Severance High School announced the hiring of three coaches Tuesday, adding a girls varsity basketball and junior varsity baseball coaches to the Silver Knights’ lineup.
Deric Yaussi will take on the girls basketball program, while Kevin Johnson will oversee the Silver Knights’ JV baseball team. Johnson will be joined next spring by Northridge High School varsity assistant coach Brad Hertzke, who will serve as the Severance program assistant.
With these hires, Severance High School Principal Chris Garcia said the school needs to fill head coaching positions for golf, tennis, softball, soccer, track and field and cross country.
Johnson and Hertzke, both Windsor High School graduates, will be reunited at Severance.
Johnson, 46, and a 1990 Windsor graduate, coached Hertzke at Windsor in the early 1990s and the men later worked together with the Wizards JV team as well as coaching against each other.
Johnson was also the head coach for nine years at Thompson Valley, but he’s out been out coaching baseball for seven or eight years while his children have been growing up.
Hertzke, 43, is a 1994 Windsor graduate who for the last 16 years has served as Mike Huston’s assistant at Northridge High School.
Hertzke said he was planning for this season to be his last season at Northridge because his nephew, Nolan Hertzke, will be a freshman at Severance in the fall, and Hertzke wanted to watch the boy play sports.
Now, as it happens, Hertzke will be able to coach with an old friend while coaching Nolan.
“Definitely with my nephew, but starting new and starting young and being able to get my influence in to a class all four years,” Hertzke said. “What’s really fun about a new school is I want everyone to be a three-sport athlete, and so the more every kid does the better the whole school gets right away. Taht’s what I think is really exciting. At a new school, we want everybody to do everything.”
Johnson is in his 10th year teaching physical education and health at Windsor High School and he will take the same position at Severance.
“We’re trying to make sure we have things in place to get a program started,” Johnson said. “When you start with a just a JV program, you hire a head coach, you’re lookkng at a varsity team two years down the road. With the experience, I have I want to make sure we get the program started for whoever that is in the future.”
Severance High School Principal Chris Garcia said the school administration will hire a varsity head baseball coach in spring 2020. Severance team sports will not begin varsity level competition until the 2020-21 school year.
Yaussi, the son of Highland High School principal Randy Yaussi, comes to Severance from Poudre High School where he served as girls varsity basketball for the last two seasons.
Yaussi, 35, is a 2002 Poudre High School graduate and a former placekicker at the University of Wyoming and with the Colorado Ice and Colorado Crush, formerly of the Arena Football League.
He continues to coach kickers through his own business and he’ll serve as a special teams coach with the Silver Knights’ football team.
Yaussi’s hire marks the second time in a week Severance has dipped into coaches from the Poudre School District to fill openings. Last week, the school announced former Fossil Ridge girls basektball coach Chad Salz was hired to coach the Severance boys team.
Like Salz, Yaussi will be moving closer to home by joining the Severance staff. A Windsor resident, Yaussi is currently a physical education and health teacher at Poudre High School. He’ll take the same position at Severance.
“I think it’s a great opportunity to be in the same district with my daughter and I like the challenge of being able to start my own program from scratch,” he said.
Yaussi and Salz were opposing girls basketball coaches for two years in the Class 5A Frontier Range League. In two seasons at Poudre, Yaussi’s teams were 16-32 overall and 9-15 in the Front Range League.
“We’ll be together this time as opposed to playing against each other,” Yaussi said. “We enjoyed competing against each, but I think we’re looking forward to being on the same team.”
– Anne Delaney covers high school and recreational sports for The Greeley Tribune. Contact Anne at adelaney@greeleytribune.com, (970) 392-5647 or on Twitter @AnneGDelaney.
