Rock Falls has its new football coach.

Steve Disler will take over the Rockets, his hiring approved Wednesday by the Rock Falls Board of Education. The hiring comes 3 months after athletic director Rich Montgomery announced he would not be back on the sidelines for the 2018 season.

Disler takes over a team still searching for its first playoff appearance since 1992 and first winning season since 2009, having gone winless three times since 2011, but winning three games each in 2016 and 2017.

“I had heard that there were some very good athletes, but they’ve been down,” Disler said. “It’s a sleeping giant. We’ve got to get the ball rolling.”

Disler will coach football and teach math, as Rock Falls was looking for a math teacher as well.

“We really liked what we saw with the math part, and it happened that he’s a football coach, so it worked out really well for us,” Montgomery said.

Disler comes to Rock Falls after one season as the head coach at Northwestern High School in Kokomo, Indiana, where the Tigers went 4-6, finishing 0-4 in the Hoosier Conference East Division and losing 28-27 to Blackford in the first round of the IHSAA postseason.

He was part of coaching staffs at Farmington, IVC and Richwoods. His tenure as an assistant coach at Richwoods included a state runner-up campaign in 2011 in Class 6A.

Now in his new job, he already is compiling a long to-do list of things he wants to accomplish to help build the program at Rock Falls.

“You’ve got to assemble a staff, guys who are going to get this program going in the right direction and teach kids football,” he said. “The other aspect is getting the kids to buy in and believe that they can be something special. I think the third piece of it is getting the community to rally behind it and support them in any way possible.”

Disler is still in Indiana for another week with Northwestern still in school, but will soon be headed west. He has offseason work planned for June 4.

“During that time, we’re going to talk about our core values, and we’ll start working on weights and then speed and agility stuff,” he said.

“I think he’s going to have a lot of expectations,” Montgomery said. “I’ve seen his summer schedule, which is equal to what we were trying to do, if not a tad more. He’s going to work hard to get the kids to buy in. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of Xs and Os changes; most teams are running spread or pistol, that’s pretty universal, that’s what I anticipate him doing. I think he’s going to hit the ground running, and he’s going to expect the kids to do the same thing.”

Though he’s coming into a program that has thrown the ball a lot in recent years, Disler said he plans to build a game plan around the skills of the players he has.

“If we’re big and strong up front and have a good running back, we’ll run as much as possible,” he said. “If we have a quarterback with a good arm, we’ll throw. The best teams put the kids in the best situations.”

Disler file

College: Michigan State

High school: Eaton Rapids (Mich.)

Head coach: Northwestern (Kokomo, Indiana), 2017

Record: 4-6

Offensive coordinator: Farmington, 2015-16

Freshman coach: IVC 2013-14

JV receivers and secondary coach: Richwoods: 2011-12

Student teacher, receivers coach: Holt (Mich.) 2010