Jack Pearce
Jack Pearce is a former football player and manager of Bognor Regis Town. He is currently general manager of Bognor Regis Town and continues to serve the club after 40 years.
Career
Player and manager
Pearce arrived as a 21-year-old full back in 1970 in time for the 1970–71 season. When he joined, Bognor Regis Town was languishing in Division Two of the Sussex County League. He helped the Rocks win the Division Two and One titles in consecutive seasons with his tough-tackling defending. In 1976 Pearce was almost forced into taking the manager's job at the age of just 26 since no one else would accept the job. Bognor were bottom of the Southern League and were struggling to survive financially and had lost all their best players but Pearce managed to turn things around and as a result the job was his.
Cup competitions
Soon Pearce put together a team that dominated the Sussex non-league for years and made national headlines for their wins in the FA Cup. They won the Sussex Senior Cup five years in a row between 1980 and 1984, a unique achievement in the competition's 124-year history and reached the second round of the FA Cup three times in the space of four years. They also won the AC Delco Cup in 1987, the only time a Sussex club has won a knockout competition outside the county. The highlight of Pearce's management career was on 17 November 1984 when Bognor Regis Town beat a Swansea City side including Dean Saunders in a first round FA Cup replay. Swansea had been in the First Division just two years before. In the first tie at the Vetch Field they were unlucky to be held 1–1 but in the return leg at Nyewood Lane they won 3–1 in front of 4,500. They repeated the feat the following year and again in 1988 when they knocked out Fourth Division outfit Exeter City in the first round. Pearce led Bognor Regis Town to the second round in 1995 and guided the club to the first round on two other occasions during their heyday in the Eighties.
League form
Pearce matched his success in cup competitions with success in the league. In the season 1970–71 Bognor Regis Town returned to Division one of the Sussex County League at the first attempt and next season won the Division One title that was rewarded with a step up to the Southern League. They played in this league until 1981 when they switched to the Isthmian League where promotion to the Premier Division was achieved at the first attempt. In 1991–92 they finished in 21st place but escaped relegation due to Dagenham FC withdrawing from the league, but the following year they finished rock bottom and dropped into Division One. In 2002–03 they finally won promotion back to the Isthmian League Premier Division, and a 10th-place finish the 2003–4 season was enough to claim a place in the re-structured Conference South where the club remained until 2009. In successive seasons Bognor Regis Town finished 9th in 2004-5 (their highest league position), 12th in 2005-6 and 12th in 2006-7, under Pearce's reign.
After a poor start and a run of 2 wins, 9 defeats and 1 draw in the 2007–08 season Pearce finally brought his 30-year reign as manager at Nyewood Lane to an end. On the Sunday 21 October 2007 following a 2–2 draw at Newport County that left the Rocks second-bottom of Conference South Pearce stepped down. It subsequently turned out that during this run they had played most of the top teams but by then the reins had been passed to one of his protoges, Michael Birmingham who saved the club from relegation.[1]
The most impressive thing is that he has done it all without compromising his beliefs to the passing game in a bid to turn things around and has established Bognor's reputation as one of the most attractive teams to watch in non-league football. Even more remarkably he did it without the help of any real financial backing.[2]
"Like Shankly, Busby and Clough, the scale of Pearce's impact at Bognor will only be truly realised in years to come but there is no doubt he was one of the finest managers Sussex has ever seen".[2]
General manager
Although Pearce no longer manages the first team, he stepped down to give more attention to the day-to-day running of the club and was very busy in the club's 125th Anniversary year in 2008. Since he stepped down as team boss at Bognor, in his role at the FA he has advocated financial prudence amongst non-League clubs and Respect for match officials. In 2010 he had served the club for 40 years. Aside from the club, Pearce lives in Bognor Regis with his common-law wife Gill, and the pair also ran a newsagents shop nearby, until their retirement from the industry in 2009.
As of August 2011, he entered 42nd season with Bognor Regis Town.