For the past several football seasons, the Lone Tree Lions have worked under the tutelage of two head coaches. The 2015 season begins a slightly new era of coaching at the school. Former Lone Tree alum and Lions’ co-head coach Jeff Spears took a job as the middle school head football coach of the Cedar Rapids Prairie Hawks, leaving Chad Shield as the Lions’ lone head football coach.

Spears said the decision he made was based on the location of his family, “My wife has been in the district for the last three years and we had a daughter back in January.” Spears said, “It was one of those things where she was headed north, I was headed south, we both were living in Iowa City and an opportunity opened up at Prairie Point Middle School and was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up for my family.”

Spears and Shield have been coaching together since the Highland and Lone Tree consolidated Class 2A football program was split into two Class A squads back in 2006. The coaches were dual head coaches of the Lions’ junior varsity squad before both agreed to share the head coaching duties two years later.

Despite leading two different teams, Shield says he has kept frequent contact with Spears, “We still talk to each other a couple times a week, we run football stuff by one another” Shield said, “We are definitely going to miss Coach Spears, he was a great athlete at Lone Tree, and has coached there since the inception of the split 10 years ago.”

Shield adds he is bringing back Travis Pierson this season as his special teams coordinator and Aaron Bohr as the Lions’ defensive coordinator, and has promoted former Lone Tree alum Mike Miller from the school’s middle school program to assume the Lions’ offensive coordinator duties.

Lone Tree opens the 2015 football season at home on Friday, August 28, versus the Louisa-Muscatine Falcons.