Former longtime Woodbridge and Colonia softball coach Stew Jago dies
When Courtney Murgittroyd heard of Stew Jago’s passing, she began to reminisce about her time playing softball for the longtime coach at Woodbridge High School. All those practices and games and preseason training sessions.
“And I can’t think of a negative moment,” she said. “I can’t. I really can’t. There’s just so much positivity that he had throughout all four years.”
While Jago had much success on the field, he also acted as that positive mentor to his players and brought a laidback, calm demeanor in his 34 years coaching in Woodbridge Township.
Jago, a member of the NJSIAA Coaches Hall of Fame, died Wednesday at age 66.
Jago spent 15 years as the softball coach at Colonia High School and then 19 years at Woodbridge High School before his retirement following the 2014 school year. He impacted hundreds of non-athletes as a physical education and health teacher, whose duties included driver’s education.
When he retired, he was the only softball coach in Middlesex County to win five county tournament titles and the only coach to have captured a title at two different schools. He won over 400 games in his career.
“He was just a really great guy,” Woodbridge athletic director Joe Ward said. “He cared so much about his family, his wife, his two sons, his brother and he cared the same way about the girls on his softball teams. He always had such nice things to say about them and they all loved coming back and seeing him. You could tell there was a genuine, like father-daughter love there for his former players.
“Also, you saw the coaches around Middlesex County had such respect for him and there was a sincere friendship between him and some of the other veteran coaches in the Greater Middlesex Conference and around New Jersey. People just loved Stew and respected him.”
When asked about his personality, Ward remembers someone who “would have good one-liners. He was a good, funny storyteller. He had a very good sense of humor.”
“My condolences go out to the Jago family,” Ward continued. “He’s going to be so dearly missed in the Woodbridge High School and Woodbridge Township and the GMC softball community. He was a definite legend in many facets of his life.”
Brian Figueiredo coached with Jago at Woodbridge for eight years from 2006 to 2014, first as the JV coach and then as a varsity assistant. He’s now the head coach at Scotch Plains-Fanwood and implements things that he learned from his time with Jago.
“When I think of Stew, honestly, it’s funny to say, I really don’t even think of softball,” Figueiredo said. “Stew was a good person and the things that I took away from Stew really weren’t on the softball field. They were more about of how to handle situations in life and situations with kids. If a situation would come up where probably I would have handled it a lot differently in a negative way, Stew just had this calmness about him that really set a great example on how to deal with kids and situations and life, as well.”
When Jago died, Figueiredo said he also “thought a lot of the life lessons that Stew taught me and hopefully a lot of his old players are realizing now.”
Make no mistake, Jago wanted to win on the field.
“He had a fire I know that burned,” Figueiredo said. “There’s no question about it, but he didn’t belabor his points.”
Figueiredo noted that if Jago was upset over a particular situation or at the umpire, it lasted for a moment and he moved on back to his calm demeanor. Same thing if it was a bad practice.
“Things did not carry over with Stew, which you can’t say that about everybody,” Figueiredo said. “The next day was just a new day and he never held grudges or anything like that. It’s one of things that you learn from.”
On the diamond, Jago got the best of his players.
“I would say he was very, very simple in his approach,” Figueiredo said. “I think sometimes a lot of coaches over-analyze things and make things a lot bigger than they are. He was very simple. There weren’t elaborate game plans or anything like that. He just believed in, you know what, here’s what we do. We got to execute. It wasn’t like we were tricking people or anything like that. … He didn’t make things too complicated which I think the girls appreciated and probably led to a lot of their success.”
Murgittroyd, whose maiden name was Cuevas, played for Jago at Woodbridge from 2004 to 2007 and later was the Barrons’ JV coach under Jago during his last two years in 2013 and 2014. Her older sister Stephanie also played softball for Jago.
“He was fantastic,” said Murgittroyd, who is now Woodbridge’s head coach. “If you made an error or you had a bad game, you knew he wasn’t going to yell and scream and be crazy towards you. He coached the team that he had and not the team that he wanted to have. So, he knew that for each girl individually how to get to them. He definitely adjusted to the players that he had.”
That included knowing which players thrived on loud motivation and which ones preferred getting pulled aside with quiet instruction.
Murgittroyd noted that Jago was patient and encouraging when she struggled as a varsity freshman player. When she went on to Georgian Court University, he’d always knew her college batting average whenever she ran into him.
The two other current Woodbridge softball coaches, Stefanie Klepchick and Taylor DeLeo, also played under Jago. His son Mike was the Barrons JV coach until this season.
“That is like the Barron family,” she said. “That’s why this one hurts us.”
If you needed to know anything about the program’s history from the all-time home run leader to a game 10 years ago at an away field, ask Jago. He was like an almanac.
“He knew everything,” Murgittroyd said. “He could recall when he played against certain teams, what happened. He could recall when he won the GMCs, his pep talks to the team. I mean, he just knew it. He knew good plays. He knew bad plays. He knew mistakes and then the great things that happened.”
Before there were apps that kept stats, Jago would calculate batting averages and post stats in the locker room. He made a book for players at the end of the season that had newspaper clippings and pictures.
Jago knew to keep things fun. If the team was forced inside because of rain – never pleasant – he’d have a kickball or wiffle ball game to lighten things up.
“Or he would even bring us ice pops,” Murgittroyd said. “Just something so random that you just remember years later because he did it. So, when we’re kind of like at that point in our season, we’re always, ‘Let’s do something crazy like Coach Jago used to do.’ Like let’s play kickball or let’s play backward softball … to just kind of break it up. It really works. It keeps us loose. It keeps us active. It was a great kind of mix up in the middle of the season.”
She also remembers Jago wowing players, taking rips in the batting cage in his final season.
“That’s the good memories and those are the things that I’m going to remember forever about him,” Murgittroyd said. “I know that even girls prior to me and his first teams and his teams at Colonia probably have memories that are just as good. The impact that he’s had on his players and in the community in general is just so beyond words.
“Like so, so big. This is why the news of his passing is so hard for so many people because of the impact that he had. I just can’t say enough about the type of person that he was, not just coaching but just in general.”
Jago was still a fixture when he retired. He’d help out in the Barrons summer softball camps and, of course, attend games, positioning himself in the middle where he could watch both JV and varsity on adjacent fields along with his wife.
Murgittroyd recalled that Jago’s head “almost swiveled just kind of going back and forth and back and forth.”
Despite her now being a peer, years after playing, Murgittroyd could never call him Stew.
“I would still call him coach,” she said. “I would not call him anything else. He’s my coach. I will always call him coach.”
Email: amendlowitz@njpressmedia.com
Andy Mendlowitz is a sports reporter for MyCentralJersey.com. To get unlimited access to local news throughout Central Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Former longtime Woodbridge and Colonia softball coach Stew Jago dies
