Dion Evans will try to turn around a South City football team that hasn’t won a game since the 2018 season. Evans is one of four new coaches taking over football programs in the PAL.
While every football coach has had to wait for more than a year to take the field again, there are a handful of head coaches in the Peninsula Athletic League who have been really champing at the bit.
South City’s Dion Evans, Menlo-Atherton’s Chris Saunders, Eric Rado at Carlmont and Todd Smith at Menlo School are all in their first season with their respective schools. While all are seasoned coaches — in football and other sports — there is nothing like the butterflies from that first game with a new team.
“Man, I’ve been waiting a year for Friday,” said Evans, who took over the Warriors program just before the lockdown in March 2020.
“I thoroughly believe, win or lose Friday night, it will be clear … that this is a different football program.”
Evans is also the athletic director at Madison Park Academy, a charter school in East Oakland where he started the football program before shuttering it because of a lack of participation. He has been coaching football at various levels for years. He was looking for a challenge when he took over South City in February 2020, which has lost 20 straight games dating to the 2018 season. The Evans Era has only been complicated by rules and protocol of returning to the field as pandemic numbers continue to inch down in San Mateo County.
“Even though I’m a seasoned coach, I feel I’m a brand-new coach because the era had determined that everything we believed and operated under prior (to 2020) has thoroughly changed,” Evans said. “I think for me, practicing football during this COVID-19 era, opening day is very different than the first game of the season in prior years. I know for sure what to expect prior (to the pandemic). I feel as none of my experiences can really prepare me what could happen going forward.”
Chris Saunders
While the Warriors have nowhere to go but up, Saunders has a different dilemma at Menlo-Atherton. The Bears are only two seasons removed from winning the 2018 state championship and in 2019 went 5-0 in Peninsula Athletic League Bay Division play, but were knocked out in the first round of the Central Coast Section playoffs.
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The Bears are loaded, talent-wise, again this season and there are certainly expectations associated with this squad.
But Saunders, who spent the last several years coaching in the West Catholic Athletic League at Riordan and St. Ignatius, is only concerned with getting his team on the field in this strangest of seasons.
“I’ve been a head coach at different levels in different sports. I’ve been head coach at M-A for over a year… I’m not feeling any pressure. I feel more pressure with COVID,” Saunders said. “Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve made my mission pretty clear — I want to provide a first-class experience for our kids. That goes from study hall to training. We’ve had a lot of time to do those other things besides play football.”
Besides, Friday’s game against Half Moon Bay won’t be the first time Saunders takes the field with the Bears. They went to San Francisco to scrimmage St. Ignatius last Friday so they do have some play under their collective belts.
“It was a great way to get our feet wet,” Saunders said. “It went extremely well. From a football standpoint to a COVID standpoint, everything was really smooth.”
Todd Smith
A couple miles away from M-A, Smith takes over at Menlo School, but he is well acquainted with the Menlo program, having been on the coaching staff since 2013. His familiarity with the personnel should allow him to hit the ground running.
The same could be said of Rado at Carlmont. He first joined the Scots football coaching staff in 2016 as coach of the JV team before joining the varsity staff beginning the 2017 season. He has been the school’s strength and conditioning coach since 2018 and last season, he was the Scots’ offensive coordinator.
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