Jon and Leslie Conant have been involved with Ewing sports programs for more than a decade.
Jon and Leslie Conant are a fixture in Ewing’s recreation and school sports programs.
Anyone who has gone through Ewing recreational, competitive, or high school sports programs in the last decade has probably encountered Jon or Leslie Conant. The couple have been mainstays in the area sports system for the last 11 years.
Jon started off with the Ewing Little League in 2002. He stayed there for two years and eventually made the move down Route 31 to coach the Hopewell Post 339 American Legion team. He stayed there for one year and came back to Ewing to coach the Post 314 squad, where he served as manager for three years.
This is his first year away from the team in nine years after taking a position at Immaculata University. Leslie currently coaches the Ewing High School field hockey and girls’ lacrosse teams. She kicked off her coaching career 10 years ago at Fisher Middle School.
Both, though, also take time out of their summers to run the recreation department’s summer camps. Jon sticks to baseball, while Leslie handles lacrosse and a pickup high school field hockey league.
“When we were at Trenton State, our coach used to have us help out at the high school camps,” Leslie said. “As college kids, we used to do all the waters and stuff and help out maybe in the afternoon. We used to play at night. That’s how we helped out and practiced. She always made a big deal about always giving back to what you got so much out of. Just following through with that, I got so much out of the sport, so to give sometime back was pretty important.”
For Jon, it’s about the town, too. He grew up in Ewing, and a lot of his youth coaches impacted him strongly. He wants to have that same impact on his players.
“My three biggest influences were Bill Forst, Ted Forst, and Fred Walters, who is like a second father to me,” he said. “They were all coaches. They’re the biggest part of my coaching.”
He said the best part about coaching is watching a player’s growth from that first practice to the last game of his or her career.
“I love every single minute of it,” Leslie said. “It just brings me so much happiness. To take somebody that doesn’t know much about the sport and watch them grow into an incredible athlete, into incredible young women, is the best feeling ever. It makes you proud. You encourage them to give back. Some of them have gone on to play in college and pick up programs along the way, so it’s very rewarding.”
Leslie said the two take cues from each other, both on and off the field. Both are emotional coaches, she said, but Jon is a little more “suppressed.”
“He’s a good sounding board,” she said. “When I kind of fly off the handle, he goes, ‘Oh, that’s not right.’ Nobody understands me better than Jon. He gets it. He understands if I can’t be there for something like a family thing, and vice versa. Sometimes I don’t like it and he might no like it either, but we totally understand. Hopefully, our children will see what we do and follow and kind of bring the tradition along.”
Their kids — Coors, 17, and Cameron, 15 — are both Ewing High athletes. At their lacrosse games and swim meets, though, Jon and Leslie turn off the coaching parts of their brains.
“You’re not being that parent that’s a coach,” Jon said. “The thing that we take away from coaching is with your own kids, you don’t cross that line. You let coaches coach.”
Leslie said it allows them to step back and “enjoy it on another level.”
“It’s really nice to just be the parent,” she said. “You go to their games and their meets and just enjoy it. You don’t have to worry about your decorum. That’s where we get to step away.”
Still, though, Leslie said she hopes she and her husband hope to coach “until we can’t walk anymore.”
“We don’t do it for the attention or the money or anything else,” she said. “Seeing a kid get so much out of it means so much to us. You want to see the programs continue to be successful. It kind of gives the kids pride. Seeing them wear their baseball jerseys or their field hockey sweatshirts around town, you’re like, ‘That’s one of my kids.’ It makes them really proud of where they come from. That’s really important. We love it and we enjoy it.”
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