In eight years of coaching football at Woodside High, Head Coach Steve Nicolopulos hasn’t had a losing season. In 2004, he led the team to a division championship after a 13-0 season.
The Wildcats are off to a winning start again this season. They opened Friday with a 14-10 victory over Gilroy. The next game is also at home, under the lights at Woodside High, starting at 8 p.m. against Riordan of San Francisco.
Nicolopulos’ approach to the 2006 season will be “the same as it is every year: one game at a time,” he told the Almanac. “It sounds very cliche and very vanilla, as I’ve been told, but you play one game at a time.”
There are differences, however. For the 2004 championship season, Woodside fielded a team rich with experienced seniors. Last year, the team had no seniors but still had a 6-5 winning season. This year there are four seniors with varsity experience that they can now draw on, Nicolopulos said.
Woodside appears to be a favorite to dethrone Aragon, which has a 22-game win streak, in the Bay Division of the Peninsula Athletic League, says sports writer Tim Goode of the San Mateo County Times, who covers the league for the paper.
Woodside is the most experienced team in the division, and has the addition of running back Lopeti Taufoou, a transfer from Serra, to make life easier for quarterback Matt Pelesasa, says Goode.
Routines
Every week, Woodside players review video of the previous week’s game, and each player reads a scouting report on the next opponent.The routines also serve educational purposes, Nicolopulos said, and elaborated with a few examples. Reading a scouting report challenges one’s study skills; carrying out a play is putting concepts into action; responding to audible adjustments to a play at the line of scrimmage teaches thinking on one’s feet; and daily practice regimens of two and a half hours builds time-management skills, particularly for students who may have to help the household put food on the table in addition to doing their homework.
Pure academic skills on the team cover the spectrum, he said, with grade-point averages from a high of 4.4. to the minimum 2.0.
Football provides “another learning situation” that can cover lessons in morality, competition and gentlemanly behavior, he added.
A team, he said, can be like a family: “We’re surrogate fathers or uncles or big brothers. We’re there for the kids and the kids are there for each other. I think that’s one of the things that has given us such success.”
“I just appreciate them as individual human beings,” he added. “It’s fun to be around them.”
