Jennings steps down as Waukegan coach

Pat Jennings had one goal when he took the Waukegan High School varsity head football coaching job -- win a playoff game and make the community proud.

After coming tantalizingly close to making the playoffs two seasons ago, then stumbling to a 2-7 record this season, Jennings submitted his written resignation to athletic director David Perkins on Monday.

Jennings said that he was stepping down at this time in order to give the school plenty of time to find a good replacement. The decision, he said, had actually been made prior to the last game of the year, a loss to Evanston.

In a letter to the News-Sun, Jennings wrote, in part:

"I am not going to make excuses. We never played up to our potential. That is extremely disappointing. What should have been a historic season turned out to be just a typical year for Waukegan football. That being said, I am to blame. I tried to change the climate and build a solid base for success. I failed. I never realized the day-to-day challenges."

Perkins, responding to the resignation, said, "Pat has lived and breathed Bulldog football for the last 4 1/2 years. He feels the time is right for a move down the shoreline to a school closer to his home so he can spend more quality time with his wife and kids.

"We are deeply appreciative for the time Pat spent at Waukegan, we are sorry to see him go, and we wish him and his family the very best."

Perkins concluded that the position will be posted very soon so that a search for Jennings' replacement can begin.

"I did not have the time it takes to move the program in the right direction," Jennings said. "After our second season (2-7 record), we started pointing to the next year and I was there after school every day with the guys for weight-training and other activities. We had our leadership committee in place, we had basketball night, pizza night and other activities for the team. I tried to bring a sense of family to the program that wasn't there when I got here.

"The idea was to get the kids to believe in themselves."

The result was a 5-4 campaign, the best season at the school since 2001. But although the Bulldogs registered the required amount of wins to make them playoff eligible, they did not make the postseason due to the IHSA tie-breaker system.

"I couldn't devote the same kind of between-season time after that year," said Jennings, who noted that his wife, a registered nurse, was in school and he needed to be with his three young sons, now ages 11, 9 and 6.

"But I thought that we could piggy-back the momentum from the year before and really have some success this season. But it didn't happen."

Jennings will be leaving his special-education teaching position at Waukegan High as of Friday and will take the same position, minus the football-coaching duties, at Lakeview High, four miles from his home on the North Side of Chicago near Wrigley Field.

The Waukegan job was Jennings' first as head coach after 20 years as an assistant. He said he will coach again "down the road."

"Was I a success or failure?" he asked. "That's for other people to decide. I know I tried my hardest. But I also know that there's no way on God's green earth that I could be at this school and watch another guy be the head football coach and be in the same building with the kids from the team without coaching them."

Overcoming the neighborhood economics in the Waukegan district was always something somewhat unique to coaching, Jennings observed. But he also said that the success of the soccer and basketball programs prove it can be done and can spark success in football, which, due to sheer numbers, is often the last sport to get over the failure hump.

Jennings closed is letter to the News-Sun this way:

"The future of the program is bright. I believe that the sophomores (7-2 last year), led by a freshmen quarterback, will carry on and hopefully deliver a playoff win. ... The one thing I will never be able to live with is the fact that I couldn't deliver what I was hired to do -- win a playoff game and make the community of Waukegan proud. I have grown to realize they deserve it."

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