NORTH SYRACUSE – Anyone who was going to follow Dave Kline as Cicero-North Syracuse High School’s varsity football coach was going to have a tough assignment, given the run of five straightSection III and regional Class AA titles the Northstars won from 2017 to 2022.
Adding to it was the way Kline’s tenure ended last fall – a suspension to quarterback Jaxon Razmovski and other events that led Kline to resign just before the sectional final, where C-NS lost to eventual state champion Christian Brothers Academy.
But a months-long search ended Monday night when the North Syracuse Board of Education approved the appointment of Jim Ryan, who moves to the Northstars after two seasons as head coach at Bishop Ludden.
Though Ryan’s head-coaching experience is not as deep as it was for Kline, who won sectional titles at Henninger before moving to C-NS, he has spent two decades in the coaching ranks getting ready for this assignment.
Ryan’s formative years were in the Rochester area, first at Victor High School, then at St. John Fisher College in Pittsford, from where he graduated in 2000.
Moving to Central New York a year later, Ryan, in 2001, spent a season at Cato-Meridian before a four-year stint as an assistant at Bishop Grimes, progressing from there to college assistant jobs at Morrisville State and Hobart over the course of a decade.
Yet Ryan did not lose his ties to Section III, returning in 2016 and, for the next five years, running the athletic department at Manlius Pebble Hill, only to leave that job and go into sales and marketing.
When Bishop Ludden needed a head coach after Matt Rogers’ retirement, Ryan went back to the sidelines in 2022. He led a combined Ludden/Syracuse Academy of Science side to a 6-2 record in his first year and a 4-5 mark last fall.
And now it’s C-NS, where Ryan said that he will continue the program’s emphasis on power up front and speed all over the field on both offense and defense, regardless of whether he keeps the Northstars’ current group of assistant coaches or goes in another direction.
