A coach familiar with the Four Corners region will return to lead the Bayfield High School boys basketball team next season.
Jeff Lehnus, who last coached the Wolverines in 2005, was hired by the Bayfield School Board, athletic director David Preszler announced in a news release Wednesday.
Randy Stephens, last season’s head coach, resigned his position.
“Jeff brings a passion, a high level of high school basketball experience and a great understanding of today’s youth,” Preszler said in the news release. “He is the perfect fit as BHS’s next head boys basketball coach.”
Lehnus currently serves as Bayfield’s dean of students and will continue through the end of the year.
He first came to the Four Corners region from Englewood High School to coach basketball at Shiprock High School.
Lehnus also coached basketball at Farmington High School as an assistant before taking Durango High School’s head coaching job in 1996 before resigning in 1998.
Bayfield first hired Lehnus in 1999 after he spent a year as an assistant coach at Fort Lewis College. He coached the Wolverines off and on for the next five years before retiring from coaching to focus on teaching and become the head of Bayfield’s history department, then eventually assumed his role as dean of students.
“My deepest passion, the thing that brings me the greatest joy, I had to get back to,” Lehnus said in a phone interview with The Durango Herald on Thursday. “I love the game of basketball, and I enjoy working with young people.”
Lehnus played collegiately at Kankakee Community College in Kankakee, Illinois, and was a member of teams that were ranked No. 1 in the nation.
“I was very fortunate to be a part of that,” Lehnus said. “We springboarded the program.”
The Wolverines jumped above .500 last season for the first time since the 2010-11 season, but that recent success wasn’t what motivated Lehnus to return.
“It was something I wanted to do. I’m excited to get back in the arena,” he said. “I’m a Bayfield community member. This is where my heart is, and that’s what’s most important to me.
“I believe in the kids of Bayfield.”
heraldsports@durangoherald.com
