by Rusty Ellis
Shane Jacobs is no stranger to late nights at the office, as the former Peabody Golden Tide Football head coach put in overtime several times over his time in Trenton.
On the night of Wednesday, April 2 however, it wasn’t the current week’s opponent that was getting his attention; it was knowing what news he would be delivering the next day.
“It was a tough night of sleep on Wednesday night, knowing all of the people I would have to tell,” Jacobs said. “It’s like ‘gosh I hope they’re not mad. I hope they understand how hard this is for me.’ It’s still an emotional thing to think about…it was the toughest decision I’ve ever had to make.”
On Thursday morning, Jacobs informed his staff, players and the Trenton community of his decision to step down as the head coach of the Golden Tide, a decision he didn’t take lightly. It came on the heels of a 2024 campaign that saw Peabody finish with a 4-6 overall record, missing the playoffs by a single game due to a head-to-head tiebreaker with Riverside.
While the season didn’t go the way Jacobs was expecting it to, he saw glimpses of potential primarily in the form of a stretch of games from Week 4 to Week 9 where his team went 4-1 and was neck-and-neck with eventual Class A State Champions MASE on the road in Memphis.
When it came time to think about a decision like this, a couple key factors began to rise to the surface for Jacobs.
Chief among them was his family.
“As the kids are getting older, what’s demanded from a high school football coach becomes tougher with the kids playing ball,” Jacobs said. “Every weekend, I have two boys playing travel baseball and a daughter playing travel basketball, and then we have the toddler that’s three years old, so those demands started to get a little more difficult in order for me to serve the players like they deserved to be served.”
Add in that he and longtime friend and USJ’s Head of School Don Roe would sometimes talk about the topic of working together, and one thing led to another.
“Don and I have known each other for 20 years, he’s a good friend of mine,” Jacobs said. “It was always something we talked about, hypothetically working together someday.”
Make no mistake though, while Jacobs is excited for his future, delivering the news was no small task. Jacobs has always been one to brag on the players and coaches he’s worked with, but that feeling also extended to a community that in his words, made sure his players never went without anything they needed.
“As a staff, we never sat around and thought ‘man if we just had this or if the community could just give us that,'” Jacobs said. “The community always found a way. Talking to the players was hard, and talking to the faculty was hard, but talking to that group of people and telling them first-thing Thursday morning was difficult…it was emotional just looking some of those people in the eyes, knowing they did everything they could for the program.”
Those are the moments Jacobs says he’ll look back on the most, the relationships he built in his time, and for a coach that was at the helm of three straight State Championships from 2018-2020, that speaks volumes.
“A lot of former players and parents have reached out to me, and I’ve appreciated every bit of it,” Jacobs said. “For me, that’s always been special…just the relationships have always been important to me. There’s some really important people in Trenton, and people that we’ve worked with that have done a lot for us. That’s really what I think about when I look back my time.”
Now Jacobs will soon turn his attention to USJ, as his role becomes official on July 1. While he may be stepping away from coaching for now, he says he now gets an opportunity to work on his other passion: education.
“I’ve always loved football and that’s obvious, but I’m just as passionate about academics,” Jacobs said. “I love working with motivated students and seeing how we can push the envelope to get better academically…it’s pretty similar to coaching football, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t see the parallels there, but I’m very much equally passionate about both. Taking on a new team and learning people and developing relationships there is what I’m most excited about.”
