Brad Meester is the new head football coach at Mount Vernon

CEDAR RAPIDS - Brad Meester was named head football coach at Mount Vernon High School earlier this week.

He’d been offensive coordinator for the Mustangs under Lance Pedersen, who recently left to become head coach at nearby Clear Creek Amana. Mount Vernon always has been one of the top programs in Eastern Iowa.

“I’m excited about the opportunity,” Meester said. “We’re going to do a lot of the same things that we’ve been doing, but, I don’t want to say add our twist to it, but try and continue the tradition of Mount Vernon football and what Mount Vernon stands for.”

The roots of this whole head coaching thing, this whole coaching thing, period, for Meester, who played 14 seasons in the NFL as a center for the Jacksonville Jaguars, dates to late June of 2009. He was in a car of six driving to a Parkersburg cemetery for the burial of Ed Thomas.

The beloved Aplington-Parkersburg High School coach had been shot and murdered by a former player who was mentally ill. Hundreds of people converged on the town to mourn and honor him.

Meester was a pallbearer at the funeral, as were Casey Wiegmann, Jared DeVries and Aaron Kampman: small-town kids mentored and coached by Thomas who’d all made it to the NFL.

“I remember the car starts driving by the Sacred Acre (football field),” Meester said. “It ended up taking us basically through town, takes you to the cemeteries. You go down this hill past the swimming pool. We’re all talking, sharing stories about Thomas and things like that. But when we turn this corner, the street is just absolutely filled. I’m talking like it was 10 deep. People everywhere.

“Not just former players and people from town, it was people from neighboring towns. I remember seeing people from Grundy Center, Dike-New Hartford, they had their jerseys on. Everybody in the streets had four fingers in the air, which was kind of our tradition for (going into) the fourth quarter.”

It left an indelible image in his mind. And made him realize he wanted to eventually give back to a game that gave him so much.

To a man who gave him so much.

“I was in just absolute awe of how much of an impact Coach Thomas had, not only on me and people that he coached, but people in the community and neighboring towns,” Meester said. “As we (his wife, Jamie, and their six daughters) came back here, and I got into coaching, I just loved it. I love the coaching part of it.

“Not necessarily that this is what God’s calling me to do, but I think it’s what I meant to do. Give back. I’ll never be able to give back as much as Coach Thomas did, but I’m hoping just to have a small impact. Something close to what he did, I guess.”

Meester said he sees a lot of similarities between his football program now and the one he was a part of in high school. By the way, DeVries was head coach at Clear Lake and Kampman is an assistant at Solon.

“From historic coach to historic field, but just the towns, too. Two small towns with such a tradition,” Meester said. “Both towns just have great character to them. I’m blessed with the fact that our entire coaching staff is going to stay. All of those guys are just passionate about football, great with kids.”

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