SHIELDS: Jacobs appears right choice for Tide
When Ricky Woods announced his resignation this week as the head football coach at Peabody High, the speculation began almost immediately who his replacement would be.
Considering the track record Golden Tide athletic director/principal Tim Haney has established in recent years of making hires, seemingly anything was possible.
When he brought in Joe Gaddis in 2012, that was a big splash. When he brought in Ricky Woods a year later, that was a hire that caused massive ripples that had grown into tsunami waves by the time they reached Cookeville last December.
Some might have expected Haney to try to make a hire so big it would displace all the water from whatever it's in when he tries to make a big splash hire.
Haney insisted a splashy hire wasn't needed as much as the right hire, and the net was cast not across the entire nation but simply to the man who sat a couple desks down the team meeting room wall in Peabody's fieldhouse from where Woods did a lot of his work the past two years.
"If Coach Gaddis and Coach Woods were home run hires, I might be described as a bunt single at best," said new head coach Shane Jacobs.
But sometimes a bunt single is what a team needs to win.
Teams always need the guy who will teach his team to simply get better every day, which if you start with a group that won a state championship the season before that will produce a pretty good team by the end of the season.
Jacobs will bring that attitude to his team because that's the attitude he has for himself.
"My goal is to be the best man, Christian, husband, father, teacher and coach God calls me to be every day," Jacobs said. "And I want to be better at all those things today than I was yesterday.
"I've been given a platform through which I need to show Christ as much as I can to those around me, and I'm motivated each day by the fear that I could do something to mess that platform up. So I do my best to not do that."
Jacobs will instill work ethic to his players as well.
It wasn't out of the ordinary to drive by Peabody's campus late during the Golden Tide's playoff run last year and see a vehicle outside and maybe a sliver of light coming out a window or a crack in the door of the fieldhouse.
That's because Jacobs stayed around to make sure he wasn't missing something in Huntingdon's ground game, a way Trinity Christian quarterback Kyle Akin might telegraph his passes, a tendency Wade Comer might've had in calling McKenzie's offense, a way to defend Adamsville receiver Ross Burcham or a way to stop the bruising ground game Marion County brought to Cookeville for the state championship game.
All five times he figured it out, and there's a gold ball sitting in the school's trophy case now because of that extra work he put in.
Obviously because of his ability to figure that out, he's good at the Xs and Os part of coaching as well.
Tim Haney could've cast a net nationwide for the new coach at Peabody, but everything about Jacobs indicates he made the right choice by staying in house this time around.
Brandon Shields is the high school sports columnist for The Jackson Sun. Contact him at 425-9751 or at bjshields@jacksonsun.com. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at jacksonsunsports.