Class of 2025

Doug Klein,

Ida Crown Jewish Academy

Coach

 

For 33 seasons, Doug Klein has served as the head coach of the Ida Crown Jewish Academy wrestling team. Because of the school’s challenging curriculum and its abiding by Jewish law and the Sabbath, his teams have been unable to compete from Friday evening until Saturday evening, but the Skokie school has had a competitive program with tough wrestlers.

Doug is from Tidewater, Virginia, the home of the Granby School of Wrestling. He wrestled 98 pounds and 112 pounds at Western Branch High School in Chesapeake, Va. He was a hard worker and joined the cross country team in order to prepare for wrestling season. He won the Most Dedicated Wrestler Award his senior year.

Following high school, Doug attended The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He walked onto the wrestling team and spent countless hours in the wrestling room and learned technique and wrestling strategies along the way. As a student, he was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship and a member of several academic honor societies. After graduating, Doug attended law school, also at William & Mary.

Doug joined a law firm in downtown Chicago, but missed the sport and the team dynamic. With a stroke of good fortune in 1992, he stumbled into the head coaching job at Ida Crown. At the time, the team was a second year program, one largely considered a joke by the larger student body. When Doug took the job, the team had a dozen wrestlers.

Applying the discipline and team ethos in which he was cultivated, the team had only four wrestlers for his second season as head coach. The team has grown from there. At one point, approximately one third of the boys in the school (out of 250) were on the wrestling team.

Over the years, Doug has amassed a dual meet record of 209-315. Ida Crown has produced a number of regional champions and dozens of sectional qualifiers. Four Ida Crown wrestlers have appeared in the Class 1A state rankings - a significant achievement given the lack of regular season opportunities against other ranked competitors.

In 2007, the IHSA moved a 1A regional tournament to Saturday night so that Ida Crown could participate. The team has performed admirably in this competition, and in 2012 claimed the regional title and thereby qualifying for the state dual team title.

Since 1996, Ida Crown has participated in the Henry Wittenberg Wrestling Invitational in the New York area, a competition which serves as the national championship for Jewish high schools. Ida Crown teams have won this competition 10 times, most recently in 2025.

In 2008, Doug was named Educator of the Year by Ida Crown. After the 2024 Wittenberg Championship, the Village of Skokie designated April 4, 2024 as ‘Coach Doug Klein Day’.