By Delaini Quitiquit, Staff Writer
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: So, first can you just tell me a little about yourself?
A: I’m a teacher here at McClatchy High School, this is going into my second full year. I teach social studies and I’ve been teaching for 18 years. I taught up in Natomas at Inderkum High School for about four and a half years and then I taught down at Santa Monica for about twelve years before that.
Q: Why did you want to become the football coach?
A: Well, I’ve been a football coach before, I coached for several years down in Santa Monica. I was the head football coach there for several years and it was mostly that Coach Floyd stepped down last June. There was an opening and I thought maybe I could help a little bit and so I interviewed and it seemed like it was good fit.
Q: What do you have planned for the football team?
A: Well, to me I think football is just a really neat opportunity for a high school to really build a sense of community. I’ve always been more of a program-minded guy and we’ve been trying to get as many people involved as possible from as many different parts of our community and neighborhood as we can. Just trying to grow it from there.
Q: Are you doing anything to recognize the players that stand out?
A: We’re right in the thick of it right now with game planning and preparing for our opponents but yes, that’s a huge part. I developed a relationship with some of the sports reporters over at the SacBee and so we send them statistics and stuff when we have players that stand out so we can get them recognition in the newspaper. Kazi Lewis was included in the SacBee player of the week poll and he was also included in a previous poll, and then Hector “Bear” Espinosa was in there week one of the season. So that to me is a really cool thing that three out of four weeks now we’ve had a player that was identified by the SacBee as being one of the best players in the city, which is pretty cool. You think of hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of kids that play football and two of our guys have been named as one of the top ten, top twenty. So that’s the in-season stuff, the off-season stuff is when all of the real recruiting stuff happens, and it’s a big part of this job. For me, being new to Sacramento area football, it’s about building relationships with college coaches and having them know you’re developing good players. When you’ve got a guy who can play at that level you reach out to everyone you know and let them know, “Hey, I’ve got a player here who might be able to help you at the next level.”
Q: So the team hasn’t gone to the playoffs since 1996, do you think there’s a chance you could get them there?
A: I always think there’s a chance, I mean that certainly is our goal. We want to make the postseason but we’re just taking it one week at a time. We’ve had four weeks here and have won three of the four and we have a good chance to win our next one. Then we jump into league and the competition goes up a level. I guess we’ll take it one game at a time but I definitely feel like this group has an opportunity to win every game that we have in front of us. I don’t think there’s a single game on our schedule that we don’t have a chance to win.
Q: Is there anything else you want to say that I haven’t asked?
A: The big thing I want to say is that it’s been exciting to see lots of members of the community show up and watch and be excited about football. I’ve had a lot of people approach me and say they’re really excited about the team this year and that’s within the context that SCUSD isn’t letting a lot of people show up to our games and stuff like that, so that’s really exciting for me as a coach and for us as a program to know that we have some people on campus behind us supporting us. My main message is the boys are working hard, they’re having fun, they’re having some success, and for anybody and everybody that supports McClatchy athletics: Come out and take a look because I think the guys are doing a great job.