LOWER LAKE — Stan Weiper won”t return for a fifth season as head coach of the Lower Lake High School varsity football team.
Weiper, who served two tours of duty as the longtime Kelseyville High School varsity football coach before relocating to Lower Lake prior to the 2007 season, has resigned as coach of the Trojans so that he can take over his new job at Ione Community School in eastern Oregon, population 323.
The charter school plays eight-man football in a six-team 1-A league and Weiper will inherit a squad that posted a 4-6 record a year ago with only four seniors on its 24-man roster.
Weiper, long a rival of the Clear Lake Cardinals while leading Kelseyville for many seasons, will now take over the Ione Cardinals, whose uniform color scheme is close to Clear Lake”s.
“That will be different,” Weiper said with a laugh.
Weiper said he accepted the job with Ione last Wednesday, four days after school principal Jerry Archer interviewed him for the job.
“Everyone I talked to had nothing but good things to say about him,” Archer said. “He sounds like a good addition to our school.”
Ione Community School, located in the town of Ione in Morrow County, serves students in kindergarten through 12th grade and has a student body of approximately 165, of which nearly half that total is in the ninth through 12th grades.
Weiper, 64, will have one assistant coach, according to Archer, who moved to Ione after working more than 20 years in Pendleton.
“It is a new challenge for me and I”m kind of excited,” Weiper said of coaching eight-man football instead of the 11-man game he”s always known at Lower Lake and Kelseyville, where he accumulated a career record of 179-140-6.
Weiper also won 439 games as Kelseyville”s longtime varsity basketball coach, putting him among the Redwood Empire”s all-time leaders in victories.
He”ll just coach football at Ione, at least to start, according to Archer, who said Weiper was hired as a varsity football coach only.
That Weiper was available when the Ione job became available is a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
Weiper and wife Susan inherited a home in Ione and began working on it only a few months ago. The house is located all of one block away from the school.
“I took a look at the whole situation and it made a lot of sense,” said Weiper, who owns a ranch in Scotts Valley outside of Lakeport, a property he will keep.
“Two of my sons, Logan and Morgan, are building houses on that (Scotts Valley) property right now,” Weiper said.
Weiper plans to spend part of the time ? most certainly football season — in Ione and part of his time at the family home in Scotts Valley.
“I will miss Bill and Jack,” Weiper said of Middletown coach Bill Foltmer and Fort Bragg”s Jack Moyer, who stepped down as Fort Bragg football coach at the end of the 2010-11 school year. “I”ll miss the camaraderie we had. We were the old guys.”
One of Weiper”s former players, current Kelseyville varsity football coach Rob Ishihara, said he”ll miss his former coach.
“You wouldn”t believe how many grown men around Kelseyville have stories about playing for Stan,” Ishihara said. “I”m happy that I got to coach against him last season. He had a great coaching career in Lake County and he definitely racked up a lot of wins.”
While Weiper said he considered staying on another season at Lower Lake, where he reversed the flagging fortunes of that school”s football program by leading the Trojans to the NCL I North title in his first season in 2007, he said it was time to let a younger coach take over that program.
Weiper said he is looking forward to working with what he calls a “solid nucleus” of players at Ione.
“I”ll go up in August and get started,” Weiper said.
Ione plays its first game the weekend of Sept. 2-3.
Lower Lake has yet to fill its coaching vacancy but will do so soon, according to former athletic director Gary Logoteta, who said one of the candidates for the job is last year”s junior varsity coach Mike Huffman.
