Coach Chad Longacre came in last year at second semester as a world geography teacher and assistant baseball coach.

This year he has been promoted to varsity baseball coach where he coaches baseball everyday as well as teaching four classes.

“I think now he’ll have a little more responsibility being the head coach instead of the assistant coach, but I think he does a good job overall,” senior Jack Hanstad said.

Trying to balance coaching a varsity team and teaching world geography can become time consuming.

“I have to use my conference time to be able to grade, and then if I can’t get everything done during my conference time I’ll have to take it home with me,” Coach Longacre said.

Even though teaching and coaching can be time consuming, he meets up with other world geography teachers who also coach and they help each other out.

“I think the most important thing is planning ahead and also having other teachers that you can count on. We meet together weekly and we plan together, so guys like Coach Villa and Coach Stanford, they also teach geography. We team up to be able to do… what more than one person can do on their own,” Coach Longacre said.

Since he teaches and coaches a lot of students, it can be difficult to learn all of their names right away.

“I’m trying to get to know them so having four classes plus the baseball [team], it’s hard to get to know everybody right at the beginning, but you try to repeat their names and get to know people as quick as you can,” he said.

Coach Longacre hopes that once he gets to know them, he’ll impact them in a positive way similar to how his past coaches impacted him.

“I was really impacted by some of the coaches that I had, growing up in athletics, I think it’s really important to be involved in something, whether that’s dance, or theater, or sports it’s always important to be involved with something,” Coach Longacre said.

He doesn’t only want to impact his players, he wants to impact his students as well.

“I enjoy students, I try to impact students in a positive way so that’s why I wanted to be a teacher and a coach,” Coach Longacre said.