Messina steps down as Carlmont football coach

Messina cited financial reasons as the sole reason for his leaving. Having previously served as head coach at Fremont-Sunnyvale and Golden Valley-Merced, and as an assistant coach at Merced, the 47-year-old Messina is now relocating to Placer County.

“It’s a hundred percent cost of living,” Messina said. “We just can’t afford to stay here anymore. I don’t want to quote the number but what we were paying for rent was pretty obscene.”

Messina made his resignation official Monday, but had been in communication with Carlmont administration for some weeks. The shakeup comes on the heels of a down year for the Scots, who went 3-7 overall, including 0-5 in league play, after moving up to the “B” league Peninsula Athletic League Ocean Division.

Other than a 57-7 blowout to Ocean Division champion Half Moon Bay, the Scots’ averaged a 9.3-point deficit in their other four league losses.

“Well, I think it’s all about perspective,” Messina said. “The reality is, with the exception of the Half Moon Bay game, all those games went down to the wire. So, in some ways I thought we were better this year than we were last year. The record doesn’t show it but the level of competition was higher.”

For Messina, reaching the four-year mark as the Carlmont football head coach is something of a modern milestone. The last coach to helm the gridiron Scots longer was San Mateo County Hall of Fame coach Jim Liggett, who stepped down after the 1991 season to focus on coaching the Carlmont softball team fulltime.

Since then, 12 people have held the position. Of the 11 who came before Messina, none coached for more than three years.

“It messes it up because you have no continuity,” said Ben White, who coached the Scots in 2002 and ’03. “And the kids need someone they can count on and can rely on. They need stability.”

White is a native of Belmont who graduated from Carlmont in 1986. He played for Liggett for three years, and went on to serve as an assistant coach for two years after Liggett’s tenure. In 1992, White worked on Leon Feliciano’s staff. The following year, Rich Motylewski took over with White staying on as an assistant before leaving to coach at South City.

So far as sustaining a winning culture at Carlmont, White said the changing personality of the community in Belmont also plays a big part.

“I grew up there,” White said. “It’s totally different. Belmont used to be blue collar.”

White left San Mateo County for the same reason cited by Messina. When he resigned from Carlmont after the 2003 season, he relocated to Exeter High School in Tulare County. He returned to the Peninsula to coach at Capuchino for three seasons from 2014-16. In 2017, he returned to Tulare County to take over the football program at Orosi High School, where this season his Cardinals reached the Central Section Division 6 championship game for the first time since 1998.

White painted a stark contrast between the Peninsula and the freedom he has in Tulare County, and it isn’t just due to economics. At Orosi, he works as a physical education teacher, a position he applied for in the South San Francisco Unified School District, the Sequoia Union High School District and the San Mateo Union High School District, but was never hired. He worked as a special education teacher at South San Francisco, Carlmont and Capuchino, but not working as a PE teacher inhibited his ability to build a well-rounded football program.

When White was at South City, he went so far as to use his prep period later in the day to supervise a PE class attended by a majority of his football players. Now, he has his Orosi players in class on an official basis, where they can actually work on 7-on-7 drills throughout the school year.

“They (Orosi) want to do that for me, so it’s a totally different mindset,” White said.

Messina said redistricting in the Sequoia Union High School District also plays a big part in the football culture at Carlmont. The big factor, he said, is with PAL Bay Division powerhouse Menlo-Atherton the only San Mateo County public school that draws from Palo Alto.

“The entirety of Palo Alto goes, by default, to M-A,” Messina said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out. Just go watch them play.”

Messina said he’s interested in coaching in Placer County, perhaps as early as 2020. He said it will likely be in an assistant coach role, though he is monitoring the availability of head coaching positions opening up.

“There’s a possibility,” Messina said. “So, there’s a couple of jobs that are getting ready to open up … so I’m going to have to kind of wait for that to play out.”