Holy Spirit High School announced Tuesday that Callahan will be the Spartans’ new quarterbacks coach. Callahan, who graduated from the school in 2011, is very familiar with much of the staff, having played with and graduated with some, including head coach Andrew DiPasquale and offensive line coach Rocco Tabasso.

“I am really excited,” Callahan said Tuesday. “I am excited to go back to Spirit.”

Charlie Roman, the coach when Callahan, DiPasquale and Tabasso played for the Spartans, is also an assistant. Several other Holy Spirit alumni are on the staff, too, including Nicky Hall, Rob Mancinelli and AJ Russo. Russo was the Spartans’ head coach before DiPasquale.

Callahan, who will turn 31 on June 4, said he is excited to be working with his former teammates and coaches and “be on the coaching side of things with them.”

“I feel like there really is not that ‘getting to know each other’ phase,” he said. “When you are part of a new staff, like, you are kind of feeling your way out and feeling out their system and just trying to get comfortable. There are a lot of things they do playbook-wise that I am excited about.”

During Callahan’s senior year, the Spartans went 12-0 and won a state championship. He threw for 1,124 yards and 13 touchdowns. DiPasquale played wide receiver and caught passes from Callahan. The two played together for three seasons.

“Great quarterback, especially when you are a wide receiver,” DiPasquale said. “You enjoy having a guy hauling it all over the field. But it’s really cool everything kind of coming full circle. And that’s the one thing you notice about our staff. It’s a whole lot of Holy Spirit guys. It’s just something special about that place that makes people want to come back. We are excited for Joe to be back.”

After high school, Callahan played for Wesley College, an NCAA Division III program in Delaware. He then made the unlikely journey to the NFL, earning contacts with the Green Bay Packers (as an undrafted free agent in 2016), New Orleans Saints, Cleveland Browns, Philadelphia Eagles, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Baltimore Ravens and Detroit Lions. He was also selected in the 2020 XFL Draft by the Seattle Dragons.

Callahan appeared in one regular-season NFL game. On Dec. 31, 2017, he completed five of seven passes for 11 yards in the Packers’ 35-11 loss at Detroit.

An Absecon native, he lives in Galloway Township with his wife, Carolyn Callahan, also a 2011 Spirit graduate and a nurse at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, City Campus, in Atlantic City. He works in Pennsylvania for the sales department at Scantek, which bills itself as “the leader in vibration and sound measuring equipment sales, service, rental, and calibration.”

“The wealth of knowledge that he has through his whole career, going from high school to the D-III ranks and kind of doing the unthinkable and going from D-III to the NFL, it’s just exciting to kind of pick his brain on the things that he learned,” DiPasquale said.

“Joe has a whole wealth of experience no one else on our staff really has. It’s just going to be him trying to find the correlation between all the stuff he learned and trying to correlate that to 15-, 16-, 17-year-old kids. And I think he’s going to do a great job with it. I know the kids are excited to have him. We are excited to have him on the staff as well.”

The Spartans will have many returning top players, including quarterback Ty Costabile, who will be a junior. Callahan said he has watched film from Holy Spirit’s previous two seasons to “familiarize myself with the offense.”

He met some of the players already at the Spartans’ spring weightlifting. He will be around the team more in early June and the summer as the season approaches. Holy Spirit will open its season Aug. 30 against Millville in a Battle at the Beach game at Egg Harbor Township.

“I watched every snap from last season a couple times, just trying to get myself up to speed with the offense and seeing what their quarterback, Ty Costabile, does well,” Callahan said. “I am a big fan of his game and excited to get to work with him.”

One of his goals is to help improve Holy Spirit’s quarterbacks in both the passing and running games “because you want them to be prepared and really confident in what they are doing,” he said.

“Spirit is definitely a run-the-ball first team, but being a past quarterback, I want to grow the passing game a little bit,” Callahan said. “Put some really friendly quarterback concepts and just kind of just bring things I learned from my playing and coaching experience to Spirit to help them continue to be successful. Any way that I can add value, I am going to try to.

“I am excited for what’s to come. I am really excited to be a part of Holy Spirit again. Obviously, they have a great program, culture and winning tradition. I am happy to join the staff and help these kids compete for a state championship.”