Pleasantville Grad Coaching Football at RPI

2003 graduate and former Panther three-year inside linebacker Jeff Dittman on Aug. 1 officially became the defensive line coach for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy.

It’s a position he really likes to coach.

“What I like about the defensive line is the intensity that is involved in it,” Dittman said. “There is less thinking, it’s more physical. It’s just go out there and play.”

Dittman said he took the job at RPI, which opens its season in a non-league game at Alfred University at 1 p.m. Sept. 10, because he feels the school is the complete package.

“They have incredible athletic facilities, a tradition of winning and it was a chance to stay in a great league, the Liberty League, in upstate New York,” Dittman said.

The Liberty League is one that Dittman is well immersed in.

Dittman comes to RPI after a successful three-year stint at St. Lawrence University in Canton, where he was the linebackers coach after coaching the defensive line the previous two years. The highlight of that stretch came in 2010 when the Saints won the Liberty League title and advanced to the NCAA tournament.

That run to the tournament earned the Saints’ coaching staff the conference’s Coaching Staff of the Year honors.

Dittman can relate well to the college student-athlete because it wasn’t that long ago that he was one himself. He was two-time captain as a linebacker at Hartwick in Oneonta, where he also saw some time on the defensive line as well.

He played at Hartwick from 2003 to 2006 before graduating in 2007 with a B.A. in accounting.

“The best accomplishment I had at Hartwick actually came a year after I graduated when the school won the league championship,” Dittman said. “The year before when I was a senior we lost a couple of 1-point games and the group after us learned from those losses. I take great pride in the fact that the players I helped went on to win a league title.”

Dittman did get a league title of his own when he played at Pleasantville along with other numerous honors.

He earned Pleasantville’s A.J. Pittorino Award for high character, the Phil Rigano Award, the highest award for academic and athletic excellence, and the M. Beal Banks Award, which is the athletic department's award for character.

While those individual awards were meaningful, nothing meant more to Dittman than what the Panthers accomplished as a team.

“At Pleasantville, my highlight was when we played in the sectional championship game and we won the league in ’02, Dittman said. “It was the first league championship Pleasantville had won since ’91. I really had a great time playing for those guys and coach Dick Rote.”

Rote retired in 2003, winner of 191 games.

Now Dittman has a great time working with the coaching staff at RPI, which was 6-4 a year ago.

“What is great about being a coach on this staff is that it is made of up coaches with a lot of experience,” Dittman said. “You don’t have to tell anybody what to do here, the coaches here know what to do and are allowed to coach the way they want to.”

Besides fitting in with the coaches, he said he has learned in the first week of coaching practice at RPI is that the athletes there are better than one might think.

“What is great about coaching the players that we have here is that a lot of them ability wise are above the Division III level, they could’ve gone to a higher level,” Dittman said. “However, they wanted to be part of a school with a high level of academics, great facilities and great people.”

While he loves being a defensive-line coach, Dittman has even bigger plans for the future.

“I would like to be a defensive coordinator eventually and one day be a head coach at the Division III level,” Dittman said. “That’s where I see myself in the future."