by Alan Hoskins, KCKCC
Kansas City Kansas Community College’s new women’s soccer coach Jeremy Winzer was destined for coaching the day he graduated from high school.
“Our faculty representative, Joe Auldx, called me and asked me to coach at my old high school while I was attending Louisiana Tech,” said the 25-year-old Winzer. He becomes KCKCC’s first full-time women’s soccer coach. For the past three seasons, Ruben Rodriguez has coached both the men’s and women’s teams.
For three seasons, Winzer coached at Rustin High School in Russell, La., where he had been a three-sport standout in cross country, track and soccer. He spent another year at West Ouachita High School on the way to earning a degree from Louisiana Tech and then turned to coaching in the college ranks. After serving as an assistant at Centenary College of Louisiana and Culver-Stockton in Canton, Mo., he was named to his first head coaching position at Iowa Wesleyan in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. The past season was spent in administration as academic counselor at Mississippi Valley State University.
“I worked with a lot of transfer students,” Winzer said. “My passion is coaching because I had such great coaches and knew how much they helped me. I want to commit my life to working with kids and help them transition into college. It can have such an impact across the board.”
As he begins his eighth season of coaching and fourth at the collegiate level, academics will be a focal point as he heads into his first season this fall.
“My goal is to have a team grade point average of 3.50,” he said. “I want to install a winning culture, try to do things the right way, be fundamentally sound and be known in the Jayhawk Conference as an extremely hard-working team.”
At Rustin High School, Winzer was team captain and all-conference in soccer but his best sports were cross country and track. A member of a 5A Louisiana state championship 4×800 meter relay team, he ran cross country and played club soccer for Shreveport United in the fall, played high school soccer in the winter and then ran track and played club soccer in the spring.
Winzer holds a degree in general science from Louisiana Tech and is currently working on earning a master’s in exercise science and health promotion from the University of California at Pennsylvania.
Alan Hoskins is the sports information director at KCKCC.