http://ajerseyguy.com/?p=10719#comments
Coach Spaz’s new role
by Mark • July 14, 2014
It has been a year and a half now and Frank Spaziani’s routine is that there is no routine–once dictated by practices and game preparation—in his life until he checks the daily activity list of his three children Avery, Andrew and Joe and his wife Laura.
Avery, a junior at Notre Dame High School in Hingham, has an ambitious volley ball schedule that has taken her all over the country. Andrew, a junior at Hingham High School, has a summer full of golf tournaments and Joey is off to the University of Virginia, where he will try out for the Cavalier football team as walk on long snapper/QB.
For Spaziani, whose career as the head football coach at Boston College came to a close two seasons ago when he was fired after four years in which the Eagles tumbled towards mediocrity, the sense of urgency of finding a new job–at the age of 67–remains muted, but focused.
He wants to return to coaching in some capacity on someone’s staff and talk about X’s and O’s again. For more than 30 years, he did extremely well as Tom O’Brien’s defensive coordinator at BC and other stops in a coaching career which dates back to his days as a graduate assistant at his alma mater Penn State, with stops along the way at the Naval Academy, Virginia, Canadian Football League at Winnipeg and Calgary, before he settled in at BC in 1997.
But Spaziani’s roots are in New Jersey. He grew up in the 60′s as a kid from Clark, whose life was dictated by the seasons from football in the fall to baseball in the spring. BSpaz had game as a QB/Pitcher who was good enough in football to get a scholarship at Penn State and good enough as a pitcher to get offers from the Cleveland Indians.
Truth be told, Spaz was probably a better athlete than many of the players he recruited. But a bad arm ended his pitching career and he was not big enough or fast enough to take it to the next level in football. So he quickly moved to coaching.
And he lived the coaches life for many summers, falls and winters, catching the activities of his children in small increments, while Laura ran the household.
When he was fired–with the cushion of a few years remaining on his million dollar a year contract–the dynamics changed. He had the time and if you wanted to find Spaz, all you had to do was check the athletic schedule of Notre Dame and Hingham High school.
Laura and Spaz have always been the antithesis of the “helicopter” parents who hover over everything their children do on the field or on the court.
Spaz would show up at Joey’s football game and sit in the top of the stands, sometime on the opposing sideline and silently watch. He would show up on a Friday afternoon at Scituate High school and watch both Joey and Andrew play basketball. He would show up at Notre Dame and watch Avery and a highly regarded volley ball team take on the world.
Laura would work as a volunteer in the concession stands.
Other parents would yell and scream and scold as their children performed, Spaz just watched. Oh, he offered advice when asked and he has spent countless hours with all of his children working on technique.
But he also gave his children as much space as support. His job has become being a “Dad”, while the world he once was so much apart of for so many years continued to evolve.
If you went to any of his children’s games, you would be hard pressed to identify Spaz as a parent of one of the athletes.
Now Joey is off to college and Avery and Andrew are finishing up their high school years. Make no mistake, Spaz still has the competitive juices running through his veins. He still has the energy to coach and teach, but the priorities remain.
You can argue about Spaz’s merits as a head coach and what he failed to do. That ship has come and gone and Spaz has moved on.
But right now he is doing the job that is more important than any coaching job he has ever had. He is guiding his children through the turbulent years when they make the transition from childhood to adults and he is doing a damn good job, which is why Frank Spaziani is our Jerseyguy of The Week.
