Jared Jensen
The Paducah Sun
July 14, 2023
Used with permission.
As the new athletic director for Paducah Tilghman High School, Jay Burgett says he’s ready to build upon the winning tradition of the Blue Tornado. Burgett comes to Paducah with a plethora of both coaching and AD experience and with experienced mentors to lean on, he is excited to get started.
He joins the Blue Tornado as a former high school football player in Mayfield and continued his playing career at Murray State. He began his work in education at Ohio County, then moved to Hopkins County where he was an assistant football coach for six seasons and was head coach for six seasons. As head coach he led Madisonville-North Hopkins High School to the state 4A semifinals in 2019. He moved to Henderson County in 2021 to become associate athletic director and associate head football coach.
“Tradition in athletics is obviously a huge thing when you talk about Paducah Tilghman High School,” Burgett said on what attracted him to the job. “The athletic accomplishments of a school of this nature was very appealing to me.”
As a young man growing up just 30 minutes South of Tilghman, he is very familiar with the school and programs, having played them regularly on the football field.
“I spent a lot of time playing against Paducah Tilghman,” he continued. “The early 2000’s era of Paducah Tilghman as well as Mayfield and pretty much all sports in western Kentucky was very high back then and a lot of schools produced a lot of good athletes in that era.”
Of course, this current era of western Kentucky athletics is also producing good athletes and Burgett is excited to once again be apart of the process.
Being in his new position just a short while, Burgett has hit the ground running, doing a deep dive into Blue Tornado athletics win-loss records, coaching durations and much more. His goal is to figure out what has worked in the past to ensure PT continues to thrive across all sports for years to come.
His research has found that Tilghman has won a total of 55 state championships across the board not including individual championships won at the track and field and wrestling level. The wrestling program is the most recent team to bring home the most state hardware just last season.
“The past two schools I’ve been at haven’t had wrestling programs, Henderson just recently started theirs, but Coach Livingston has been a huge resource for me understanding how they are succeeding,” Burgett said. “And we want to make sure that success doesn’t go unnoticed, by putting up some banners and other things to celebrate their state championships and also encourage the rest of our athletics to go chase their own championships.”
As a former Mayfield Cardinal, Burgett will be hanging up his red shirts and pull out his blue shirts. At least at rivalry games. The Blue Tornado will host the Cardinals for the first home game of the season on September 3 and he believes his love for both schools will be just fine because of the amount of respect between the two schools and the rivalry.
“Respect. The respect between the two programs is huge,” he said. “It’s a big rivalry but there has always been respect. So, if there was one school where the people of Mayfield would understand me being at it would be here because we have a lot of the same culture.”
Burgett was the first group of athletes to play all four years of high school for Coach Joe Morris. In his senior year, the Cardinals put on an impressive 15-0 season to win the state championship, and now as an athletic director just up the road from his former coach, Burgett says he looks forward to bouncing ideas off the fellow athletic director and being back in the area around him.
“Coach Joe has been transformational for me as a student athlete, as an educator and as a coach,” Burgett said. “We have kept in contact over the years and we will continue to talk, in fact he was one of the first people I called after I accepted the position. He means a lot to me so that September 1 game is going to be a big one on multiple levels.”
As for the immediate future, Burgett is excited to see all fall sports get underway. With the dead period over, he will be meeting with all of the schools coaches to see how he can best help their individual programs succeed this upcoming season.