After two seasons as a defensive assistant at Western Colorado University, JR Conkright is returning to the high school level and was announced late last week as Loveland’s new head football coach.
Conkright replaces Allan Jeffries, who retired from coaching after leading the Red Wolves to a 40-21 record in five seasons, including one state championship game.
In each of the last three seasons, Loveland has made only short playoff appearances. Conkright wants to change that. He’s looking forward to turning Loveland back into a consistent state title contender.
Conkright was an assistant at Broomfield when the Eagles defeated the Red Wolves in the 2022 Class 4A state championship game, so he knows the program’s reputation.
“I’ve always known Loveland,” he said. “They are very well known across the state as a tough, tough football program. They’re football rich. That is a winning program. You always know you’re going to be in a battle when it comes to facing Loveland.”
Now Conkright is going to be leading the Red Wolves into those battles.
But before he ever got into coaching, Conkright was in the military, then personal training where his love of working with athletes grew. He began coaching football in youth organizations before moving up to the high school level.
His most recent high school stop was at Broomfield, where he was the defensive coordinator for three seasons. From there, he went to Western Colorado and coached there for two years, which was always the plan, he said.
“My wife and I agreed if I had the opportunity to coach at the college level, it was going to be for two years while my daughter was in middle school,” he said. “We agreed that I wanted to be home for her high school career, basically. So, after the season, I knew I was going to be coming back home. When it came to exactly what role I was going to step into, I didn’t know. It was never a crazy dream of mine to be a head coach.”
When the Loveland job opened up, he sensed an opportunity and acted on it, saying the time was right to make such a move.
After talking with mentors, fellow coaches and, most importantly, his wife, he applied for the job.
“I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to go ahead and give it a try,’ ” he said. “My wife and I, we prayed on it and said this is probably the best time for it if I’m going to step into head coaching and do it and stay at the high school level.”
Conkright said he gets more joy out of coaching high school athletes than those in college, something else that lured him to Loveland.
He described what he wants of his athletes, specifically those at Loveland now, is to be relentless in everything they do.
“Offensively, defensively, special teams, in the classroom, be relentless in everything that we do,” he said. “If you have that mentality and you’re not going to lose and yours not going to slack or not going to give it 100%, then why are you doing it in the first place? That’s something I think I’m going to go with moving forward is just be relentless and know everything that you’re going to do in life.”
Conkright knows the program’s reputation of having a stout defense and playing smash-mouth football offensively.
He has been a coach on both sides of the ball and is looking forward to helping the team find an identity early that will contribute to its success.
“I would have to say the philosophy and what I want to bring to Loveland, I want our defense to have the identity,” he said. “They have a pretty strong identity as it is anyway when it comes to the defensive side of the ball. And offensively, they had an identity of smash-mouth. We’re going to do what we want to do offensively, and I really want to get back to that, so that we’re establishing an identity that we can hang our hat on.
“Everybody is going to know exactly what that is going to be. What it is now, I don’t know.”
Conkright said he’s excited to meet with the current coaching staff and players beginning as early as the end of this week as well as watching film of what the team did last fall.
He wants to be heavily involved in the Loveland community, too, he said. Most importantly, however, he wants to get the football program back to where deep playoff runs are normal and championships are the goal.
“Every year, it’s going to be, yes, we want to get to playoffs, and we want to be a force within the playoffs,” he said. “I don’t want to just make it and just say, ‘Hey, we made it to the playoffs.’ Loveland has been known for going very deep in the playoffs and competing for the state championship if it’s not a quarterfinal or a semifinal. That’s what I want to get back to. I want to get back on that track as fast as possible.”
