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Erlenbaugh finds a great fit at Solorio Academy

By Marty Maciaszek

Special to the Daily Herald

Matt Erlenbaugh was looking for teaching and coaching jobs in somewhat unfamiliar territory.

The former Daily Herald All-Area football standout at Buffalo Grove wanted something closer to his future wife's teaching job at Lincoln-Way West in the far south suburbs. Then Erlenbaugh's phone rang.

"I had never heard of Solorio (Academy)," Erlenbaugh said of the call from then head football coach Matt Lawson. "He invited me over for an interview."

Solorio was a brand new public school in Chicago's Gage Park neighborhood on the South Side. It would be an opportunity for Erlenbaugh to help build something from the ground up as a physical education teacher and coach.

Now Erlenbaugh is firmly entrenched in all aspects of Solorio. That includes his first year as a head football coach of a team that is 4-1 and chasing a third consecutive state playoff appearance.

"I love it. I absolutely do," said Erlenbaugh, who was Solorio's defensive coordinator from 2011-13 before taking the same position at Riverside-Brookfield the last two years. "I thought I would continue to go the college route after I was a graduate assistant at Western Illinois and I would try to get on a college staff.

"But I started to miss high school football and getting to do more things than football."

That's not surprising considering Erlenbaugh's family history. His dad Chuck taught and coached at Loyola Academy and his mom was a special education teacher. His wife Laura is now a department head at Lincoln-Way West.

Erlenbaugh's brother Dan teaches special education at Grayslake Central and is taking over its boys volleyball program. And Matt's older brother J.D. is on his staff as a line coach and working at an elementary school after spending 10 years as a teacher and coach in Los Angeles.

Matt Erlenbaugh also found out football doesn't last forever after playing a big part on BG's state quarterfinal teams in 2001 and 2002. He blew out his knee in his second game at Carthage College and ended up transferring to Western Illinois to focus on academics.

Taking a football coaching class with then WIU head coach Don Patterson helped start his return to the sidelines.

"I really missed football and the camaraderie and competition," Erlenbaugh said. "When my semester was up (Patterson) asked if I wanted to get on his staff as a volunteer coach. I jumped right on it and said absolutely."

Erlenbaugh sandwiched three years as a volunteer assistant and his year as a graduate assistant at WIU around a year as a student teacher at Stevenson. After leaving WIU, he spent a year coaching football at Grayslake Central and wrestling at Vernon Hills. And then he got the call from Solorio.

"The kids here are wonderful," Erlenbaugh said. "You always hear stuff that it's so tough over there and it is ... with 97 percent of our students getting free or reduced lunch.

"There are struggles but there are no fights here. We joke that we're kind of the country club of CPS (Chicago Public Schools). It's a great learning environment."

It was definitely a different world for Erlenbaugh from a football standpoint in his first few years.

"Just having mostly kids who never had experience playing football, it was almost elementary in terms of fundamentals," he said. "X's and O's, we weren't thinking about them too much at that point.

"The first year we had 30 kids who had no idea what they were doing and we kind of kept rolling from there. Now we get a lot of kids with a lot more experience."

But Erlenbaugh thought it would help him to get some additional experience so he jumped at the chance to work with R-B head coach Brendan Curtin. It proved to be a good move when Lawson stepped down as head coach after Solorio made the second round of the state playoffs last year.

It also helped that he was moving back to a program he was familiar with since he was still teaching and coaching wrestling at Solorio. The school also has its own home field on campus with lights and a much more experienced group that includes junior quarterback Quincy Patterson, who has scholarship offers from Northwestern, Illinois, Indiana and Penn State.

Erlenbaugh has challenges a lot of suburban schools don't face, such as how to bring in a doctor to give kids free physicals and fundraising to make sure the program has quality equipment and enough money to pay for good assistant coaches. Players are also held accountable for unexcused absences or tardiness.

"I'm not going to sacrifice winning for integrity," Erlenbaugh said of sitting three starting offensive linemen for a half in an early-season game. "We're trying to get to where it doesn't need to be that way, where we don't need to make excuses for ourselves and we can be as responsible as everyone else in the state of Illinois."

And Erlenbaugh is doing what he can to make Solorio better for everyone. Three years ago he started an adapted physical education leaders program to help those in the school's program for severely and profoundly disabled students.

"That's been wonderful," Erlenbaugh said. "It changes the lives of students with disabilities who are in the classroom all day long. You see all the kids helping them play sports and their faces light up and they love coming down to PE."

Solorio is poised for another state postseason trip if CPS averts a potential teacher's strike. The biggest test is scheduled for Week 8 against defending Class 4A state champion Phillips.

And Erlenbaugh would love to help the school he didn't even know about just a few years ago become a familiar name throughout the state.

"I could see myself here for a long time with the support we have from the administration for all athletics," Erlenbaugh said, "and the staff we have in place with football and the PE department. I knew it would take some time to turn it around and it's not going to happen overnight."

marty.maciaszek@gmail.com

Matt Erlenbaugh with his son, John, already among the fans when Solorio Academy plays football. Submitted photo
Matt Erlenbaugh, former Buffalo Grove football standout and now Solorio Academy's head coach. Submitted photo
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