Not everyone winds up spending their entire career doing what they love, and Jason Forrester, a longtime teacher and coach at Caledonia, said he’s glad to be a part of that small group.
For the last 25 years, Forrester, a New Hope native, has been leading the charge in the classroom and on many different fields of play for the Cavaliers. After this school year, he’s decided it’s time to hang up the whistle and put down the pen and paper.
From coaching future NFL players to helping new sports at the school get off the ground, there isn’t much athletic history at the school that Forrester hasn’t seen or been a part of, and those moments will give him a lot to think about and appreciate just how special a ride it has been.
“I’m very fortunate to have been at Caledonia for 25 years,” he said. “Not a lot of coaches get to do that at one place.”
Forrester played football and powerlifted in high school, but coaching it never really crossed his radar until he attended Mississippi State University in the 1990s. While he was pursuing a business degree, he and some friends decided they wanted to coach a summer softball league, and he had so much fun he got hooked for good. He also credits his wife for giving him that extra push to chase his dream.
“I actually started out going to let my wife be the teacher and do what she wanted to do,” said Forrester, who also happens to be a fan of Auburn athletics. “I have a business degree from Mississippi State and I was going to do that kind of thing, and she noticed I was really bored with that, so she said, ‘You know what, you need to go back and get your teaching certification so you can coach. That’s what you really want to do.’ … And I took off from there.”
Right out of college he landed a spot at Caledonia as the head junior varsity coach and as an assistant varsity coach under Jack Hankins, which he said was an unbelievable opportunity because football was the main sport he wanted to coach and he got to work with the high school team in his first year.
“I was like, ‘Woah, a varsity position right away.’ (Hankins) had a lot of trust in me and I learned a lot from that point forward,” Forrester said.
Forrester and Hankins helped get the team to its first playoff game in the 2004 season and then again the following season – and of course they had some help on the field in the form of future NFL players and brotherly duo Derek Sherrod and Dezmond Sherrod. Both went on to play at Mississippi State after their Caledonia days with Dezmond finding his way to the Pittsburgh Steelers as an undrafted free agent and Derek landing with the Green Bay Packers as a first-round pick. But during those high school years they were both transcendent for the programs, and it didn’t take long for Forrester to realize that they both were bound to land in the NFL.
Forrester has plenty of stories to tell about the two during their Caledonia days, like the time when Derek got mad during the Cavs’ 2005 playoff game.
“That (second) playoff game that we went to (against East Side), there was a guy who was a senior going to Mississippi State (as well), and they had seen each other at camps and things like that, and they started jawing during warmups,” Forrester said. “… The first play of the game Derek gets his nose bloodied by that guy. He comes over and we clean him up and he says, ‘I’m good.’ From that point on we saw a different side (of Derek). He pancaked that guy about 17 times throughout the game, and it was all over.”
Beyond the gridiron
Forrester’s coaching experience began to spread farther than just football at Caledonia, and pretty soon he had his hand in all sorts of sports including girls and boys soccer, which soon became a sport he loved to coach. He led those programs for 15 years.
“It ended up that I really love coaching soccer,” he said. “It turned out being a really fun game and kind of the extra part of the year gave me something to do, so to speak.”
Then he coached boys golf for “about three years” and coached girls golf for the first two years of the program – all the while still holding his football duties while teaching multiple different subjects in the classroom like, English, reading and social studies.
Forrester also spent the majority of his 25 years at school with a heavy hand in powerlifting, something he became a big fan of during his own high school days. He helped the girls team get off the ground four years ago and helped lead them to a second-place finish last year in the MHSAA state powerlifting meet – the program’s best-ever season.
Forrester said it was amazing to see the girls start from the bottom and climb so close to the mountain top in so little time.
“I guess the correct word is ‘satisfying,’ knowing where it started, where it is at and who is going to be able to take it over is going to be in a good place,” he said. “You’ve always heard the phrase, ‘You want to leave it better than you found it,’ and I really hope that’s the way it is because I want whoever is going to take it over to be able to take it and just run with it.”
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