Over his 15-year career as a coach, Chris Casamento has had nine state playoff appearances, and has even coached a player who went on to play in the National Football League.##M:[more]##
But the new coach of High School North’s football team takes it one step at a time — helping to build players’ techniques, blocking, and tackling, and even their abilities to throw and catch the football. It’s all about taking care of the little things.
For Casamento, the number one goal is to focus on more than just the athlete in the student-athlete. “I want to have a program that the town can be proud of, the kids can be proud of, the parents can be proud of, “ he says. “We want to build a program that everybody can look at and say, ‘Those guys are doing the right things, teaching the right things,’ and that the coach is leading by example and putting these kids in the right positions to be successful. Do that, and the others stuff will follow.”
Casamento, whose father was a pharmacist and whose mother was a florist, was born in the Bronx, and moved to New Jersey when he was two years old as a result of his father’s job at Sandoz (now Novartis Pharmaceuticals) in East Hanover. Casamento lived in Lincoln Park and Verona and finally Basking Ridge, where he lived from 10 years old on.
He played varsity football for Bayley-Ellard high school in Madison, where he graduated in 1988. He attended college at Northeastern University in Boston, where he double-majored in finance and management. He then worked for MetLife for a year before deciding he wanted to go back to football. He began in 1993 working as a volunteer assistant for Ridge High School, and ended up as a paid assistant the following year.
Says Casamento: “I really got a feel for what the teaching aspect and coaching aspect was, and I loved it,” he says. “I always wanted to do this. Economically, I though it might be wise to go into business, and make more money. I wound up doing it (football and teaching) anyway.”
“I wanted to be a stock broker, but I just missed football,” he added. “When I first did it at Ridge, I loved it and couldn’t get away from it.” So, he went back to school at Kean University, and became a teacher.
He worked at Ridge High School for five years as the team’s defensive coordinator. He then became the head coach at New Brunswick High School for two years. He followed that with a position as head coach at Bound Brook from 2002 to 2003, and then the special teams coordinator at Hillsborough in 2004. Most recently, he has been the offensive coordinator at Manville.
In New Brunswick, he coached Dwayne Jarret, who, in 2007, was drafted by the Carolina Panthers in the second round.
Casamento, however, keeps a firm grip on reality. “You can’t rely on it as a career,” he says. With about 1,”700 players in the entire NFL, and with 44,”000 high school football players in New Jersey alone, “the odds of making a career or living out of football are very slim to none.”
Instead, “I need to give them the skills and build their character — to be good quality citizens and productive citizens in society long-term, whether they’re lawyers, doctors, teachers, coaches,” Casamento added.
In addition to coaching, he has been teaching special education in New Brunswick for the past eight years. He heard about the open position at North from another coach. Even though he wasn’t really looking for a new job, he researched the school and found he felt that “it was a good fit for me, and obviously they felt it was a good fit for them, too,” he says. Casamento was first hired as a special education teacher at High School North. He says he went through a three-month interview process involving four or five interviews with the athletic director, and then went through a series of interviews for the teaching position.
Casamento met the North players for the first time on June 3, and says so far he has had 55 players come to the initial meeting — excluding this year’s seniors. With 30 freshmen signing up since then, there are a total of about 85 kids in the program, he says. The Knights finished 3-7 last season.
Casamento, who takes over for Art Stubbs, says his approach will be to concentrate on increasing the players’ strength and speed, and helping them become better-conditioned athletes. “If you take care of those little things, the big things will follow,” Casamento says.
He says just wanting to win is fine, but “who’s willing to do what’s necessary to actually win?”
His philosophy also involves a team-first attitude, which he hopes to instill in his players. “We want to develop successful players who aren’t just going to be successful football students, but successful students in life,” he said. “I want a teaching environment based on positive reinforcement, not negative rhetoric — not only focusing on what kids are doing wrong, but on what they’re doing right.”
