By: Joseph Kellard
For a football team whose combined record over the past three seasons is 4-20, the future can basically only be brighter. The Long Beach High School varsity team will enter the 2001 season with a new leader who expects his squad will not only be brighter, it could potentially outshine its competition.
"My goal is to have at least a .500 season," said Dan Quinn, the team's new head coach. "It's certainly in our reach. I think we may do better than that. We just have to keep working hard."
If Quinn's name rings a bell to ears knowledgeable about local football, that's because he was an assistant coach with the same team during its 1996 and 1997 seasons under then-head coach Harry Wittkin.
When Quinn came aboard in 1995 Long Beach had just suffered a 1-7 season, the same record it compiled in 2000. In his first year he served as a defensive coach who assisted the team to a 4-4 record. In 1997, as the offensive coordinator, he coached his players into scoring the most points in their conference halfway through the season, when they went 3-0-1. The team ended up at 4-3-1 in a season when it faced then top seeded teams Hempstead and Uniondale.
"I thought we were getting it turned around at the time," he said, "but after that season, Harry stepped down and I took a head-coaching job in Brooklyn."
A physical education teacher at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn for nine years, Quinn, 38, began his career as a football coach in 1987 at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He continued as an assistant at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and then came to Long Beach for the first time. He departed after being offered a head coaching job at Bishop Ford High School in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
But one day, as he leafed through a newspaper, Quinn found a classified ad seeking someone to head both the varsity team and the entire football program at Long Beach High School, and, "when that opportunity arose I jumped at it." Presently a Long Beach resident, who has lived in the city periodically for the past 18 years, Quinn felt this was an ideal job he couldn't pass up.
"When I was an assistant coach here," he said, "I thought there was no reason this team could not be one of the best in Nassau County, and now I have the opportunity to bring that vision to a reality. I'm going to try to get this program back to feeling good about itself. I want the school to be proud of their football team."
In pursuit of this goal, Quinn has the advantage of a soft schedule in his first year as head coach. Football scheduling in Nassau County is based on both a team's final record the previous year and the population of its school, with the theory being the larger the school, the greater the potential in its talent pool. Since Long Beach's record was so poor last year, 1-7, the team was allotted a 13th seed's schedule, which translates into the second easiest in its 14-team conference.
Long Beach's season opens on Saturday, Sept. 15 in Elmont, which Quinn regards as a formidable opponent.
He will take a young team into that and every game this season, since he's inherited a squad with just five seniors. Since practices only began Monday, he said it's too early to tell who will have the greatest positive impact on his team.
However, he does anticipate that two senior will be significant contributors: Jesse Lopez, who played center in 2000 and is currently trying out for a defensive spot, and Justin Shapiro, who played defensive end last year and is currently trying out for quarterback.
"Other than those two players, I cannot say just yet," Quinn said. "But so far, the team looks like they'll be productive."
Joining his staff will be two new coaches: Bob Carberry, a coach at Port Washington High School, will coach the defensive ends and secondary, and Jack Ciano, the head coach of Bayside High School in Queens, will be the defensive coordinator.
Quinn was hired late in the school year, on June 15, which he said has added to the difficulty of him getting to know his team. But prior to this week's practice he held meetings with both his players and their parents.
"They have been fairly well attended and once they get to know me more, they will have more enthusiasm for the program," he said. "Also, at the end of this week we are taking the team up to the Catskill mountains for a week, where we rented out a summer sleep-away camp. We'll be taking film of all our practices up there and studying them together. We'll be eating together, we'll be sleeping together, we'll be with each other for a whole week. That kind of bonding is invaluable to a football team."
