This fall, the sidelines at Summit High School’s Climax Molybdenum Field will look a little bit different.

Earlier this summer, Summit head football coach James Wagner announced his move to Traverse City, Michigan, and a few weeks later, head boys and girls soccer coach Jotwan Daniels announced his own departure from the school.

Daniels has served as the head coach for the girls soccer program for the last four seasons (2020-2023) and has been the head coach of the boys program since the fall 2021 season. 

While being a driven and passionate head coach of two sports programs at Summit High School, Daniels also displayed his love for teaching by being a social studies teacher and the International Baccalaureate (IB) program coordinator. 

Although Daniels’ passion and energy on the Summit sideline may give the impression that he is young and full of unlimited energy, Daniels has been a full-time teacher and coach for the last 20 years. 

“Don’t let the young face fool you. I have been doing this quite a while,” Daniels said. “Maybe not so much in this community, but this would’ve been my 20th year going back into the classroom and coaching in any capacity. Summit gave me my first head coaching job, but I have been coaching almost every year that I have been teaching.”

Coaching and teaching year after year in the secondary school setting can start to take its toll and after 20 years of serving as a leader for young students and athletes, Daniels said he felt like his career path was starting to lead him to new opportunities.

“While I love coaching, and coaching is a huge aspect of who I am and what I do as a professional, I also know that I am an educator first,” Daniels said. “In terms of my career, I started to go down a path of doing what I do not at the secondary level anymore, but perhaps at the post-secondary level.”

Feeling like it was the right time to make the jump to teaching at the post-secondary level, Daniels chose to accept the assistant dean of instruction job opening at Colorado Mountain College. 

Daniels knew that accepting the job offer would potentially jeopardize his role as head coach of the Summit soccer programs, but felt like it was the right move at the right time in terms of his career of being an educator. 

“I have a lot of classes that I am responsible for that are run at night,” Daniels said. “A lot of my meetings or a lot of the time that I would be spending observing my faculty and supporting them would most likely start to occur in the time period that would conflict with coaching. Unfortunately, I could not come up with a model that met everybodies’ needs. I had to make the difficult decision to step away from the program as its head coach.”

In his new role at Colorado Mountain College, Daniels will not only work to find adjunct faculty members to teach courses, but will also train the faculty in order to ensure they are delivering the highest level of instruction to students at both the Dillon and Breckenridge Colorado Mountain College campuses.

Daniels is excited for his new role in a new setting, but can’t help feeling sentimental about his time as a teacher and coach at Summit High School.

Over the last few seasons, Daniels has instituted a culture of success within both the boys and girls soccer programs. 

This past season specifically both soccer teams had widespread success with the boys soccer team making it to the state semifinal soccer match, the girls soccer team getting to six wins on the season for the first time since the spring of 2018 and three girls soccer players being named all-state.

However, it is not the success of the teams that Daniels will remember the most. Instead, Daniels will savor the relationships he was able to foster both on the field and in the classroom. 

“The relationships I was able to form not only within my team by way of my staff and players, but also the relationships that I held in the building as a teacher and a coach,” Daniels said. “The relationships I was able to develop within the community from the parents of my players to the supporters of the program.That was really the hardest part to come to grips with. Allowing that to no longer be part of my career anymore.”

Ultimately, Daniels feels fortunate that he was able to come to Summit and turn his dreams for a soccer program into a reality. With the buying in of players, support from teachers and coaches, Daniels achieved his vision of success for both programs.

“They bought everything I was selling them and they helped me live this dream that became a reality,” Daniels said. They were a huge reason why the program became a success. I was just fortunate to be named head coach during those years.” 

With a firm foundation beneath both programs, Daniels hopes both teams can continue to excel over the next few seasons. This fall, the boys team will be spearheaded by Daniels’ longtime assistant — JJ Bosgraaf. 

Holding some of the same coaching values as himself, Daniels says he hopes Bosgraaf and the boys soccer program can make state playoff runs and success in the 4A Western Slope league the norm for Summit soccer. 

“I know Coach JJ is going to do a fantastic job,” Daniels said. “I couldn’t have asked for better continuity from me stepping down to my assistant now leading the program.The question now is, ‘Can we go again?’ Can what we are able to do on the boys side in the fall become the norm instead of the exception? Can we be the chased instead of always being those that are doing the chasing?”

Daniels hopes to get back into coaching later in his professional career and says he will enjoy seeing his former students and players on the pitch throughout the 2023-24 school year.