MONTICELLO, Ind. — After months of deliberation, Jerry Hoover decided to step down as the boys basketball head coach at Blackford High School this week.
The final decision for the 86-year-old coach came last Saturday. For months, Hoover — who has played a large part in the turnaround that the Blackford boys basketball program has seen the past couple of seasons (he credits two-time state scoring leader Luke Brown) — had been tracking rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in Indiana and across the county.
With his medical history, including a recent hospitalization with pneumonia in January, Hoover feared that if he got the virus, he'd be "a dead man.