SOUTH BELOIT — In addition to years of coaching youth and junior high football, Josh Redieske says he has one more asset that makes him a perfect hire as new head coach at South Beloit High School.
Continuity.
“I think I offer stability because coaches have been bouncing through South Beloit for the past 20 years,” said Redieske, who’s hiring was made official Tuesday night when it was approved by the school board. “Every time they leave the kids have to learn new offenses and defenses, new schemes. I plan to stay for a while. You look at historically successful programs like Hononegah and Lena-Winslow, it’s no secret why. They keep their coaches around.
“That’s why I’m glad they picked me.”
Redieske, 45, is a 1996 South Beloit High graduate who replaces Jim Morrow, who left South Beloit to become head coach of the Harlem Huskies.
“Some of the current seniors at South Beloit, I started coaching in probably second grade,” Redieske said. “I coached with the Boys & Girls Club until that league made it difficult to keep the South Beloit kids together. Then we formed the Future SoBos program and played in a league with Clinton and Turner. The past six seasons I’ve coached the teams at the junior high.”
Redieske said he helped at the high school with its summer program. He said once the high school season actually began, he broke away to run the junior high program. He wanted his Fridays free because his son Bodee, a senior, played football at Hononegah and he wanted to watch his games.
“I had a lot of fun doing seventh and eighth grade football,” he said. “I think I had a pretty big impact there. We played 11-man football up until the past two years when we switched to 8-man.”
Redieske says he was a reluctant admirer of the 8-man game.
“I think we’d still all rather play 11, but I don’t see that happening,” he said. “(8-man) is likely here to stay and it’s been a good fit at South Beloit. We’ve been able to have a full jayvee team with a full jayvee schedule. We’re not forced to bring up freshmen and sophomore to the varsity so we can build from the bottom up. We are going to be successful in 8-man.”
Redieske said one of the drawbacks in the recent past was how far the SoBos had to travel to play games, but that should be less of an issue going forward.
“Travel has been horrible, but this year Illinois broke 8-man into two divisions, North and South, so there would be a lot less travel,” he said. “It’s a challenge, though. Most of the talent is in the North Division. But that’s OK. I’d rather build rivalries up here.”
Redieske said overall numbers have been good and he expects that to continue.
“We’ll probably have 40 in the entire program, freshmen through seniors, and 25 in the top two classes,” he said. “That’s really good numbers for small-school 8-man football. That gives me an opportunity to two-platoon more.”
The 2023 SoBos featured one of the top quarterbacks in 8-man in senior All-Stater Kaden Myhres, who led the SoBos to a 5-1 start before a broken wrist sidelined him for the final three games of the season. At quarterback, he completed 20-of-30 passes for 338 yards and eight touchdowns and he ran 64 times for 1,187 yards and 13 more TDs. As a defensive back, he had 34 tackles, 20 assists, six tackles for losses, four sacks, two forced fumbles, five interceptions and a pair of TDs. He accounted for 23 TDs and 1,526 all-purpose yards.
Without Mhyres, the SoBos lost three of their final four games, including a 52-0 loss to Flanagan/Cornelll/Woodland in the first round of the playoffs.
Identifying Mhres’ successor will be an early goal, particularly since Redieske plans on revamping schemes.
“We’ll definitely run a completely different offense,” he said. “(Former Coach Jim Morrow) ran a lot of triple option. We may have a triple-option play, but that’s not going to be the main feature. Really, I like the fact that right now teams don’t have any idea what we’re going to do. There’s no film on us yet.”
Redieske said the SoBos will have talent.
“We’ll lose a really talented senior class and we won’t have huge numbers in our senior class next year,” he said. “But we have some really talented sophomores and freshmen moving up. I think we can win next year.”
Redieske is not a teacher. He owns Lolligags salon/spa in Beloit.
“It’s great to have an in-house coach and having (assistant coach and athletic director) Sam (Cady) there is a big asset. It always helps recruiting to have someone in the hallways, but I plan on being there as much as I am allowed for weight-training and I have worked with all these kids and they know me pretty well. It’s a small town. It’s pretty easy to identify the kids who want to play football.”
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