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FeedNFL Meets Friday Night Lights
Valley Christian High football has a heavyweight roster—of coaches.
Photography by Jose Carlos Fajardo
(page 2 of 2)
Parrella and his wife, Leigh, settled in Pleasanton when he joined the Raiders in 2002, after eight seasons in San Diego. They enrolled their four kids in Valley Christian Elementary School at the suggestion of one of Parrella’s coaches, Paul Kelly, and the Parellas soon came to savor the small classes, spiritual inclination, and community atmosphere.
The 36-year-old school had one missing ingredient: football. Valley Christian officials had talked about starting a program over the years, but the idea was always derailed by financial obstacles, meager facilities, and modest enrollment. That changed under the leadership of Ray Noah, the school’s former senior pastor.
Noah worried about Valley Christian’s reputation as a football-less school and how much it hurt enrollment. Over the years, a steady stream of boys left the school after eighth grade because they wanted to play the sport in high school. “There came a point where I thought, ‘We really need a football program,’ ” says Noah, who has since left for a church in Portland, Oregon. “I always believed money would follow the vision. I thought the biggest part would be launching the vision.”
Noah and Parrella were friends through the church at Valley Christian, and the passionate former football player struck the pastor as the ideal choice to lead the new football team. At one of their weekly breakfast meetings, Parrella recalls, Noah suddenly said, “Let’s do it—and you coach it!”
Parrella was hired as head coach in January 2007, and players began a conditioning program in September 2007. The junior varsity launches its first season this month with 50 boys expected to come out, and the varsity will debut in the fall of 2009. Parrella expects football to help expand the school’s enrollment not only because players will stay but because of the camaraderie generated by fielding a team.
Here lies the great unknown for Valley Christian: How soon can the school actually win games? In an area rich with strong high-school programs, from De La Salle to Foothill to Monte Vista, it could take years for Parrella and his dream-team staff to carve out significant success on the field.
“We’ll win from day one,” Parrella says in a moment of unrestrained bravado. “We firmly expect to win and win often.” Then, he catches himself and repeats his mantra, “But if we build good Christian men, everything else will take care of itself.”
The beneficiaries are the fresh-faced kids who will form the first football team in school history. They are kids such as running back Max Kurth and offensive linemen Adam Brissey and Andrew Aqua, all polite and respectful and restlessly excited to face Harker School of San Jose on September 6, the opening game of their long-awaited first season.
“We’re pioneering,” Aqua says with pride.
Reader Comments:
The Tri Valley needs a program like this and I think many boys will flock from the public high schools to get on board!
Good luck to Mr. Parella and all the team for success and character building. Go Vikings!
Update: The Vikings won their first football game, 41 to 22!
They beat a bunch of freshmen from Harker
One of their coaches, Rod Woodson, was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in January 2009. How awesome for this team!
Lights go on next Friday night for Valley Christian
By Michelle Smith, CSNBayArea.com columnist
August 27, 2009
Valley Christian High in Dublin has almost everything a high school football program needs to succeed – financial support, fan support, high-level coaching, committed athletes. The only thing the Vikings don’t have is a history.
But they will begin to take care of that next Friday night.
Valley Christian will kick off the school’s first-ever varsity football game on Sept. 4 at Chabot College in Hayward, facing off against Cochrane High School of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Former Raider defensive lineman John Parrella, who ran on to the field in three Super Bowls, will lead his team onto the turf for the first time as the Vikings’ head coach. The game is the culmination of a ground-up effort to bring football and visibility to this small Christian school that sits on the hilltop overlooking the Tri-Valley and Highway 580.
Varsity player Adam Brissey has attended Valley Christian since he was in preschool. But he was prepared to leave.
“They didn’t have football, so I was going to go to Dublin High,” Brissey said.
But it turned out that Brissey didn’t have to go anywhere. Instead, on a warm Tuesday afternoon, he finishes another football practice on the outfield of the school’s baseball field.
The anticipation for the first game is palpable on campus. Families are making their tailgate plans, elementary students at the school opened the year by running through a large paper football banner.
“We are going to be able to call each other in 10 years and talk about what we started together,” Brissey said. “I can’t wait.”
None of this would have happened without Parrella, who has equal parts deep faith and big-time football experience. He is the foundation of the foundation.
“Everybody needs a leader with vision and John’s that guy,” said Valley Christian pastor Roger Valci. “We are not here right now without him.”
Parrella has used his connections to assemble a high-profile coaching staff and to solicit advice and ideas from some of the other top private-school programs in the country.
Parrella’s coaching staff includes NFL Hall of Famer Rod Woodson and former Raider Josh Taves as well as more than two dozen other volunteer coaches.
Parrella and Woodson’s sons are on the varsity roster. Woodson, who held a fundraiser for the school and the program that raised $85,000 prior to his Hall of Fame induction earlier this summer, is also set to coach the school’s basketball team in the winter.
There’s no doubt the name recognition of the staff has made building a program more easier. Brissey and teammate Nick Rubio said the prospect of playing for Parrella and Woodson was undeniably appealing.
“They’ve been to the NFL, they are showing us the right way,” Rubio said. “Maybe we’ll get there someday too.”
The genesis of the program came several years ago when Parrella was sitting at breakfast with the church’s former pastor following a Sunday service, talking about how unfortunate it was that he would have to send his sons to another school in order for them to play high school football.
“He said ‘Let’s do it’, and I said ‘Do what?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Parrella said. “He said ‘Let’s start football’.”
Parrella was in. He said it was his vision to build a “brotherhood”.
“It’s all about God and these young men,” Parrella said. “The hardest part is to push them to get better each day. We love them so much, we have to push them.”
He began by recruiting coaches, including Woodson, and traveled to schools such as San Jose’s Valley Christian, Southern California’s Oaks Christian (No. 7 in the nation in pre-season rankings) and Valor Christian in Colorado to ask them how it’s done.
He got equipment donated by private and corporate sponsors and arranged for the team to play its home games 12 miles away at Chabot College in Hayward.
“Our team has been very blessed,” Parrella said. “There are a lot of people here who wanted this to happen.”
The program began last year in earnest with a junior varsity team that went 6-2 in its inaugural season and brought 500 spectators to Chabot with them to watch.
“We have a great following. The first game we pulled up and there were 10 RVs parked out there and we wondered what’s going on and they were there for us,” Parrella said. “This year, Chabot’s already put in their plan about where all the RVs are going to park because there might be so many.”
Parrella has 31 players on his varsity team and 36 on the JV squad – accounting for nearly 15 percent of the school’s high school student body. The varsity team includes seven new starters who transferred to his program from other schools since last season.
The school held a camp over the summer that drew 130 athletes and he had to turn people away because there wasn’t enough space or staff to accommodate the demand.
The football program has brought an enrollment increase at the school. There is a waiting list for incoming freshman for the first time.
“We were projecting decreased enrollment and we have 25 more students than we did last year,” said school superintendent John Moran. “A large number of those are football players. I think there are people out there who really like Valley Christian, but were hesitant to send their sons here because we didn’t have football. And we’ve overcome that hurdle.”
Moran said it is part of the school’s strategic plan to build a football stadium in the next few years.
“This program is building more quickly than we expected,” Moran said. “Last year we were hoping to win one (JV) game and we went 6-2. Excellence creates influence and I think we have every right to believe we are going to have a highly competitive team here.”
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