Fifty years ago, Jack Muldoon graduated from Monsignor Bonner Catholic High School in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania after playing defensive back for four seasons on the Friars football team.
Last year, Muldoon led his alma mater, now Monsignor Bonner & Archbishop Prendergast Catholic High School, more commonly known as Bonner & Prendie, to its first-ever PIAA Class 4A State Championship.
This year, he is the first Philadelphia Eagles High School Coach of the Week for the 2025 season.
"It's amazing. This is huge. We've gotten some Coach of the Year honors, and I always say we because my staff, I ride on their shoulders. But it really is," says Muldoon, whose Friars are off to a 3-0 start this year. "I think it gives us a kind of a stamp of approval from people who really know football and people who know what youth sports are all about.
"I've gotten to go to a bunch of coaching clinics through the years. With the Eagles, I have gotten to go to camps and get to know the different guys who have worked in that capacity of youth sports. And being a lifelong Eagles fan, it's just a huge honor for me and for our team."
Muldoon has known practically his whole life that he wanted to coach. Shortly after graduating from high school, he took up rugby and it became his second passion. He would return to Bonner and be the school's rugby coach for 10 years while also coaching CYO basketball.
"I started to really understand that I liked coaching, I enjoyed that whole relationship between the coach and the players," Muldoon says. "Even when I was younger, a lot of the guys I coached were around my age.
"And then I was coaching some CYO football. Later on, I coached at St. Joe's Prep from 2001 to 2011. I then came back here to Bonner in 2012, and have been a coach here since."
After overseeing the freshman team, Muldoon became the head coach of the varsity team in 2016. And over the past four years, Bonner & Prendie has won the District 12 Championship four times, the Philadelphia Catholic League title in 2022, and, of course, the 4A state championship in 2024.
All great accomplishments! But Muldoon, his coaches, and his players have no intention of resting on their laurels.
It's a new season and a new goal.
"We have a great role model in Nick Sirianni. I've kind of grabbed a couple of his sayings and have watched some of the ways his Eagles team approaches it," Muldoon says. "And the way I basically approach it is, each season, each team writes its own story. It's kind of like their own yearbook.
"If we were defending it, I'd want the 12 seniors, who are all playing college football, to come back. We'll defend it with the guys from last year. I want our guys (on this year's team) to feel that this is their own story to write. We are booked as a defending state champion, but until we even get into the state tournament, none of that really matters. All the points we scored, all the touchdowns, that graduated."
In his 10th season as Bonner & Prendie's head coach, Muldoon stresses to his players the importance of not only being committed to being successful on the field, but in the classroom and away from school, as well.
"We're really big here at school on service opportunities, and we challenge them," Muldoon says. "The opportunities they're going to get to move on and possibly play at the collegiate level – currently, we have 32 players that are playing at all different levels – their GPA, how they act in school, how they carry themselves is vitally important to how they're going to succeed outside of here.
"We want to have them enjoy their football experience, but at the end of the day, we're trying to make men."
Muldoon, who is also the school's Director of Alumni Relations, not only wears a whistle around his neck during practices and a headset during games, but he also wears his heart on his sleeve and cares about the boys he's coaching now as well as the men he has coached in the past.
"They really mean everything to me. When I coached back in the '80s, I still have some of those (players) as friends. Some of them, I had Eagles season tickets with for years. We carried a bond," Muldoon says. "And these players that I coach now, I spend a lot of time with them and tell parents, 'I probably talk to your kids more than I talk to my own.' And I have had the opportunity to coach my son, Brady. He was on the team last year.
"But I've been blessed to have this opportunity, and I take it very seriously. If you don't show that you love these kids, and they really think that you'll go to bat for them in every way, then you're really kind of not doing it for the right reason.
"Of all the guys that I've coached, I have a couple back on my staff, and they see that some of the things that we taught them were worthwhile. Some of the things our school teaches them as far as responsibility and accountability and ownership of everything we do and just being good people, they understand, yeah, these are all worthwhile characteristics to apply yourself to."