What is it that a team manager does, exactly? Work with athletes and coaches, yes. Maybe even grab a championship ring if you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by greatness, sure. But what draws a person to this calling, to this business of long nights and little sleep, of missed family time and little social time, of devoting one’s self to the betterment of guys and girls whose names everyone knows while you toil away in anonymity, somehow comforted by the knowledge that you will never get any credit, nor will you ever want any?
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How about an equipment manager, specifically? Those jobs especially are not for the faint of heart, grimy as they are when you work your way up the totem pole.
“People that have the personalities of wanting to give and give back and expect really little in return, because they want to do their part to make sure that their team is outfitted on the field and ready to play their best with their equipment,” says Trevor Pueblo, a Kansas football equipment assistant. “And if anything happens, we’re right out there to fix what needs to be fixed and make sure everything runs as smoothly and flawlessly as possible.”
Pueblo adds that, in addition to coaches, equipment managers try to keep their constituencies lively, negating any potential worries of players or staff and freeing them to focus on the tasks at hand.
Consider, for example, the early background work of Jack Roche. It’s the heart of two-a-days in 2013, Marist High School’s season-opener at Soldier Field is looming, and nothing is getting past this locker room when it comes to finding bulletin-board material.
St. Rita, one of a handful of rivals on Chicago’s South side, is the opponent. Enough neighborhood kids from both rosters have gone to middle school together to breed some preseason contempt. And now, on top of the traditional preview publications and regular Facebook bickering among teens, here comes a Twitter account that hits a little too close to home.
Shots at a Marist assistant here. Jabs at the specialists, of all people, there. Tidbits on why this first-time starter was going to get exposed come game day. You name it. Nothing was out of bounds.
The deliveries are personal. Privately, the coaches fume, wondering if they had a spy at practices. They had always told their players to keep their mouths shut and let their play do the talking, but tweet by tweet, the tension continues to bubble, especially as players exit the locker room ready to unleash frustrations on each other once they hit the practice field.
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As Marist head coach Pat Dunne takes the field with them one day that August, he realizes he has forgotten his whistle, so he heads back to his office. As he opens the door, he notices the annoying Twitter account open on the projector screen to his right. To his left, behind his desk, sits his freshman manager Roche, his jig up, his head nodding.
Wait a second, Dunne thinks, trying to process the mind behind the motivational tool.
“So what do you want up there next?” Roche, all of 14 years old, asks his boss, undeterred.
Dunne couldn’t quit laughing then, and he can’t stop laughing now at the memory. He had kept that story to himself over the years, allowing Roche to work his magic in silence and continue running the account all season long to rile up his players, with head coach and manager the only two guys in on the joke.
Keeping his players lively? Yeah, that was no problem for Jack Roche.
In the early-morning hours of July 12, Roche was hit by a car and pronounced dead at the scene, just blocks from his childhood home and just two days before he was set to fly back to Kansas for his senior year. His death was ruled an accident. The 21-year-old had been a mainstay in the Jayhawks’ football equipment office. Known to all as “Coach Roche,” he was an oversized personality in an undersized body, an old soul who had never met a stranger.
He was running Twitter burner accounts well before burner accounts were a thing, and he exhausted every edge humanly possible to make the players he served look good.
“That was kind of the start of when we started getting more technological, with all the tech-savvy stuff that players in high school are familiar with now,” says Nic Weishar, a senior on that Marist team who went on to play tight end at Notre Dame. “But at the time with iPads and things like that, using Hudl, he was extremely instrumental in that part and helping Ray (Holmes) get that together, help the team study film in a timely manner.”
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Says Holmes, a former Marist manager who is now a grad assistant at Temple: “Jack was someone who you always looked forward to trying to find after games. He would dance in the locker room. My senior year especially (2015-16), we made it pretty far. The atmosphere in the locker room for the games we won, you would look at him and everybody knew he was part of the team even though he didn’t dress up on the field.”
“I don’t think there was much skill in that locker room as far as dancing,” he adds, laughing. “But you look back, and the joy that he had going in there after games was evident.”
Roche’s cousin, Marty Roche, delivered his eulogy during a funeral Mass this past Saturday in Marist’s gym. Marty, like many others present, was donning a Kansas necktie. He talked about his cousin’s dancing — and his singing — in a tribute that was equal parts roast and equal parts tear-jerker, such was the nature of Coach Roche’s effect on everyone.
Memories poured in all over social media from Kansas and the Big 12 community, and nine members of the Jayhawks program — two staff members, seven student managers — bussed the nine hours from Lawrence to Chicago on Friday to visit the Roche family and attend services the next day.
Forever a part of our team
Rest easy, Jack pic.twitter.com/SW2ywj8eDh
— Kansas Football (@KU_Football) July 13, 2020
Imploring mourners to Live Like Jack, “the richest man in town,” Marty Roche shared the story of how his cousin would con his way into the Kansas cafeteria, his 5-foot nothing, 100-and-nothing-pound frame belying the confidence of a kid so bent on snagging the cookies and brownies afforded to players with meal plans that he had convinced the student cashier he was a place-kicker. By phone, John Roche talked about the time that his son, working the Kansas equipment window, sent a 300-pound lineman off with his head sulking after refusing to bend over and hand the player more replacement shorts for the pairs that he “lost” three days in a row. Pueblo recalled Coach Roche getting into his element and breaking clipboards as a faux-motivational tactic whenever they would take the field against other Big 12 programs’ managers in 7-on-7 contests the Fridays before Saturday games.
“You were gonna get a laugh every day, so you might as well look forward to coming to work every day knowing that he was there,” Pueblo says. “He would joke with players to keep it lively. That was his thing. He enjoyed it as much as I’ve ever seen, and he was a special, one-of-a-kind kid. “
The KU Football Equipment Room won’t be the same without you. Going to miss my “seat buddy” for road games and your infectious personality that you brought with you everyday. You can have my window seat anytime on the team charters. Love you and miss you @coach_roche12 #RIP pic.twitter.com/daKAwKkeOX
— Trevor Pueblo (@T_Pueblo) July 12, 2020
Roche managed the football, basketball and baseball teams at different points in high school, and he earned Marist’s coveted RedHawk Rowdy honor his senior year, taking home a big screen TV as his prize. As Southside as they come, he was a devoted White Sox fan who hated the Cubs and loved Palermo’s pizza.
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He played the fiddle for his family every year during the neighborhood St. Paddy’s Day parade, and when he was off at Kansas, he’d FaceTime into the living room to play from college. He would perform the national anthem all over the area, be it for a St. Baldrick’s event at Guaranteed Rate Field or for a charity boxing match at Bourbon Street, a local haunt.
All of this jubilance from someone who probably reached the height of his athletic feats as a sixth-grader, his final year playing football for St. Catherine’s middle school.
“In the playoffs he got a fumble recovery and we were like, You’re a turnover machine!” says his father, John. “He probably weighed 50 pounds at the most.”
(Courtesy of Marist High School)
Because his playing career was short-lived, Roche got a head start on becoming Coach Roche. His brother Patrick and sister Lilly, three and four years his junior, respectively, were his pride and joy. When Patrick was playing on an 11U Little League team, the seeds for Coach Roche were planted when big brother stood behind the batting cage and filmed every pitch. (Which, inevitably, made him the unofficial arbiter of balls and strikes for angry parents.) When Patrick’s team traveled to Cooperstown the next year for a tournament, Jack officially became an assistant coach, spending all week in the barracks with the guys, taping every game and making highlight reels on DVDs to be distributed to players’ families at week’s end.
Chris Bohanek, a family friend and former Marist assistant, recalls former colleague Matt Battaglia trying to throw Roche 40-yard deep balls after practice. Neither had a care in the world as Bohanek sat there with a you-know-what-eating grin on his face watching Battaglia, a former Northern Illinois lineman, struggle to toss a spiral every five passes and Roche stumble his way into a catch every third throw or so.
“If you were around him, you were better because of it,” Bohanek says. “It’s one of those gifts that the big guy bestows upon you. I know his life was cut short at 21, but he knew it, and it’s not an ego thing. He had a gift.”
Pueblo and the rest of the traveling Kansas party brought to Chicago a commemorative football and multiple framed Jayhawks jerseys for the Roche family. Friends have created T-shirts — Rock, Chalk, RedHawk — in his memory. The ties between Coach Roche and the schools he grew up at were inseparable. His Marist family stated, over and over again, just how much a part of their family the Kansas football program would forever be.
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“Like a lot of us said: God requested an equipment manager to work the issue window, and he got the best one,” Pueblo says.
Funny thing about religion and managing and even sports, for that matter, as Father Tom Hurley said at a remembrance that did not lack for light-hearted digs (“We know them for basketball. We know football hasn’t been that successful,” the priest cracked of Kansas) or deeply emotional praise (“To you, Kim and John, you were the best head coaches of all,” he told Jack’s parents).
Father Hurley read from Matthew 14: 13-21. He drew parallels afterward between Jesus telling his disciples to manage a crowd of more than 5,000 with five loaves and two fish, and Coach Roche managing hundreds of Marist and Kansas football players across the past seven years. He didn’t manage sports, Father Hurley stressed, he managed multitudes, and all it took was being his genuine self.
No one will go away hungry, he said, because Coach Roche fed them.
And two giant football communities are livelier for having known him.
(Top photo: Courtesy of Marist High School)
