ROCKLAND – Daryle Weiss, who guided a struggling Rockland football program back to respectability during the last six years, has resigned as the Tigers’ head coach and as the school’s athletics/activities director, effective at the end of the current school year.

Weiss cited professional reasons for the decision, in particular a planned move to southern Maine where he expects to be teaching and coaching at the high school level this fall.

“If this decision was just about football, I’d stay here forever,” said Weiss, who was in his first year as Rockland’s athletics/activities director.

When Weiss arrived in Rockland from his native New Jersey in 2001, the Rockland football program had just 28 players at the varsity level, a number that actually dropped to as low as 19 in his second season.

“There was little interest in football citywide,” he said, “so we started up a youth program and built that with a lot of help from the community, and that led to building up the numbers a the high school.”

Those increased numbers at the high school level correlated with increased success on the gridiron.

Rockland finished 5-4 in the LTC Class C ranks each of the last four years – marking the program’s first winning seasons since the late 1980s.

Last fall the Tigers suited up 51 varsity players.

“It’s been a lot of hard work by a lot of people that helped build it up,” said Weiss, who had an overall coaching record of 24-30 at Rockland. “A lot of people have put a lot of time in at the high school, the middle school and with the peewee program – the assistant coaches, parents, and most important of all, the kids.”

Weiss believes he’s leaving the Rockland football program in position to contend for the conference title next season, adding that two of his nephews who have been key players for the Tigers, Andrew Weiss and Sam Weiss, will not be following him to his next destination.

Andrew Weiss, who will be a senior at Rockland in the fall, is an All-LTC quarterback who has passed for nearly 4,000 yards and rushed for more than 2,100 yards in his first three years as the Tigers’ starting signalcaller. Sam Weiss was among the team’s leading tacklers as a freshman linebacker last season, and earned second-team All-LTC accolades.

“I think the team’s in good shape, there are a lot of good kids in the program,” said Weiss, “It isn’t the coach that makes the program, it’s the kids who strap it up and go out there and play.”

Weiss expects his teaching and coaching status for the coming year to be firmed up in the next few weeks.

Several southern Maine high schools had varsity football coaching vacancies after the 2006 season, among them Class A programs at Westbrook, Scarborough, Noble of North Berwick and Mount Ararat of Topsham.