After serving as Joliet Central’s baseball coach and teaching for eleven years, Kevin Fitzgerald finally took his position at Central, as a Steelman, a step further accepting the position as Central’s athletic director. “As an Athletic Director getting to oversee all the programs like that is a huge task, it’s a lot of work but it’s something I take a lot of pride in because I care about this place.”
Having started off as Joliet West’s baseball coach alongside John Karczewski, the pride of being a Steelman stuck with Fitzgerald as did coaching alongside Karczewski who plays as a role model in his life. Always open to new opportunities, upon hearing about Tony Juarez stepping down Fitzgerald jumped at taking over at Joliet Central as head baseball coach as well as the opportunity to teach social studies at the school. However, while coaching baseball at West Fitzgerald landed an office job, SchoolKids a job not necessarily passion-driven. “It was a good money maker but I didn’t really enjoy it. I was literally sitting behind a computer making phone calls all day. I was coaching baseball at the time at Joliet West and that was kinda my “Hey why don’t you go back to school to be a teacher?” my mom had always told me “Hey you’d be a good teacher.””
Fitzgerald studied politics at Aurora University and even went as far as taking the LSAT seeing as he originally intended to do something in the political field. “I was really into politics, political science, that’s what I studied, so I kinda thought I was going to end up with a job in politics, something with lobbying or something like that. Or law school so I actually took the LSAT to go to law school but realized I just didn’t want to do it at the time, it wasn’t a huge passion” Things fell into place for Fitzgerald, co-teaching alongside Mr. Charley for 11 years together, working closely with athletics as assistant athletic director and head baseball coach, it was an entirely necessary change in pace for Fitzgerald to take the reins as athletic director for Central.