What is your name and occupation? Jordan DeGeorge, I’m the Strength and Conditioning Coordinator at Niles North High School.
Where did you grow up and when did you move here? I grew up in Boiloit, Wisconsin. I lived out in Iowa for a year, lived in Aurora, Illinois, and then came to work here at Niles North five years ago when I took that job my wife and I moved to Mount Prospect.
Did you have any jobs before coming to Niles North? My previous jobs… I coached baseball for ten years.
What’s your coaching philosophy? I think if you’re a good coach you kind of have some touchstones that are always present and then you have flexibility and adaptability based on who you’re working with and what they need. I think my favorite thing about coaching is helping young people develop confidence and seeing how that confidence transitions into other parts of their life whether that’s through a sport or the weight room. I also try to balance being hard on athletes to help push them without being harsh.
How do you like to motivate your students? I really like to encourage them to motivate themselves. I think that motivation is severely overrated. I think that if you’re ever in a situation where you have to rely on motivation, I think you’re gonna find yourself unsuccessful and disappointed more times than you want to be. I think that motivation is just the icing on the cake but I think what you need is discipline. Discipline trumps motivation all the time so I try to encourage my athletes to a set of standards. We have to build standards for ourselves and not just wait for motivation to show up.
What’s the best part about being a coach/trainer? I think the best part is just watching athletes grow up and develop and enjoy success and what I really like to accomplish as a coach is to help athletes really get first hand experience with the process of “I have a goal.” I’m going to commit to doing all this work that supports it for a year or 6 months and then seeing that feedback. When they commit to working out three times a day and when the next season comes along there’s a huge difference in the way they perform in their sport. So now they understand that that time, energy and effort was worth it and know they can apply that to other things in their life. If someone gets more confident in the weight room, more confident in the baseball field, you can see them more confident in other areas as well and it’s really empowering.
What inspired you to become a coach? Well, I come from a family of coaches. My grandfather was a college football coach. He’s actually in the Wisconsin Football Hall of Fame. My dad and two uncles are all college coaches and so I kind of followed their footsteps; so I’d be a third generation coach. My dad has a college baseball coach [and] that’s kind of where I started and wound up here as a strength and conditioning coach. I have an opportunity to have a positive impact on if not hundreds, thousands of athletes. I just pull one thing from them that sticks with them forever. That’s a huge impact on the world, and so I thought that was just such a cool opportunity and a big responsibility. It was something that excited me about that type of work.
What do you like most about Niles North’s community? I think that we just have really nice people here. I think that we have a lot of opportunities to grow here. I think there’s not just what we do athletically, but I think we have a lot that we can do for our kids, a lot that we can do for our community and I think we have kids in our community that are really nice and really great to be around so I do look forward to being with my coworkers, being with the athletes, the students that I work with. You know everyday that I come in here and I think that’s a blessing. I don’t know if everybody has that.
What do you like most about your job? I think it’s really fun to be able to stay in the weight room everyday. I get to share in hundreds of athletes’ success. Whatever season we are in, there’s a team that’s really successful, I get to share in that win.We have kids hitting new records in the weight room, maybe they hit a really big bench press, maybe they did their first pull up of their life. That’s hard to beat and it’s a good lifestyle. When I was coaching at the college level, basically every night and weekend was work, work, work all the time, so having a little more work-life balance and this environment has been awesome. It allows me to enjoy all kinds of opportunities with my wife that maybe we couldn’t do before because of my work schedule. So that balance has been great for my personal life but it also allows me to enjoy my work more because it isn’t as relentless as my previous jobs were.
