Silkowski to step down as Railer
football coach, looks back at 10-year tenure at LCHS
[October 15, 2025]
The 2025 LCHS Railer football season will come to an end when
Lincoln plays its final game of the year October 24 in Jacksonville.
Not only will the end of that game mark the close of the season, it
will also be the end of Matt Silkowski’s 10-year tenure as head
coach for the team.
Silkowski’s wife Lauren received a promotion in her job which will
take Matt and Lauren, along with their two children Urban and
Madison, to Texas.
Click for larger image
Silkowski will depart as the third longest-tenured football coach in
the history of Railer football. He also is No. 3 in wins as head
coach of the Railers.
Silkowski’s first season as head coach of the Railers was 2016.
Prior to that, he was on the staff at Homewood-Flossmoor, serving as
sophomore head coach as well as quarterback and backs coach. The
Vikings advanced to the IHSA Class 8A quarterfinals in 2015 after
falling in the previous season 31-25 in the Class 8A state
championship game against Lincolnshire Stevenson.
In contrast, the Railer football program had gone three straight
years without a win from 2013 to 2015. So how did Silkowski make his
way from the suburbs of Chicago to Lincoln?
While on the football coaching staff at Homewood-Flossmoor, he was
teaching in an alternative education school. He said the situation
wasn’t a great fit and that the arrangement “wasn’t sustainable, so
we were using football to kind of get out.”
Silkowski said that he applied in previous years for head coaching
positions, usually at smaller schools that hadn’t had a lot of
success, to gain interviewing experience. But after his engagement
in 2014 and marriage the following year, as well as being able to
mention on his resume he was on the coaching staff of a successful
team, he began looking more seriously for a head coaching job. He
applied for the opening in Lincoln and vividly remembers being
called for a late January interview.
“I got here early like you do for a job interview,” he said. “[LCHS
principal] Mr. Bagby pulled me into his office and said, ‘Don’t give
me any bull**** that you’re going to go to the playoffs your first
year, because you’re not going to.’ And he told me there was some
talk of a conference change on the horizon, so that kind of changes
some things. Because when you looked at the schedule and you’ve got
to play SH-G and Rochester every year, that’s really hard. But then
when he told me that [about the potential conference change], that
kind of changed my mentality a little bit.”
Silkowski said he felt good following the formal interview. Todd
Poelker reached out shortly after the interview with a few follow-up
items, then Bagby contacted Silkowski and formally offered him the
job.
“It was a great opportunity for me to get out of the situation I was
in at the time,” he said. “My wife and I were both kind of sick of
the Chicagoland area, and I think we were both ready for a change.”
And quite a change it was. Silkowski moved from being on the staff
of a team that played for a state championship to a squad that
compiled an 0-27 record the three seasons prior to his arrival.
While such a shift in program statuses, what did Silkowski set as
his goal for the Railer football program?
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“Just to win a game,” he said. “I knew the superintendent had told
me, ‘You’re not going to do this right away,’ which made me feel
good, because they understand where they’re at.”
Click for larger image
Silkowski said Bagby told him the evaluation of the success of
Railer football would be based on if there was progress in building
the program. Silkowski said that, even though it was a relief
knowing his success would not be measured in how many wins and
losses the program had right away, there were still plenty of
challenges.
“It was a lot of work to do early on,” Silkowski said. “It still is.
But I just wanted to get our kids to line up correctly, play hard,
understand the game and their assignments, cut down on the turnovers
and just put together a team that looked prepared.”
In addition to the challenges accompanying a three-year drought in
victories, Silkowski did so without some of the essential tools most
high school football coaches have at their disposal.
“There wasn’t a lot of film to watch,” he said. “On the Hudl [a
video capture system used by coaches to watch recordings of their
own team as well as exchange footage with other teams], there was no
real game film on there. They had an endzone camera, but it never
worked. I spent a lot of time researching why it didn’t work; it
turns out they had the wrong camera, so we had to buy a different
camera.
“It was such a disaster; the equipment room was a nightmare with
things thrown in and no care to anything. It was just getting things
modernized and getting things where they should be.”
While the behind-the-scenes changes and upgrades were happening,
there was also the matter of improving the on-the-field product.
“We were trying to find things for our kids: what can we do to be
successful,” Silkowski said. “Trying to figure out what do we do
well and trying to build on that.”
With the building of a foundation for the program in progress, the
hope is that will translate to improvements in performance on the
football field. Part 2 of this series will look back at the
on-the-field performance of the Railers during Silkowski’s 10 years
as LCHS head coach, including his list of the Top 5 wins during his
coaching tenure.
[Loyd Kirby]
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