A well-known Cambridge high school teacher and football coach, who built a legacy leading Jacob Hespeler Secondary School to eight consecutive championship wins, is calling it a career.

After 31 years spent at the school, Greg White has retired.

“He’s so known for being an outstanding football coach,” said Jill Macallum, a leadership and physical education teacher at JHSS. “But he’s an outstanding teacher too.”

White, known to his friends and students as “Whitey,” is credited for building what is now an elite athletic program at the high school.

He says he was inspired by seeing high school football culture during trips to the United States.

“You drive by a big campus . . . and you think ‘that’s a nice looking college, or university’, and you realize it’s a high school . . . and you think to yourself, ‘why can’t we have that?’” said White.

White knew more infrastructure was needed in order for local athletes to thrive, so he got to work raising money.

“We had a gala dinner, where we had the real Rudy from the movie Rudy come in and speak,” he said. “We did a lot of Bingos, knocked on a lot of doors.”

The football program has since produced multiple Ontario University Athletics and Canadian Football League players.

That success started in the gym White built.

“He made everybody better around him,” said Macallum. “He made kids want to come to school and our powerlift program soared.”

Macallum added the kids wanted to be in the program to learn from White.

As for his advice for future teachers, White says you have to have a true passion for the job.

“If you were positively impacted by a teacher, you are probably getting into it for the right reasons,” he explained.

Anthony Maggiacomo says “Whitey” was that teacher for him.

“He was my phys ed teacher here,” Maggiacomo said. “I was a student at Jacob as well.”

For the past ten years, Maggiacomo and White have been colleagues.

“The first couple years were fun, or funny I should say, because I still look up to him as a father figure,” said Maggiacomo.

“Greg is Jacob Hespeler,” said co-worker Nancy Spreitzer. “He embodies everything that a teacher should be. He’s reliable, he’s accountable, he just makes everybody around him better.”

White’s new game plan is to enjoy life in the country, refurbish an old bar to include a weight room, and start building a new chapter.

“Summing it up, it was just meeting great people along the way,” said White of his teaching career.

And he intends to keep the same mantra he’s always told his students.

“High, high, high expectations. But at the same time we gotta have fun.”