Longtime Assistant Jeff Ojanen Named New Cloquet Football Head Coach

Ojanen, a Cloquet alum, has spent the past 19 seasons with the program, including the last 15 as the team's defensive coordinator. 

CLOQUET, Minn. – After the end of the 2021 high school football season, Cloquet’s Tom Lenarz announced his resignation as head coach of the Lumberjacks. The administration moved quick to find his replacement and they decided to make it an in-house hire.

Longtime assistant coach Jeff Ojanen will be the new head coach of the Cloquet football team. Ojanen has spent the past 19 seasons with the program, including the last 15 as the team’s defensive coordinator.

He is also a Cloquet alum which makes this job a dream come true for him.

“A lot of pride, not only for the community, but for the school and the kids and just being a Lumberjack is a great thing. That’s something that I’ll make sure the kids know every day that it’s a great day to be a Lumberjack. Being from here, going to school here and then coaching and teaching here for so long, and then getting the opportunity to be the head coach is just a, I feel a lot of pride with the whole thing,” Ojanen said.

Ojanen’s start with the Lumberjacks coincided with Lenarz’s start as head coach as well. He says there are many things about Coach Lenarz that he learned about how to build a successful program.

“You think back to all the things that made him great as a head coach. It necessarily wasn’t all about the X’s and O’s and what we did for strategy. It was about how he was able to connect with kids, make sure kids felt important and they stayed around the program. Having those kids around has been a reason for us to have as much success as we’ve had,” Ojanen added.

Ojanen is also a graduate of UMD.