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SCHENECTADY
Coach restores team to former glory
DePoalo lauded by students, community
BY SARA FOSS Gazette Reporter

    It’s right around dusk on a chilly Thursday night, and the Schenectady High School football team is all business.
    Dressed in their red and blue practice uniforms, the players run drills on their practice field at Mont Pleasant Middle School, while their coach, Carmen DePoalo, moves from group to group, studying his team intently. Occasionally he barks encouragement, instructions or criticism.
    “Let’s go, come on, come on!” DePoalo yells in his slightly husky voice, clapping his hands for emphasis. “Let’s get a good rhythm there. Let’s go! Nobody can stop us! Ain’t a team around!”
    This is DePoalo’s second season with the Patriots, and it’s a surprisingly successful one. The team was undefeated until a loss to Shaker earlier this month, won its division, the Class AA Liberty Division, for the first time in 21 years and was seeded first in the playoffs. Friday night, the team earned their first home playoff win in program history, defeating the Ballston Spa Scotties to advance to the semifinals.
    Last year the team went 5-4 and made the playoffs for the first time since the merger of Linton and Mont Pleasant high schools in 1992.
    The success of the team has taken people by surprise, and DePoalo is quick to praise his assistant coaches and players — “The talent has always been there” — many of whom he has known from his years coaching Belmont Pop Warner.
    But parents and school officials credit DePoalo, a blunt, no-nonsense disciplinarian, with building a winning atmosphere. His players, they say, are expected to focus on school and think about college. He is not averse to benching players, no matter how valuable they are to the team, if they’re not performing in the classroom. He allows players to miss practice to get help on schoolwork and stays in touch with their teachers via e-mail. He doesn’t let his players wear hats or do-rags. He describes himself as a disciplinarian but also as someone who cares deeply about
his players.
    “I run a tight ship,” said DePoalo, who serves as business agent for Local 301 of the IUE-CWA, the union that represents General Electric workers at the plant in Schenectady. “But we never leave the field without telling the kids we love them and that we care about them. ... One of the things you can’t do with kids is say you care and don’t really care. They’ll see right through you.
    “It’s not just about playing football,” DePoalo continued. “It’s about getting them to school. In time, we’re going to have good student athletes. I want to graduate all of the football players.”
    Players who are struggling in school are expected to fill out tracking sheets indicating that they’re doing their homework, and in the off season, DePoalo coordinates study halls for the players.
    “We’re creating young men for the future,” he said. “We want them to go to the college. I hope someday I’m watching one of them in the NFL.”
    DePoalo himself never graduated from college. He spent about six weeks at Hudson Valley Community College before dropping out.
    “I took a different path,” he said.
    He took a year off, then got a job at General Electric. He has held various positions for IUE-CWA since 1974.
RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB
    DePoalo’s appointment took some — including DePoalo — by surprise. His last high school coaching job was a stint at Mohonasen High School in the 1980s. He wasn’t a teacher in the district, as many coaches are.
    “Being an outsider, I didn’t think I had much of a shot,” he said during an interview in his office on Broadway, which is decorated with labor union and football paraphernalia and figurines and images of Mickey Mouse. “But a lot of community members were involved, and they said, ‘Give this guy a shot,’ and I got my shot.”
    Schenectady Superintendent Eric Ely said DePoalo embodied exactly what he was looking for in a football coach.
    “Everybody who interviewed for the job had a commitment to football, but I wanted somebody who would be committed to the district, to kids, to football and to the city of Schenectady,” Ely said. “I wanted someone who was willing to immerse themselves in the program.
    “Any sport is about people,” continued Ely, a former football coach. “It’s about kids being rallied by a particular coach. This coaching staff has hit all the right buttons.”
    The team’s motto is “band of brothers,” and standout running back Marc Thompson, 17, a team captain, says “trusting in the players to your right and to your left” is one of the biggest lessons DePoalo has taught him.
    “Football is not a one-player game,” Thompson said. “He taught me that. You’re not going to go anywhere unless you trust your teammates. ... We’re a family. We’re a band of brothers. He’s the conductor, and we’ve got to trust in one another.”
PASSION FOR COACHING
    DePoalo, 57, started coaching when he was 17. At the time, he was an offensive tackle and linebacker on the Mont Pleasant High School varsity football team, and as he walked off of the practice field, he noticed a group of kids playing Pop Warner football. He wandered over, saw they had no coach and stepped in.
    “When you’re 14 or 15, people start asking you what you want to be,” DePoalo said. “When I was 17 years old, I knew what I wanted to do. [Coaching] burns inside me. It’s a passion. If I’m 85, I might be a high school coach, I might be a Pop Warner coach.
    “Kids, they fulfill me,” DePoalo said.
    DePoalo was named head football coach of the Schenectady/Belmont Pop Warner football team in 1967, two years before he graduated from Mont Pleasant High School, and served there until 1980. He took a coaching job at Mohonasen High School in 1983 and was charged with reviving the school’s defunct program. At Mohonasen, he led efforts to raise more than $100,000 to improve fields and bleachers and purchase equipment such as lighting and uniforms and managed to guide his team to one winning season before stepping down in 1987. He returned to Pop Warner, which is where he remained until his appointment with Schenectady High School.
TUMULTUOUS TENURE
    DePoalo’s tenure hasn’t been without controversy.
    In April, DePoalo was charged with third-degree assault stemming from an altercation at Ferrari’s Ristorante; he later pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment. In response, the trustees of the George Kozak Scholarship Foundation announced that they were withdrawing a $1,000 scholarship for Schenectady High School football players, saying DePoalo’s conduct set a bad example. (Frank Gallo of Frank Gallo & Son Florist replaced the scholarship.)
    But DePoalo never lost the support of the school administration or his team.
    Ely said that DePoalo talked to him about the incident almost immediately after it happened and met with players and parents to discuss it.
    “[DePoalo] took this as an opportunity to make himself a better person,” he said. “He made a mistake. He didn’t deny anything. It was an unfortunate situation, but he made it a teaching opportunity.”
    “I’m their coach; I’m their mentor,” DePoalo said. “I told [the players] the truth. One kid put his hand out and said, ‘We’re a family, coach.’
    “I’m not perfect,” DePoalo added. “I make mistakes.”
COMMUNITY TIES
    DePoalo said he enjoys the challenges of coaching at an inner-city school. Some of his players, he said, are needy. Some lack parental support, and a few live in halfway houses. But if a player can’t afford equipment, he’ll get them what they need.
    “A lot of the parents are struggling,” he said. “The work climate in Schenectady is tough. A couple of the kids come late to practice because they’re watching siblings. Sometimes they bring siblings to the sidelines. During the pre-season, we would provide peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
    The crowds at the team’s games have been building all year long.
    “It’s the talk of the town,” said Amanda Thompson, mother of Marc Thompson. “I work at Talbots, and everybody’s talking about it. People in Albany are talking about it. Their record speaks for itself.”
    When the team had a losing record, “it was a little depressing,” she said. But things have changed.
    “They have a lot of confidence now,” she said. “They’re a good bunch of boys. I’ll be proud of what they’ve achieved, even if they don’t go any further.”
    “The city is excited about it,” Ely said. “I go to meetings outside the district and people ask me how we turned it around that quickly. All the old-timers are coming back. It’s a positive thing for the community.”
STUDENT SUPPORT
    Marc Thompson said it has been a fun season.
    “We’ve never had this much success,” he said. “Last year when we made the playoffs, people were surprised. But this year, they were expecting a little more.”
    He said he first met DePoalo when he was 10 and DePoalo was coaching Pop Warner. He never had DePoalo as a coach, but “I’d always heard ‘Coach Carm’ this and ‘Coach Carm’ that,” he said. “When I heard he was going to be our coach, I was excited. He is a great coach. He keeps everything 100 percent with us. He’s straightforward with us. Sometimes it may not be what we want to hear.” He said school is DePoalo’s biggest priority. “There are times when I’ve missed practice to catch up,” he said. Amanda Thompson said DePoalo is more concerned “with college than football.” “He’s most concerned about their grades,” she said. “He’s concerned about what’s going on academically. He’s in the school every single day. He’s a no-tolerance coach. He wants the players to carry themselves as young men.” DePoalo said that over the years, he’s become a mellower coach. “When I was younger, I thought I had to micromanage,” he said. “I had to be involved in everything.” He’s still a yeller, but his overall approach is calmer.
    “If you ask the kids, they think I yell every day, but it’s more controlled than it used to be,” he said.
SIGHTS SET ON VICTORY
    DePoalo said he’s glad he’s been able to restore some of the luster to Schenectady’s football program. The city had powerhouse teams back in the 1950s and 1960s, when there were still two high schools, but struggled after the merger of Linton and Mount Pleasant. At times, DePoalo felt that some people were blaming the players for losing.
    “They were saying, ‘Those kids are bad. Those kids are in trouble.’ They were blaming the kids. I never refer to them as those kids. They’re my kids,” he said.
    DePoalo’s coaching experience extends to other sports. He founded the first independent softball league in Schenectady County, the Rotterdam Girls Softball League, and coached the Mohonasen girls’ varsity softball and varsity track teams from 1983 to 1985.
    DePoalo, who has three adult sons, is divorced and lives with his 83-year-old mother in the Mont Pleasant neighborhood.
    The loss to Schalmont was a blow for the team, who had hoped to finish the season undefeated.
    “They got down,” DePoalo said. “I told them that tomorrow is another day.”
    But he doesn’t like losing.
    “I’d like to go out and win every week,” he said. “When I interviewed for this job, they asked me what my goal was, and I said, ‘My goal is to go to the Carrier Dome [in Syracuse] and play.’ ”


BRUCE SQUIERS/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER Carmen DePoalo, head coach of the Schenectady Patriots high school football team, offers encouragement to his players in a Thursday night practice as they prepare for postseason play.


BRUCE SQUIERS/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER The Schenectady Patriots football team practices Thursday night in Mont Pleasant as they prepare for postseason play.