By Cricket Desmarais
Jennifer Noah swings a whistle, the twin of it inked on her inner wrist with the words “grit” and “grace” tattooed in cursive above it — just a few of the many colorful tattoos visible on the striking, fit, blond who is every bit of her 5 feet 10 inches. Invisible to most are the words on her ribs — “She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future” — a proverb that seems a perfect fit for the physical education teacher at The Basilica School of Saint Mary Star of the Sea, where 400 students lovingly call her “Coach JJ.”
“Yesterday I had a second-grade class and had said ‘Well, that’s impossible,’ and this little girl goes, ‘But Coach JJ, you tell us nothing is impossible.’ And I went, ‘Oh, you’re right. You’re right. I do say that.’”
Noah is also the school’s cross-country coach.
“It’s my jam,” she says about the 50- and100-mile runs she does for fun. “It’s not until maybe mile 20 that I settle down. I’m like, Okay, now I’m here. Something about long-distance running just does it for me.”
Like most athletes, she starts her day early, rising at 4:30 to attend to the family “zoo” — saltwater fish tanks, two Maine coon cats, and a 120-pound mastiff — drop her son at Key West High School, then head to the Catholic school with her daughter, 10, who is a student there. Noah creates the curriculum for the twice-weekly PE classes, unbound by standardized testing pressure.
“My focus is heavy on stress relief and the connection between breath and movement that’s so important. Some of them say, ‘I know how to breathe.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, but are you taking a full breath? When you get scared or frustrated or are taking a test, you don’t take deep breaths. You hold your breath.’ It’s part of my passion to teach them how to breathe properly.”
Originally a Florida girl, Noah moved from Jacksonville to Atlanta, where she played guitar in an all-girl punk band called “Man’s Ruin,” and owned a pizza restaurant in Decatur. When she and her husband, a UPS pilot, realized they were working “nonstop, just passing each other in the night,” a change was in order. They started looking in the Upper Keys in 2000, then inched farther down until they hit Big Pine.
“At first, the energy seemed kind of junky to me. But then I realized I’m looking at everybody’s backyards, that their front yards face the ocean. Maybe I was just reading the place all wrong. Later, we get on this driveway and I just start crying. I could not stop. I hadn’t even seen the house, but it was the energy there. I fell in love and knew it was where I wanted to live. My husband made it happen. He makes things happen like that.”
They moved to that home in Big Pine Key in 2001. Then, unexpectedly, Noah became depressed.
“I was drinking on my dock. I didn’t know I was depressed. I was living in paradise, but had no direction, no purpose.”
Six years in, she stumbled across a Boys & Girls Club ad that said, “Do you want to make a difference?” Noah did.
She got a counselor job for Saturday night teen dances, and “something just cracked open.” When they opened a camp in Big Pine, she worked there until she got pregnant in 2006, “which was sort of out of the blue.”
“The club kids threw me a baby shower,” she says “I knew no adults in all of the Keys.”
Noah landed on The Basilica School’s radar when her son, now 14, was a student there, and she was eager to change the school lunch program.
“I’m sure Principal Robert Wright wanted to laugh me out of the office. But he listened, then offered me a job in the lunchroom. I’m thinking, ‘Restaurant work, I’m not going back into the kitchen, not even for my kids.’”
Shortly after, she was back in Wright’s office to get reading support for her son, who is dyslexic. At the end of the meeting, he offered her the PE position that had recently become vacant.
“Took me two seconds. I said, ‘Yes, I’ll take it.’ I was a yoga teacher. I had no idea. I’d never taught anywhere before. And he goes, ‘Wow, you don’t even want to think about it?’ I was like, ‘Nope.’ Everything in my life had come together for this job. It was seamless, perfect. I just jumped right in. And it’s been that way ever since. It really has.”
Quick Q&A
Something you’d like to learn? French. My son is taking French at the high school and we have dreams of going back to France and speaking fluently.
Playlist for the 100-mile run? Anything punk rock or Billie Holiday to Big Mama Thornton after mile 40.
Funniest thing a kid has ever said or asked you? “Are all teachers related to Jesus? And what does he think about all your tattoos?”
Words to live by? It’s all so impermanent. Check yourself, Sis.
