In a seismic high school football coaching move, Roy High head football coach Fred Fernandes stepped down from that post on Tuesday after 11 seasons at the helm of his alma mater.

Fernandes will head to Bingham High to be offensive coordinator, he told the Standard-Examiner on Wednesday morning. There, he will link up with his former defensive coordinator at Roy, Eric Jones, who was hired as the Miners’ head coach in January.

The move was somewhat unexpected given how long Fernandes had been at Roy, but was also not entirely surprising.

When Jones — also a Roy High alumnus — accepted the Bingham head coaching job after years as Roy’s defensive coordinator, he spoke with Fernandes, a teacher at Roy High, about the possibility of joining him at Bingham.

It seemed Fernandes would stay at Roy, but he stepped down Tuesday to take the role at Bingham, a move that was announced early Wednesday morning by Bingham’s principal, who indicated Fernandes had also accepted a teaching position at the school.

“The first reason is Eric asked, and it was a really appealing thought,” Fernandes said Wednesday. “Eleven years ago when I hired him at Roy, we were talking I said ‘Hey, I’ll be the head coach for a while and when you get your head job I’ll come help you,’ totally thinking that’d be at Roy.

“It’s tough to tell your kids you’re leaving, but it’s just a great opportunity for me.”

Fernandes also indicated a better pay schedule in Jordan School District is a factor, as is ninth-grade football. The Jordan district doesn’t have ninth-grade football at the junior-high level, which has long been a point of contention between Weber district high school football coaches, junior high coaches and district officials.

Fernandes departs Roy with a 77-39 overall record since taking over in 2011 — a win total trailing only Ernie Jacklin, who went 79-44-1 as Roy head coach from 1970-81, a span highlighted by the Royals’ triumph in the 1981 state championship.

The Royals had a brief stint of success from 1986-91 but struggled for the next two decades before Fernandes got to town. After Roy’s shared region title in 1991, the Royals went 39-152 before Fernandes’ hire ahead of the 2011 season.

In his fourth season at Roy, the Royals won their first region championship since 1991, finishing the 2014 season 12-1 with their only loss coming to Timpview in the 4A state championship game. They went on to win region championships in the next three even years: 2016, 2018 and 2020, with a 5A state semifinal appearance in 2018.

Fernandes was previously head football coach at Northridge and Woods Cross high schools for 12 seasons before his hire at Roy, with an 87-43 record between those two schools and three consecutive state championships at Northridge from 2000-02. Before that, he was an assistant coach at Morgan and Fremont high schools.

Fernandes said he’s “chomping at the bit” for a “new adventure” at Bingham, where one can expect the Miners’ offense to look similar to what Fernandes’ teams have run over the years.

“They want to run the dang football, they’ve got an offensive line that wants to run the football, they got a couple of good backs … we’re going to run the football,” he said.

The future of Roy’s program is somewhat murky. In the short term, the Royals are looking for a new head coach, defensive coordinator and offensive coordinator with a couple months to go until summer workouts start.

In the long term, Roy could potentially experience a downturn once the new high school in Taylor opens in a few years, which will take some students from Roy’s boundaries.

A similar thing happened in south Davis County when Farmington High opened in 2018, eventually causing a downturn in some sports at Viewmont, where most of the Farmington students attended pre-2018.

Brett Hein contributed to this report.