Plunkett steps down as CHA head coach

by TOM UTESCHER

In about two months, Chestnut Hill Academy football players will gather at the local school for the start of training camp, the annual prelude to the autumn campaign on the gridiron. There will be something different about the ritual this time, though, because for the first time in two dozen seasons the Blue Devils will not have Jack Plunkett as their head coach.

Plunkett, who’s been with the team since 1975 and has headed the program since 1981, will still be very much in evidence as an assistant coach and the defensive coordinator for the club, but the man in charge will be one of his former players, Rick Knox, a member of the class of 1992.

“It’s a great time for this move, and I think that we’re fortunate with the way things have fallen into place,” notes CHA Athletic Director Mark Burke.

A 1986 graduate of the school, Burke played for Plunkett early in his tenure as head coach, and recalls that even then he was an inspirational leader.

“I remember how he stressed character development, rather than just winning,” Burke says. “I remember how fair he was, his compassion for each player. He made everybody feel that they were a big part of the team, no matter what their role was.”

There was no pressing need for Plunkett, still in his early fifties, to pass on the title, but he’s been pondering the question of a successor for some time and wanted to make sure the team would be in good hands for many years to come. Another CHA alum, Steve Lampe, worked under Plunkett as an assistant for a number of years and was viewed as a candidate for head coach, but he departed in 2003 to serve in the military.

Fortunately, the availability of the coaching job and a vacancy in an administrative post enabled CHA to lure Knox back across the Schuylkill from Episcopal Academy, where he had been head football coach for the past three years.

“I’ve been a head football coach for 24 years, and it’s not that I didn’t want to be one anymore, but that I didn’t need to be,” Plunkett explained. “There was an idea that maybe Rick should work as an assistant for me for a year or two, but my feeling is that Rick is already a head football coach and he needs to be in here getting things going his way. I’m happy to help him any way that I can to take the program to new heights.”

In his new role, Plunkett will have a slightly more flexible schedule, and he’ll occasionally be able to watch his son Sean play college football. Sean Plunkett, who also was a four-time Inter-Ac champion in the shot put at CHA, has just finished his freshman year at Millersville University. Plunkett’s daughter Jackie, who attended Bishop McDevitt High School, will graduate in December from Penn State, where she competed in the shot put and the hammer throw. His youngest child, Brendan, is going into the eighth grade at Chestnut Hill.

An area native, Plunkett attended Bishop McDevitt, then headed upstate to Mansfield State College, where he played middle linebacker on the football team and earned a degree in Elementary Education. When he graduated in the spring of 1974, he already had a teaching job lined up at Immaculate Conception, a Catholic grade school in Jenkintown.

While working a summer job the following year he met Chestnut Hill Academy’s head football coach, Bill Gallagher, and Plunkett became an assistant coach for the team that fall. He went on to earn a Master’s degree in at Health and Physical Education from Temple University, where his curriculum entailed some substitute teaching at a variety of Philadelphia schools. He also performed most of the coursework necessary to become an athletic trainer, although he didn’t pursue certification in the field.

In 1980, he was offered a full-time position in the Physical Education Department at CHA, and accepted it gladly.

“Between the first job I had when I got out of college, and the teaching I did while I was getting my master’s at Temple, I worked in a lot of different schools. That gave me some perspective on how nice a place CHA really was, and the good things that were happening there.”

Soon after that, Bill Gallagher became Athletic Director and football coach at Penn Charter, and Plunkett took the helm of the Chestnut Hill team in the fall of 1981. By a twist of fate, it is Gallagher who is taking Knox’s place at Episcopal, after working with the team at Springfield (Montco) High School for the past few years.

Back in the early 1970’s Chestnut Hill had withdrawn its football team from Inter-Ac League competition. With a smaller enrollment than any of its peers at the time, CHA would literally take a pounding over the course of an Inter-Ac campaign, and would finish out the season with a skeleton crew. Heading in a new direction, Chestnut Hill played as an independent, scheduling a mixture of suburban private schools and small public high schools. In 1985, a number of these teams banded together to form the Independence Football League, an arrangement which worked out well for just about all concerned.

Over the past 20 seasons healthy rivalries have developed in the league, and Plunkett’s teams have won the IFL championship ten times.

“The 1986 season still stands out, because it was the first time that Chestnut Hill Academy won a championship in football,” the coach recalled. “It also started off a string for us where we won four times in a row. We then had guys come through the program like Brendan Kilfeather and Paul Burke, who got a lot of attention from Division I colleges, and we had Paul Aguirre set a new rushing record for Southeastern Pennsylvania. We’re actually having a pretty good run right now, with winning three championships in the last four years.”

Little else will change in Plunkett’s routine at CHA, where he’ll continue to run the Physical Education department. He’ll keep on teaching lower school P.E. classes and a ninth grade health course, as well as coaching middle school baseball in the spring. His winter schedule will still involve a good deal of travel in his capacity as a Division I women’s college basketball official. Plunkett currently refs in six different collegiate conferences, including the Big East and the Ivy League.

After three decades, he still finds Chestnut Hill Academy an almost ideal place to be a teacher, coach, and parent.

“The students at CHA have an opportunity to do so many different things that they might not have had at a larger school, where there are more people taking up those spots,” he explains. “My son Sean has always loved sports and was able to excel in that area, but he also really enjoyed working with ceramics and doing other things in his art classes. My son Brendan is in the boychoir, and Sean was a member of the boychoir for a while. When we’re having a home football game and the Hilltones (CHA’s a cappella vocal group) are singing the National Anthem and five or six of them are out there in their football pads, I think that’s really great. Having a wide variety of experiences really helps them to grow as people.”

Commenting on the future of the football program at the school, Plunkett expresses ambitions that will warm the hearts of generations of CHA alumni.

”With our school growing in enrollment and with the changes that are going to be made to our athletic facilities over the next few years,” he says, “our goal is aiming back towards Inter-Ac League football.”