Retirement came too soon for Westmoor soccer coach Omar Rashid

Prior to the 2020-21 season, Rashid took a leave of absence from coaching, hoping to return for the current season. However, injuries to his neck, shoulder, knees and wrists caused him to take an indefinite leave, and recently termed his departure as a retirement.

“It was something that was not by choice,” Rashid said. “I had a bunch of surgeries the last few years and my body couldn’t take the toll.”

Rashid was serving as the head coach of four teams, spanning the boys’ and girls’ soccer varsity and junior-varsity squads. He brought on Lalo Pedemonte on staff prior to the 2020-21 season to share coaching duties, and Pedemonte was quickly thrust into taking over as head coach of the boys’ and girls’ varsity programs.

“It was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life, was walking away from coaching,” Rashid said.

It was 1989 when Rashid arrived at Westmoor, taking over the boys’ varsity program, bringing a level of soccer expertise that had not previously existed on the Daly City campus. Longtime track and cross-country coach Ron DiMaggio began coaching at Westmoor in 1978 and shared the school’s stadium with Rashid for decades.

“He’s done one hell of a job with the kids here,” DiMaggio said. “It’s a real loss for the school.”

In recent years, Rashid had developed a hybrid approach to coaching boys’ and girls’ soccer, often mixing the programs at practice to optimize soccer results. In fact, last season, during the abbreviated spring COVID schedule, the Peninsula Athletic League opted to forgo the girls’ soccer season. This allowed girls to opt in with the boys’ team, and Westmoor’s Victoria Santana and Yuridia Corona — now freshmen with the women’s team at City College of San Francisco — did just that.

Early-morning practices also became routine during Rashid’s tenure. In 2007, he began running practices starting at 5:30 a.m. To compensate for the lack of sunlight on the predawn field, parents would park along the concourse and use their headlights to illuminate the field.

“That lasted for a long time, to a point where coaching four teams at the same time, it was really taxing on everybody’s bodies,” Rashid said.

The schedule may sound extreme, but the respect Rashid commanded from the soccer world made it possible.

“His team’s character takes after his character, and that’s playing hard,” said Kenny Anderson, El Camino soccer’s head coach, who has competed against Rashid since the mid 1990s. “Hard and consistent. We always knew if we had to play Westmoor two times, it was always going to be a tough game.”

This respect carried over to his station as the head of security on the Westmoor campus. According to DiMaggio, Rashid is revered as something of an on-campus sleuth in not just his communication with students, but in his ability to solve problems, including with certain typical crimes, such as the occasional on-campus theft.

“It was amazing how he had that technique,” DiMaggio said. “The police department and everybody else would always rely on Omar, and the kids were always free to communicate with him. It’s a real loss.”

Rashid said he intends to return to his on-campus job, potentially by the start of the 2022-23 school year.

Rashid’s presence with the evolving demographics of Daly City has been critical to on-campus roles. Now 53, Rashid was born in Palestine, grew up in Jordan and immigrated to the United States in 1983. When he arrived at Westmoor in 1989, the student body was a majority white, with the soccer program being comprised of mostly Latino students.

“When Omar started, our previous soccer coach was basically one of the PE teachers that started (coaching) when the school started,” DiMaggio said. “At that time, the makeup and demographic of the student body was completely different.”

Rashid said over the past 10 years there has been an influx of Middle Eastern students.

“And then they had somebody they could talk to relate to and confide in,” DiMaggio said. “He just really opened up the program to be really diversified.”

Over the past five years, Rashid has undergone four knee surgeries — two on each knee — two shoulder surgeries, and a major neck surgery. He is scheduled to have another neck surgery, in addition to wrist surgery, later this year.

“Other than that, I’m completely healthy,” Rashid said.

Still, there’s no keeping Rashid away from the game he loves. Wednesday afternoon, he was in attendance at a local boys’ varsity matchup between Mills and El Camino. When it comes to soccer, though, Rashid left his heart in Daly City, where he coached at Westmoor for 34 years.

“Just the love of the game, love of the kids, Westmoor High School is just a great school to work at,” Rashid said. “And the kids are amazing.”