Ellsworth Community College (JC - IA) has placed head football coach Matt White on leave, sources tell FootballScoop. We're told it is a paid leave, and is currently for an undetermined amount of time.
The move sidelines White three games into his third season at the Iowa Falls JuCo program. The reason for the leave has not been made public, and the school has not announced who will run the program in his absence.
White knows the junior college world from the inside. He played his own college ball at Iowa Central, the two-year program in Fort Dodge, before finishing his playing days at Division II Sioux Falls. From there he built a coaching path that ran straight through the JuCo ranks, with coordinator and head coaching stops at Los Angeles Valley College, a run as associate head coach and defensive coordinator at Kentucky Christian, and four seasons on staff at UVA-Wise, the Division II program in southwest Virginia, where he ran the defense and coached the safeties.
The Ellsworth job was a rebuild from the jump, and White said as much the day he was hired. "I've got a big task in front of me, I've got to revamp and revitalize a program that has historically been one of the premiere programs in the country," he told the Times Citizen in December of 2023. "Starting day one I need to build a program that is built on accountability, respect, and trust. I'm going to start recruiting and evaluating Iowa talent first and branch out from there."
What he inherited backed up the size of the job. "I took over one of the most rundown programs in America," White told kmaland.com this past offseason. "The cupboard was beyond bare."
The numbers tell the story of where he started in Iowa Falls. His first team in 2024 had 23 players on it and went 1-10. Year two, he leaned hard into the portal and brought in 48 transfers, and the Panthers climbed to 3-7 in 2025. Heading into this fall, the stated goal inside the building was the program's first winning season in more than a decade.
With just a handful of scholarships and a few part-time coaches, the rebuild is a significant uphill battle facing White.
The start to this season showed promise, but that quickly dissolved with the results in weeks two and three. Ellsworth opened with a 50-6 win over Minnesota West Community and Technical College in Week 1, then ran into the teeth of the JuCo schedule. The Panthers dropped a 76-3 decision to national power Hutchinson and fell 63-7 to Iowa Central. The 1-2 start is the backdrop for the news now coming out of Iowa Falls.
JuCo programs at this level run on thin staffs and thinner margins, and a head coach going on leave midseason puts a heavy load on whoever is left to hold the operation together, from game planning to recruiting to simply keeping a young roster pointed in the right direction.
For now, the known facts are narrow. White is on leave for the year per sources, the program has not detailed why, and there is no word yet on an interim arrangement. We will update this story as we learn more.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.