Coach Connor talks about the current state of high school football, Panther football and the PIAA.
Coach Jim Connor has been teaching and coaching for 37 years, most of those years in Nether Providence. He began at the old Swarthmore High School and was the head football coach there. He has made a decision to leave the Strath Haven coaching job as Defensive Coordinator (he will continue his teaching career at Strath Haven as well as coaching middle school sports) and has taken a position as the Defensive Coordinator at Cardinal O’Hara along with his son Mike. We interviewed him in his classroom at Strath Haven High School in mid-April to talk about his career, his future and his feelings about the current state of high school football in Pennsylvania.
HAVENFOOTBALL.NET – Coach, give us a little background on your career.
CONNOR – I was head coach at Swarthmore high school and then I was the head coach here at Strath Haven when the school changed from Nether Providence to Strath Haven High School for the first five years. At the end of the five years I decided to try my hand at college coaching and went to Penn State and then kicked around at some colleges and coached at Widener and Swarthmore College. After that experience I decided I wanted to come back and be a high school coach. Being a college coach is just a tough lifestyle with moving your families all around and my kids were coming up so I wanted to be available to them as well.
