“I just felt that it was time,” said Singleton, who’s nearing his 65th birthday. “It’s been a long road, but it’s been a fun road. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of it. This game’s been very good for me.”
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It’s a career that started in 1976 with an assistant coach’s position at North Pole High School just outside Fairbanks, Alaska, when he was in the Army.
Singleton had two runs as head coach at Monroe — 1989-95 and 2002-03 — though he did no coaching in 2002. Rocky Day stepped in on an interim basis after Singleton suffered a stroke.
At New Miami, he was an assistant for one year under Jim Jewett and then took over the program in 2014. His record with the Vikings was 13-26.
“I had a lot of misapprehensions about New Miami,” Singleton said. “Once I got here, I found out what great kids they are. They became part of my heart and part of our family. It’s been a wonderful thing.”
Singleton, who lives in Liberty Township with his wife Holly, is an instructional aide at New Miami and plans to continue in that role for two more years. He’s willing to help if the school wants him to be involved in the search for a new coach.
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“I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, but I want those kids to know they’ve got somebody they can lean on,” Singleton said.
He was 36-37 during his first seven years as Monroe’s head coach, taking the Hornets to the playoffs in 1993 and 1994. The ’94 squad went 11-1 and knocked off Badin in the first round of the Division III postseason.
Monroe was 1-9 with Day at the helm in 2002 and then 0-10 under Singleton in 2003. He was also the athletic director and gave up his coaching job after the winless season.
“I just didn’t feel like I had the energy to do both,” said Singleton, an assistant principal at Vail Middle School during the years between his times as head coach at Monroe. “We knew we had a great group coming at Monroe. I chose to be the AD and went out and got Jason Krause to be our coach, and the rest is history at Monroe. He had a great run with those kids.”
He admitted that Day’s recent death played a part in his decision to step back from coaching. Day succumbed to cancer Dec. 28.
“Rock and I grew up next door to each other,” Singleton said. “We’d known each other for over 50 years. He was my defensive coordinator at Monroe. He was my best friend.”
His assistant coaching history included stops at Monroe and Middletown. He started coaching under Buddy Moore at Monroe in 1982.
Singleton graduated from Monroe in 1971. A former fullback and defensive tackle, he played for one season at Ohio Wesleyan University, then joined the Army and later earned degrees at Miami University.
He played some eight-man football in the Army and took the opportunity to be an offensive and defensive line coach in the land of the midnight sun at North Pole.
“Alaska was a different place, but it was a great experience,” Singleton said. “We started practice in June. The season had to be over by the first week of September because it snowed, so we played a seven-game schedule. We never had to turn the lights on because it was summer. We never played a night game, even though we started at night.
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“North Pole was just starting football, so it was a new thing for them too. It was an amazing high school. It was all built underground for the heat. You walked in and everything was down. The only thing you saw was a row of windows around the school.”
Singleton won’t rule out a possible return to coaching as an assistant somewhere. But retirement is the path he’s taking right now, and he’s not expecting that to change.
Asked how he wants to be remembered as a coach, Singleton took a few moments to reply.
“I treated my kids right with integrity. We believed there were bigger lessons to learn sometimes,” he said. “We tried to teach those lessons. We tried to make them better men, which I think we did.
“I’ve been lucky to work with some great coaches in my life. I’ve tried to take what they taught me and pass it on to the kids. The thing I’m most proud of here is that we’ve given the kids a work ethic. They didn’t know what it was before. Now they know what it means to work and finish something. They set goals and try to be better.”
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