After two seasons as an assistant track coach at Allen Community College, Tony Davis is moving on and Junior Cadet has been chosen to take his place. CADET should be able to come in and help right away.
“I’ve kind of been foreshadowing this for a while, whenever I did my interviews I’d say he was going to get snatched up eventually,” head track coach Vince DeGrado said. “He does a great job, it was just a matter of time before someone from the larger market schools came after him because that is what they do.”
As much as DeGrado would have liked to keep Davis, he knew that would be the wrong choice for Davis’ career.
“He was really torn when he came to me, because we’ve had a great thing going on,” DeGrado said. “But I told him, ‘I’d be a hypocrite if I talked you out of following something that you’ve been wanting to do for awhile.’ It’s kind of like one of those things where I came back to Iola.”
DeGrado started out as the head coach at ACC in 2005, where he turned the program around after two seasons. Then he left for four years to serve as an assistant track coach at Cowley College, where he helped the program win several championships. This will be his third year back as the ACC head coach.
Davis had coached the past two seasons as an assistant track coach, specializing in sprints, hurdles and jumps. He will now be an assistant track coach at Barton Community College, Great Bend, his alma mater. While running for Barton, he had helped the school win two Region 6 Championships. Davis said that previous experience has made him want to be a part of the school’s future.
This will be Cadet’s first season as a college coach.
“I did volunteer coaching because I took a year off from NCAA, so this is my second year of coaching. But, my first year coaching college athletes,” Cadet said.
Cadet and Davis ran against each other in high school track in Florida — their home state. Cadet found out about the job opening through Davis, but DeGrado said that wasn’t the main reason he hired him.
“Junior was a hurdler and a jumper,” DeGrado said. “One of the many events we don’t do as well is the jumps on the track side.”
Cadet competed in track for Middle Tennessee State University, a Division I program in Conference USA. Even without stepping on the track, Cadet has began to build the program.
“Already, he has done a heck of a job recruiting,” DeGrado said. “The thing about coaching is you have to find your niche. But, the weird thing you have to have, either you do or you don’t and (Junior) does, is he can get numbers, he can recruit.”
“If you want to be a college coach that better be the number one thing you do well because if you can’t recruit you won’t be coaching a lot of people,” DeGrado said.
In the future, Cadet says he’d like to become a head track coach at a Division I program and own his own television production company. Cadet majored in production. Right now though, he is focusing on his new job.
“I’m very excited,” Cadet said. “I’m coming in where Tony left off, bringing this program off to a good start. I want to keep this tradition and bring it up. I’d like to bring in more athletes to help the school get recognized throughout the junior colleges.”
As Davis exits ACC track program, Cadet enters
