I assume you are being humorous here.  Several athletes were nicknamed Jake The Snake including a WWF wrestler and your football coach I guess and certainly Jacques Plante.  "You can look it up", as Casey Stengel liked to say.  Start with Wikipedia.   Doug Harvey was a good friend of my uncle whom I met in the late 60s and had been a teammate of Plante in the 50s and early 60s.  Harvey called Plante "Jake The Snake" and that's good enough for me.  I can only assume it had to do with Plante's uncanny ability to snake his stick out and pick the puck off the stick of somebody flying toward the goal.