy, I don’t want to go to work,’” Yeoman said. “I’ve never experienced that.”

Yeoman’s wife, Shawn, would shush him when he’d say that. Too many people today couldn’t relate to feeling that way, to working a job that they so loved that they can’t wait to do it.

That was Yeoman.

“I loved coaching football and working with young men,” Yeoman said. “I’d have done this for nothing. It was a great ride.”

A ride that ended Thursday.

Yeoman didn’t know it when the 2023 season ended exactly 90 days earlier - on November 10 with a 34-33 regional loss to Crown Point - that it absolutely was his final game on the Penn sideline. He didn’t take time to take one last look around Freed Field, or soak in the sights and sounds of the post-game locker room. Everything then was too raw, too emotional about not getting to Indianapolis.

Each season that Penn fell short of a state championship, he said, was like “someone cut your heart out.”

Yeoman’s heart ached after the 2023 season ended just as it did in so many previous seasons. He figured to follow his usual post-season routine — grind through those emotions during the Holidays, re-charge over winter break, then be ready in January and February to start thinking about August and everything after.

“Before you know it, you’re rocking and rolling again and reloading,” Yeoman said.

Only this time, this January this February, he never reloaded. Yeoman knew then that it was time to turn the Kingsmen keys over to someone else. To step away. To go and be a son and a husband and a father and a grandfather and a brother and a friend after all those years of being Coach Cory.

Yeoman talked Thursday with Geesman, his friend and his mentor and the man he succeeded in succeeding. Geeman had long told him not to worry about walking away. When it’s time, you’ll know it’s time.

Geesman then said something that stayed with Yeoman.

“He said, ‘I can tell, you’re ready,’” Yeoman said.

He was. He is. Ready to see what life holds for him next. He lives on the Saint Joseph River but has never been on it to fish. He doesn’t golf. He doesn’t have many hobbies outside of blocking and tackling and the Oklahoma drill and film from Football Friday Nights.

What’s next? Yeoman will get there. Eventually.

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“It’s weird,” he said. “I know this is the right thing (but) it rips your heart out that this phase of your life is going to be over because it was such a blast.

“It’s been a great ride.”

Having powered through his impromptu presser, Yeoman turned and walked away. Quietly. Slowly. On to the next chapter of life, one that will involve family, friends and faith. Not a bad fallback plan.

Football? That was then.

Now, he’s a coach whose job well done is, well, done.

Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact: (574) 235-6153.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Cory Yeoman presided over 'monster; Penn High School football program