With sports seasons wrapped up, the athletics program at Tomales High School entered the summer hiatus with a dearth of coaches for soccer, basketball and volleyball. To complicate the search, the athletic director and varsity girls soccer coach, John McGurke, tendered his resignation last week to accept an assistant principal post at Piner High School in Santa Rosa, where he will also oversee athletics.
“It’s hard to do because I absolutely love Tomales High, the kids, the sports and the community,” said Mr. McGurke, who joined the school in 2013 to resurrect a disbanded girls soccer team and became the athletic director the following year.
Mr. McGurke’s departure and the coaching vacancies come at a transitional time for the Braves and Tomales High, which has lost about 50 students—nearly a quarter of its student body—since 2005. Growing interest in basketball and volleyball has spurred the addition of junior varsity teams to those clubs, while a shrinking varsity football roster prompted the squad to drop from an 11-player league down to an eight-player division last year.
Along with losing the varsity girls soccer coach, vacancies remain for varsity volleyball, varsity boys basketball and varsity boys soccer, an increasingly popular fall sport at Tomales that many have attributed to the declining interest in the school’s traditional top fall pastime, football. With high counts of incoming eighth-graders interested in volleyball and boys basketball, the school also needs coaches to helm new junior varsity teams for those sports.
To fill the void, the school tapped head varsity football coach and math teacher Dominic Sacheli to replace Mr. McGurke. Mr. Sacheli said he intends to build on his predecessor’s accomplishments, which include implementing online athlete registration, hiring an athletic trainer and creating a subscription-based service that live-streams games. But for now, Mr. Sacheli plans to focus on finding new coaches and strengthening athlete numbers.
“My focus is to get the best quality coaches that I can get,” said Mr. Sacheli, who has coached and taught at Tomales since 2007. “When you have people that are intelligent and masters of their sport, a lot of the other stuff takes care of itself.”
Mr. Sacheli said he is confident the five teams will secure new coaches before season openings, despite the scant incentive of a $3,000 stipend combined with heavy time commitments for non-teacher candidates and a short supply of prospective dual teacher-coaches. That dual role is both ideal and lacking, following the recent departures of longtime teacher-coaches Bill Tucker, who coached varsity baseball and taught seventh-grade core subjects before retiring in 2015, and Leon Feliciano, the head football coach and physical education teacher who retired this year. Mr. McGurke also had a dual role leading a program that brings high school students to Tomales Elementary weekly to teach reading to first and second-graders.
Though the move to Piner High marks a big career opportunity for Mr. McGurke, leaving behind the girls soccer players has proved particularly tough. He reformed the team after a six-year absence and built the squad from a ragtag crew of around a dozen players—some of whom had never played the sport before—to a team on the cusp of a playoff bid this year. The team was so fresh in 2013 that the girls had to wear old, sleeveless uniforms in violation of league rules. “It kind of turned into a joke,” he said. “The referees would say, ‘You know those sleeves are illegal, right?’ But the girls didn’t care. They just wanted to play, so we went with it.”
The first two years, the team only notched one victory a season. Even so, Mr. McGurke said, the girls showed up energized at practice and workouts after a tough loss, determined to improve. The hard work paid off: this year, the team tallied seven wins and two ties, falling just two games shy of a playoff bid.
“This is an amazing group of girls,” Mr. McGurke said. “They are so committed to getting better and training hard. They just need a coach.”