From left to right: Rufus Pipkins (Ypsilanti), Craig Jobe (Huron), Ken Koenig (Dexter), Jari Brown (Pioneer) and Todd Pennycuff (Whitmore Lake).

Graphic by Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com

An offseason full of change will bring a crop of new faces to the sidelines of Ann Arbor area high school football fields this fall.

Of the 12 high school football programs in Washtenaw County, five will have new coaches for the 2013 season. They come with varying ranges of experience, from several years as a head coach to a few as an assistant. They take over all types of situations, from playoff teams to winless teams.

2013 ANNARBOR.COM HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL PREVIEW

Ready for the high school football season? Be sure to check out AnnArbor.com's football preview section on newsstands Sunday. Elements of the package will be rolled out on the following schedule online:
Thursday:

• Players to watch

Friday:

• Five new coaches take over reins of Washtenaw County football teams

Sunday:

• Team-by-team glance at SEC Red
  
• Team-by-team glance at SEC White
  
• Team-by-team glance at Washtenaw County's "other" squads

And each new coach inherits his own unique set of circumstances and challenges.

The new ranks include fresh faces at both Pioneer and Huron, who are both replacing coaches who resigned following a season that included a postgame brawl between the two teams last October.

Jari Brown will take over for Paul Test at Pioneer, with a team that won a share of the Southeastern Conference Red Division title last year, and hasn’t had a losing record since 2007.

Brown comes to Pioneer after spending time at Lincoln, Huron and Chelsea. The last four years were spent at Chelsea under one of the area’s longest-tenured coaches in Brad Bush.

From Bush, Brown said he learned how to stay organized and be a step ahead.

“Organization is a big thing. I just think being organized, being on top of everything, and the one thing he taught me is you’ve always got to be one step ahead of everybody else -- the players, the coach, everybody,” Brown said. “So you’ve got to be one step ahead of everybody so they follow you. If I can take anything from Brad and just kind of what he’s all about, organization is the key.”

On the other side of Ann Arbor, Craig Jobe walks into a markedly different situation at Huron, a team with just one win in the last two years.

Jobe, a Huron teacher, said his first priority was to increase the participation in his program, and spent the spring recruiting players in the building. He now has 35 out for the varsity squad.

“It’s just important to have some depth and have some competition at different places,” Jobe said.

Included on the list of new coaches is Rufus Pipkins, who will technically be a first-year coach, even though he’s coaching several of the same players he did last year.

Pipkins, who coached Willow Run for the last eight seasons, takes over the football program at Ypsilanti Community Schools, the result of the merger between Ypsilanti and Willow Run.

Pipkins said his team is about 75 percent former Ypsilanti players and 25 percent former Willow Run players. For some of the former Ypsilanti players, Pipkins is their third coach in as many years. Pipkins said his presence in the community over the years means he has a connection with many of them, whether or not he coached them last year or not.

“Some of the kids will come up to me and say ‘Hey coach Ru, my dad knows you’ or ‘My uncle knows you,’” Pipkins said.

Perhaps the most tumultuous situation is Ken Koenig’s in Dexter. Koenig is Dexter’s fourth head coach since the beginning of last season: Brian Baird resigned three games into last season, Ryan Fisher coached the remainder of it, and Mike Glennie took the reins for a month this season before resigning.

The first job for Koenig is to give a measure of stability to a program that needs it.

“Our fear was that once they, with the coaching switches and the changes, that kids would just lose faith,” Koenig said. “So we’ve been able to garner enough support and rally with the kids enough and we’ve got the trust.”

And in Whitmore Lake, Todd Pennycuff takes over for Barry Pierson, who resigned after three years. The Trojans won two games last year and were winless in 2010. Pennycuff comes to Whitmore Lake from Novi, and the South Lyon native said he looked forward to the chance to rebuild a small-town football program.

“This was a job that I was interested in years ago and decided I would try to get it and was fortunate enough to get it,” said Pennycuff, who applied for the job in 2006 after Ed Schindler left. “It’s something I always wanted to do, so it worked out.”

Kyle Austin covers sports for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at kyleaustin@annarbor.com or 734-623-2535. Follow him on Twitter @KAustin_AA.