By Josh Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
It was nearing 4 p.m. on a recent Friday, and it did not take long for Dave Mencarini to think about where he might have been if not for his "part-time" job.
"I'd either be on the golf course or happy hour," he said. "Or maybe at my kids' swim lessons."
Instead Mencarini -- preparing for his fourth season as the football coach at Quince Orchard High -- was trying to reconfigure that afternoon's schedule for the 80 teenagers who had come to the Gaithersburg school for a voluntary workout. Instead of running the steps in the stadium bleachers, a plan was needed to keep the players inside as the sky darkened and a thunderstorm threatened.
Across the region, preparations for the high school football season are underway; some teams in Virginia began practice last week, the DCIAA begins Thursday, and Maryland public schools start Aug. 15. For the coaches of most of those teams, the season never really ended.
High school football coaches have seen their list of duties -- and the time needed to complete each one -- multiply in recent years. Unofficially, they are equipment managers and recruiting coordinators, facility managers and strength and conditioning coaches.
"These aren't titles that people give me," Mencarini said. "This is just what I do. No one tells me to do it. It's what I've learned in my experience. It's not required, but it's necessary if you want to run a quality program."
High school coaches push themselves the way college or professional coaches do. The main difference? While coaching is a full-time job for Maryland's Ralph Friedgen or the Redskins' Joe Gibbs and their staffs, high school coaches get a stipend of a few thousand dollars. Montgomery County, for example, last season paid its head coaches $5,712, among the most in the area.
Out-of-season work generally goes uncompensated; most coaches are content if they get reimbursed for any materials they purchase for the players' benefit, such as videotapes and compact discs to send highlights to college coaches or gas money to take players to out-of-town combines or college visits.
Some districts in football-obsessed parts of the country pay a full-time salary for high school football coaches, but those same positions in the Washington area in most places are held by teachers pulling double duty. It is a concept that took time to sink in for Robinson Principal Danny Meier, who coached West Potomac and Chantilly to Virginia AAA championships before becoming an administrator.
"I'm tired of doing two jobs for the price of one," Meier recalled a former high school coach telling him before that coach embarked on a college career. "It took me many years to figure that out. Basically, you're putting in two eight-hour days."
The latest local coach to make such a move was Randy Trivers, who coached at Northwest the past nine seasons before being hired this summer as the running backs coach at Syracuse University. Trivers said it was a myth among other coaches that he often slept a few hours on a sofa at school, then showered the next morning and headed to his classroom. He acknowledged, however, a few nights spent at the Germantown school.
"There was a couch in the P.E. office, and there was a chair in my office I made as comfortable as I could make it," Trivers said.
How dedicated was Trivers? His few vacations were planned around the offseason football schedule.
"It's a year-round deal if you want to be consistently competitive," Trivers said. "To be competitive year in and year out, it's imperative a coach be committed to it 12 months a year. I felt guilty almost ever taking a vacation. If I was asking them to be committed to their training, I wanted to show them I was committed too."
"Coaches put in so much time during the season, and it's because they want to. That really hasn't changed," said Broadneck's Jeff Herrick, entering his 31st year coaching sports in Anne Arundel County. "It's the preseason, postseason and offseason that has changed a lot."
The postseason has gotten longer, with playoff growth in Maryland and Virginia including more teams and extending the season. Then there is the offseason, which has swelled to include seven-on-seven passing leagues and tournaments, individual combines to measure athletes' strength and speed and the never-ending process of college recruiting.
"It's a monster," Herrick said.
Unlike other sports, football remains a school-based team. Although personal training has blossomed, there are few individual coaches and no offseason travel or club teams. It remains up to the high school coach to organize the winter, spring and summer activities -- often at the expense of their personal lives.
Sometimes coaches tend to pay attention to their programs at the expense of their health, though they often don't want to acknowledge this publicly. It might even hit their bank account. Mencarini said before his first season as a head coach, he charged a $5,000 computer system to his personal credit card so he could better analyze videos of his team's games.
For all of the work and long hours, stepping back on the field for the start of a new season often makes it seem worthwhile even as many veteran coaches question their motivation.
"You really enjoy the time off and you say, 'Oh, how am I ever going to do this again?' " said Bill McGregor, who will begin his 26th season as DeMatha's head coach with a practice tomorrow morning. "And then you get out there, and it's what you know, and you feel really comfortable. You're really glad you're doing this. You could be in an office somewhere."
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Josh Barr
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