Sports

Winchester Football Has its New Coach

Former Northeastern Defensive Coordinator, Wally Dembrowski, will be the new coach of the Winchester football team.

The program has its new coach. The district announced the hiring of former college coach, Wally Dembrowski.

Most recently, Dembrowski was defensive coordinator at Northeastern University, and has spent the last 19 years coaching at the collegiate level.

“We’re excited about this hire,” said Athletic Director Brian Carroll. “He’s the person we were looking for. Not only does he have an impressive football resume, but this is someone that’s going to teach these kids how to become young men.”

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While this won’t be Dembrowski’s first head coaching job—he was coach of UMASS Lowell—this will be the first time he will be coaching at the high school level. But Dembrowski isn’t concerned about making the transition from college to high school football.

“My biggest challenge will be setting expectations,” Dembrowski said. “We want our kids to achieve our goals and in high school you don’t have student-athletes as long, so we need to be sure to build year after year. We want to ensure that our team improves week after week culminating on Thanksgiving with the Woburn game.”

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Dembrowski left Northeastern in the spring of 2009 and said that, instead of moving his family out of New England for another job, he decided to remain in the region. This will be his first coaching job since he was defensive coordinator at Northeastern.

But as far as scheme, Dembrowski said that the defense would be aggressive, while the offense will be up-tempo, spreading the ball around.

Dembrowsi also said that he hopes to use the Winchester school system to his advantage.

“This is a great academic school system,” Dembrowski said. “I hope to rely on that and that should allow us to be more creative with some of our schemes.”

Former Coach, Paul Sobolewski, at the beginning of February. One of the criticisms of Sobolewski was his failure to unite the community. Both Carroll and Dembrowski said that ensuring there will be communication throughout the levels—Pop Warner, middle school and high school—will be a top priority.

“I’m excited about the opportunity,” Dembrowski said. “I look forward to working with [Paul] Manganaro who started the middle school program. I look forward to working with all the youth programs. I’m looking forward to bringing the community together and a strong football program can do that. When a team does well, younger kids look up to it and that really helps build community.”

“We’re going to unite the community under this program,” Carroll said. “It’s been difficult the last few years and we’ve had some different factions, but to bring in someone of this caliber, it will help bring unity to the program.”


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