A New England Tiger for Life – The Dickinson Press

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NEW ENGLAND — Daryl Jung has bled orange and black his entire life. He grew up in the New England area his entire life, was a student-athlete at the school, became a teacher and a coach, and for the past 53 years has been serving as the athletic director.
 Now Jung will be stepping aside to make room for a fresh face.
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“I think the longest longevity is like eight years of all the rest of the ADs. To have something go that long is kind of unheard of,” Jung said. “You gotta give credit to the community, to all the parents, all the players, all the coaches for us to have decent programs.”
 Jung was hired as a basketball coach in 1972 and coached at the junior high and elementary level for 33 years. Two years later after he stepped foot on campus, he became the athletic director after the previous AD was diagnosed with an illness.
Throughout his lengthy career, he has seen sports at the school grow tremendously.
In the early years of his tenure, New England had to co-op with other schools in the surrounding area to compete in athletics. They had lots of success, appearing in multiple state tournaments and winning numerous district championships.
As a student-athlete n December 1966, he posted up 42 points without a single three-pointer, which is a school record he has held for the past 55 years.
His first year as AD had some bumps in the road, but his mindset to push through those hiccups was simple.
“If you have that type of personality, you want to be able to step up and take on the challenges and do the best you can. I’ve done this for the kids all my life,” Jung said. “It’s not for me, it’s not for any awards or anything like this, or any recognition. I do it for them and for Tiger Nation.”
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Some of the challenges he faces now are student involvement and making sure the athletes are staying with their teams. There has been a decrease in participation over the past few years, especially with their basketball program.
“You gotta be competitive enough to hang on to our programs. We have had [instances] where we lost them and we had to go co-op and it’s not an ideal thing to be in a co-op and travel every day and stuff like that. We got kids that live several miles out of town,” Jung said. “So it’s a hardship and you really gotta admire those parents that allow those kids to do that every day.”
Meanwhile, the AD position itself has changed tremendously since Jung started. He’s had to juggle more responsibilities, such as travel schedules and implementing new technology that is being made for coaches.
For Jung himself, he has had to balance the responsibilities of an athletic director with other jobs. He was the junior high basketball and track coach for 33 years and has been a part-time science teacher with his brother Gary. The two of them have spent a combined 109 years in New England.
Despite spending lots of time away from his family, they have been right by his side every step of the way.
“Sports and stuff has become our life. We follow my grandkids whenever they’re at Dickinson High and here at New England [High]. We just go to everything. So that’s going to be the hard thing to do when I step away from it,” Jung said. “If you’ve only been in there a few years, they just don’t understand what it would be like to be in there that long.”
It’s also the support from the people around him that drive him to be successful.
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“It’s been a good run. The community has really been supportive. And of course, to be successful as an AD, the one thing you gotta do is you can’t overreact to certain things. I think a lot of [other athletic directors] do,” Jung said. “I know a lot, a lot of people and they’ve all been good at being supportive, and even to this day when they come to an event, or I go to an event, they stop and talk, and they have their respect.”
In 2011, Jung was inducted into the North Dakota Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association (NDIAAA) hall of fame at the Jamestown Civic Center. It was a big honor for him to receive such recognition among other ADs that were equality deserving.
Jung will still be around during the 2025-26 school year to help guide the incoming AD, so his career is not quite over yet. It is going to be difficult for him to officially walk away from what he describes as “his life”. 58 of his 76 years of living have been spent at New England Public Schools.
“That’s a good deal to get someone in to see how things are going here in New England compared to some of the other [schools]. So apparently a lot of things have gone well when you don’t have a change in 50 years,” Jung said. “We’d like to kind of keep what we’ve done in the past here and kind of get the same type of procedures to keep going here.”
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