Abington Friends School Director of Athletics, Jeff Bond has been part of the AFS community for twenty-two years and plays a crucial role in the daily operations of AFS’s athletics year-round.
Director of Athletics at AFS has not been Jeff’s only role though. Jeff has been Head Coach of Varsity Baseball, an Upper School History Teacher, a Middle School Girls Basketball Head Coach, and at one point Varsity Girls Basketball Head Coach.
On February 22, 2020 AFS Girls Varsity Basketball won the PAISAA State Championship under Head Coach, Jeff Bond.
When did you start coaching the girls’ basketball team?
I started around 2009-2010. I coached Middle School Girls here at AFS before that, I coached Varsity and Assistant Coach at Episcopal Academy for the Boys’ team before I came here.
It’s a pretty unique thing to go between coaching and athletic director. There was a moment in baseball last year where we saw this, and I wanted to know what thoughts went into your decision to start coaching?
I’ve always been a basketball and baseball coach throughout my history of working with schools. I felt like there were a lot of interested baseball players here, and we needed to provide some stability to a program that’s been kind of rocky. Josh Leopold and I stepped in to do that. It’s kind of the same thing that we were able to provide, the assistant coaches and me back in that championship team. Just to provide that stability to a group that wants to try and get better. That girls’ basketball team got better all the time, we handled adversity, and we ended up winning.
It wasn’t just 2020 that was a successful year, 2019, 2018, and those years there were some FSL titles. Leading up to those years did you feel this energy in a sense as a Coach that there would be this big run?
We had a good combination of athletes that were here in middle school, some of them who I coached as Middle School Coach, and then some came in new to the school in 9th or 10th grade. So it was a good mix of kids, and I didn’t know that we could win the PAISAA Championship. We made it into the semi-finals four years in a row. We lost in overtime to Notre Dame one year, and we lost on a last-second shot to Germantown Academy one year, so we were always close but we never got over the hump in that tournament. We had some success in the Friends School League; we made the playoffs every year and started out losing in the semis and then made it to the finals. We were fortunate to have a lot of really good players who were committed to try and grow the program. We would play in the summer, get in a fall league, we would work out, so their commitment made me believe that maybe something could be possible.
Is that moment something you will always remember, knowing that you were technically number one in the state?
The best part of that is the relationship with the kids who were on that team. We always have this thing in common, and we can look back on it and smile and feel proud about it. We didn’t have a huge roster and I think in the championship game we only played seven players, we only had nine on the roster because of injuries by the end of the season. But those nine will always have something special that they’ll remember AFS from and that I can remember my time with them. I saw Paige Mott ‘20 and Jordan Smith ‘20 who were part of that team; Jordan was hurt and Paige played a big role. I saw them last year at college games and we talked about and remembered that. To me that memory of my time with them I’ll always have which is cool.
