Great Coaching, Play Leads To Undefeated Season

By: Jack Kraman

Let me introduce you to Coach Gagliano. Coach Gagliano is an experienced football coach, who also coaches softball. Coach Gagliano is originally from Middletown, New Jersey. He coached youth football for 2 years before being asked to coach the RFH freshman team. He accepted the offer and has been coaching freshman football at RFH for the past 22 years.

This past season, his freshman football team was undefeated, with the defense amazingly only giving up one touchdown the entire season. It’s not surprising then that Coach Gagliano says that defense is his team's best asset, and that “Offense wins games and defense wins championships.”

Coach Gagliano’s overall record from all his years of coaching is an extremely impressive 161 - 25 - 4. This record is even more impressive when you keep in mind that Coach Gagliano gets a completely new set of kids every year and he still manages to field a dominant team every year.

When asked about the ups and downs of coaching he says that the only down for him is that he loses great players that he gets to know well after only a year of coaching them. Nevertheless, Coach Gagliano still maintains a very strong relationship with his players and attends their varsity games. Even though there is this one down, Coach Gagliano says there are a lot of ups, including that the players, the parents, and the district is great, and many other things.

Before ending our interview, I asked Coach Gagliano about his best game this season. He said it was against Wall, a very good team. He says that the team was very excited to play them, worked hard, and were ready for the challenge. As a result, they defeated Wall in a great game. Coach Gagliano has been coaching at Rumson a while and definitely plans to stay. I think we're all happy about that and excited to see what he brings next season.