Irvington assistant football coach Nhemie Theodore, middle, beams while holding the championhship trophy after the Blue Knights defeated Northern Highlands in the North, Group 4 state regional championship at Rutgers. At left if IHS athletic director assistant Gwen Murray of the IHS athletic department and at right is IHS alumnus Cynthia Roth.
IRVINGTON, NJ — Nhemie Theodore has been named the new Irvington High School girls track-and-field head coach for the upcoming spring season.
A 2004 IHS graduate, Theodore has been an assistant football coach for the successful IHS Blue Knights for the past few years. During his playing days at IHS, he was a defensive lineman and signed with Division 1 University of Minnesota.
Theodore will coach in place of longtime IHS girls head coach Barnes Reid, who will miss the spring season due to medical reasons. Reid is expected to return next year.
Meanwhile, Theodore’s sister, Brionna Singleton, will be the boys IHS track-and-field head coach this spring. Singleton was a standout high-jumper at Newark Tech before graduating in 2014. In her junior season, Singleton won the high jump title at the 2013 New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association’s state outdoor Group 1 championships and then took sixth place in the same event at the NJSIAA’s Meet of Champions.
Singleton replaces Marvin Hawkins, who left IHS last June after just under 29 years. Hawkins compiled 473 dual-meet wins, which is the most wins in any sport in IHS history. He also had 25 team championships, including 14 state championships, 22 All-Americans, 305 individual championships on the conference, county and state levels; and two Olympics.
The Olympians were Paul Tucker and Malcolm Watts, both 1994 IHS graduates who represented Guyana in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Tucker also competed in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.
Hawkins was named the 2005 outdoor boys track coach of the year by the Star-Ledger and named all-area coach of the year 13 times by Worrall Community Newspapers. He was also named Essex County coach of the year six times in cross-country, indoor track-and-field and outdoor track-and-field.
Hawkins is currently the head cross-country and track coach at Hunter College. He led the Hunter College men’s and women’s cross-country teams to the CUNY Athletic Conference championships this past fall.
Reid has more than 40 years of coaching experience. In 2019, he was inducted in both the IHS Athletic Hall of Fame and Newark Hall of Fame. Reid was a star athlete at Barringer High School, Essex County College and Seton Hall University. In 1979, Reid was the first African-American health and physical education teacher hired by the Irvington Board of Education. Reid has coached numerous individual and team champions on the conference, county, state and national levels.
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