Jacob Yorg joins the Lady Archers’ team.
By: Ashley Biundo, Editor-In-Chief
St. Louis native, Jacob Yorg has taken on as head coach for the Lady Archers basketball program. At the beginning of his career, Yorg spent most of his time as a high math teacher and a coach.
“After my last year teaching high school in 2008, I decided to move back to St. Louis and work on my counselling degree, which is when I started to coach at Maryville University. I was at Maryville as assistant women’s basketball coach for five years,” he said. “Then took over the head coaching position at the University of Wisconsin Parkside which was another NCAA Division Two school in our conference.”
Yorg spent ve years in Wisconsin and decided to move back because he said he missed home. “Being a St. Louis boy and all my family was here. So I decided to come back and start working on my doctorate, which I’m working on [currently],” he said.
Along with working on his doctorate, Yorg is still teaching. “Right now, I teach Dual Credit Psychology and Sociology classes at St. Joseph’s Academy while I work on my doctorate,” he said.
Yorg said he saw an opportunity to start coaching again when STLCC was looking for a new women’s basketball head coach. “It allowed me to keep teaching and going to school,” he said.
As the head coach, Yorg has goals for his new career at STLCC. “I think the biggest thing for me is just trying to help the young ladies achieve the goals. Academically, what they want to do on to a four year school after this and go in life. Also what they want to do in the world of basketball and reach those goals and do whatever I can to help them get to the highest level that they want to achieve,” he said.
Yorg has some of the same expectations for this upcoming season as the coaches did before.
“The tremendous success that this program has had that Coach Ethridge and Coach Marcy put into the time here,” he said. “The expectations is to maintain that, with a little di erent situation.”
One of the expectations is growing as a team, said Yorg.
“We’re going to do some developing and growing this year with numbers and all that,” he said. “But the expectations should always be the same every year and that’s to win, be competitive, be nationally ranked, and make a run to go to the national tournament. Like it should be every year.”
Being a coach and seeing the players do great things is very rewarding, according to Yorg. “I still have a great relationship with most of my former players, when I coached high school and even college,” he said. “And seeing all the great things they have done, from the jobs that they have to married life now and having children and how they’ve had developing their own amazing young daughters and sons. Some of them have gone into coaching and seeing them be able to be successful as coaches and just seeing them mature and know that I’ve had some part in that journey is a very rewarding thing.”
Coming from years of coaching high school and college while also serving as a teacher, Yorg said that education is a top priority.
“I always tell people being a teacher and one who has taught both high school and college academics are very important to me,” he said. “I think in the end, we sometimes forget that professional lives are going to take up more time than basketball careers. So I think we have to utilize their basketball as a way to teach them how to become better students and to become the adults that are going to make huge contributions in the world. So I think we can never forget the importance of the aspect of basketball, that’s also studying hard work, teamwork and all that and I think we just add it together, but it always goes hand in hand. If you’re not a good student, you won’t be a good basketball player. If you’re a good basketball player, you also need to be a good student.”
