Damien receives a whopping 70! applicants for open head coach job …

Damien received a whopping 70 applications for its open varsity football head coach job, according to principal Dr. Merritt Hemenway.

The deadline to apply for the job vacated by the resignation of Greg Gano passed earlier this month and now Hemenway and crew have moved on to sifting through all the applications and are aiming to start interviewing late next week.

“Because of the overwhelming numbers of applicants we need to develop a “short list” and are talking about filtering candidates to that list first,” Hemenway said via email on Thursday. “Thanks to my experience of being around Catholic high school sports for over 30 years, there are about a dozen men on the list that I know by reputation well enough already that I could see them as a potential good fit for Damien.

“This will be a nice challenge.”

Aram’s take: Stunned disbelief. I was thinking 30 or 35. The prevailing notion around town is that the Damien football program is on the skids, but 70 applicants clearly think otherwise. I wonder if the prospect of Damien moving to an all-Catholic school league/division has something to do with it. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens with the interview process. By the way, speaking from experience, Hemenway runs a tight ship when it comes to thing like this, so information may be limited as to who the finalists are.