Kevin Parker has very little time to get settled into his new job.

Parker’s hiring was made official by the Rock Falls school board on Wednesday, making him an alternative education teacher and the Rockets’ new football coach. He has a little over 3 weeks before August practice begins. It will be all of 44 days between his official hiring and the Rockets kicking off their first game of the season.

He was able to meet with the team on Monday, more watching practice to see what the Rockets have to work with than running it, then he stepped in more and more Tuesday and Wednesday.

“It is late, but we’re going to have to catch up,” he said. “We’re still planning what our practices are going to look like, what are we going to run.”

Job No. 1 for the Rock Falls football program is just to get players out onto the field.

“The numbers were fairly low, and I completely understand that,” Parker said. “Kids were probably upset that they lost their former coach. They were getting ready for a season and had goals and had mission statements. I don’t want to come in and change that much, because I feel the kids deserve that. If they feel family is the big thing, that’s what we’re going to push. As we transition to next year, as I catch my breath, we might look at things a bit differently, get input from kids and get input from coaches on what that next step is.”

As an assistant coach over the years, he worked with linemen, and wants to build from the line out at Rock Falls.

“The way I look at football programs is that you’ve got to have the trenches taken care of,” Parker said. “Before you even start to throw the football around, you have to have the fundamentals down. Kids need to know how to tackle, block, hold onto the football. That’s where I want to start. Everything from there kind of filters in.”

The other major order of business, especially in a conference like the Big Northern, is stopping other teams.

“If you can control the ball and play some defense, that’s the best thing you can do,” Parker said.

With lightning-quick speed, he was able to put together a coaching staff, pulling in a mix of people he’s worked with in the past and holdovers from Steve Disler’s staff. He was able to meet with them to sort things out.

“I also brought in the little league staff,” Parker said. “They’re ready to go. They want some direction to put this whole thing together, which is impressive. We just went around the room saying ‘what do you think we need to do’ and it was defense, defense, defense.”

For the past 8 years, he’s been on the administrative side of things, going from serving as principal at Prophetstown and Sherrard to serving as the athletic director at LaSalle-Peru.

But in all of his stops as an administrator, the coaching ranks kept calling to him.

“When I was at LaSalle-Peru, obviously a bit closer to the coaching realm, saw the athletes, smelled it, [the coaching bug] was there,” he said. “That job at LaSalle-Peru High School, what it seemed to do was pull me away from kids more and more. I thrive off of working with kids, especially the at-risk kids.”

He left LaSalle-Peru in March and started looking at administrative positions, as well as a handful of teaching jobs. It was in July when Disler left Rock Falls to take the football coaching job in Rockridge, leaving an opening in Rock Falls that Parker felt he needed to jump at.

Now, he’s back on the field, whistle in hand, leading a team through drills.

“I had the opportunity to bring in some of those line drills on Tuesday, and it just started flowing,” Parker said. “It’s like it was never gone. That really hit home to me and got me starting to think about things.”

He played at Geneseo under Vic Boblett, and saw the opening stages of what would become a great era of Leafs football.

“One of the biggest things with my experiences in Geneseo was you knew the commitment from everybody,” Parker said. “You saw the consistency from year to year, all the way even down to the little league. I felt everything was always done the right way. I shared as an administrator, especially when I was an athletic director, was these guys were some of the most qualified, most intense coaches ever, not one cuss word that I ever heard from fifth grade through twelfth grade. Those are life lessons that I want to teach our kids.”

At Orion, Parker coached under Bob Mitton with the wrestling program. Mitton was inducted into the Illinois Wrestling Coaches and Officials Association Hall of Fame in 2005, is the namesake for Orion’s wrestling invitational, and will be joining Parker’s coaching staff at Rock Falls as the defensive coordinator. Parker said that at some of the Rockets’ practices this week, he found himself and Mitton already finishing each others’ sentences.

“It just seems to be a perfect fit,” Parker said.

At Orion, he also was part of the football staff under Jason VanHoutte and Chip Filler, joining a program in 1997 that up to that point had limited success and seeing it grow into one capable of reaching the playoffs any given year.

“When I was at Orion, walked in the first day and there was one kid in the weight room,” Parker said. “That kind of told me right away what was going on there. It’s grown into a program that is a perennial playoff team. That’s something I’m very proud of.”

Parker file

High school: Geneseo

College: Western Illinois, masters from Olivet Nazarene

Assistant coach: softball, United Township; football and wrestling, Orion

Principal: Prophetstown, Sherrard

Athletic Director: LaSalle-Peru

Wife: Christy, married 24 years

Daughters: Melanie (currently a sophomore and soccer player at Augustana), Kelly (currently a senior at Geneseo)

Son: Brock (currently a sophomore at Geneseo)