If it feels like high school football season just ended, that’s because it did. Courtesy of COVID, local fans were treated to a five-game spring football season.
At Will C. Wood High, practice for the fall season begins on June 7. And it will have a new look, mainly because the Wildcats (2-3 record in the spring) have a new head coach, Jacob Wright.
Kirk Anderson, the head coach for the last two seasons, is moving to El Dorado County to coach at Union Mine High School. Wright, who served as Anderson’s offensive and defensive line coach, now steps up to the helm. He comes with a solid playing and coaching resume.
After graduating from Wood in 1995, where he played center and middle linebacker on the football team, he played center and guard at Solano Community College. He then earned a scholarship to Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., where he played nose guard.
After graduating from Lindenwood, he stayed there for a year while he earned his teaching credential and served as a graduate assistant football coach for tackles and defensive ends as well as the scout team coordinator.
He was the head coach at San Lorenzo High School for nine years, recruiting coordinator and defensive line coach at Contra Costa College for three years, and defensive coordinator for two years at El Cerrito High.
A physical education teacher, he was selected as Teacher of the Year for the Vacaville Unified School District in 2017-18. He will now teach P.E. at Wood.
Wright coached the offensive and defensive lines under Carlos Meraz, who preceded Anderson as Wood’s head football coach. Wright sees the offense returning to Meraz’s style, but with a few twists.
“I really want to go back to running the spread offense similar to what coach Meraz was running but with some wrinkles to it,” he said, “emphasizing different things I like to do. And then defensively I am going to switch back to an even front like we ran when I was the defensive coordinator before, a 4-2-5 defense. I’m more of a man concept defensively than zone coverages.”
He held his first meeting with his coaches on Thursday to bring them up to speed on his plans so they can hit the ground running and on the same page when practice begins on June 7.
“I would definitely like to be a balanced attack (on offense), capitalizing on what the other team’s defense lets us do and then we take our opportunities when we get them,” he said.
He elaborated on his defensive plans.
“I like to make sure we use pressure when it fits into our game plan,” he said. “I don’t like to blindly blitz. I want to make sure it’s calculated based on our game plan and our evaluations of the opponents. I want to make sure that we give kids the confidence that everybody has a role. If you do your job, we play an awesome defense where we are playing an 11-man defense, pushing plays to each other… There is no secret recipe to football. X’s and O’s, everybody does the same. It’s how you cook it with your coaching and creating the right situations in practice.”
He thinks the players will do well in learning the new schemes.
“I really do because the success of football is the resiliency of the athletes,” he said, “and it really depends on how we teach it. If you get the buy-in, the kids will get it. And then we just have to make sure that we install less than we think we need to and then we rep it more than we think we need to, and that way the kids will get it.”
He knows and likes what he sees in his players.
“I’ve seen a majority of them come through the middle school,” he said. “About 80 percent I’ve had as seventh-graders and eighth-graders. I definitely think there is a solid nucleus not only from the varsity players that are coming back but also from the JV kids that will be coming up.”
The 44-year-old coach hopes and expects to be around for a long time.
“It’s the high school that I went to,” he said. “We own a home in the community so we’re not going anywhere. This is a great opportunity for us to strengthen the football program and the school community, strengthen the brand at Will C. Wood.”
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May 29, 2021 at 03:40AM
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