Head Coach of the Choate Football program, Mr. Lawrence Spinnato, spends countless hours offering insight and support to his players, both as football team members and as young men. His experience and coaching method have brought a fresh perspective to the team. I had the privilege of sitting down with him to talk about his experience coaching and what makes the Choate football team so successful.
Laila Hawkins ’19: How long have you been coaching football? Have you always coached high school prep?
Lawrence Spinnato: I began my career at Northfield Mount Hermon, as soon as I graduated from Amherst. I was an assistant coach there for two years. And now, this is my ninth year at Choate, so I have always coached prep school.
For six of my years here, I worked under some great coaches. Tony Martone and Eric Cooper both did a great job. Tony Martone was the head coach for my first two years. Then I served as Associate Head Coach under Eric Cooper, who was Head Coach for four very successful years. Then, I was named Head Coach for the 2014 season, so this is my third season with that position.
LH: What are you most proud of in regard to your team?
LS: For the coaching staff and players alike, I am most proud of their commitment, their love for each other, and their work ethic. We have a lot of fun. We work hard, but we have fun.
LH: What are your hopes for the team, and what do you think they can work on?
LS: I think, like with any team, we are constantly pursuing perfection — not a perfect record, just perfect execution. And that’s really all we should be aiming for. I think looking for anything else is probably a mistake. But, still, we never do anything perfectly. So we are always hungry for something. Yeah, it’s fun to win, but if we are constantly pursuing something greater than just a score, we’ll always want to improve.
LH: So you kind of have a philosophy where you don’t worry about the long run, but the here-and-now.
LS: Don’t worry about anything other than doing what you are supposed to do for six seconds at a time. Then, things usually work out. Focus on each individual play or defensive call and do your best to execute what was called. Then move on to the next.
So we don’t talk about winning, and we don’t set goals for championships. We just do our job. This was new to Choate, but in my opinion, it makes perfect sense at the end of the day.
LH: Based on what I have heard from athletes in general, coaches can be like family. How does it feel to have that role in student’s lives?
LS: I think they have the same impact on me. One thing that I love about coaching at Choate is that the kids here are so special. They are smart and mature, and we can coach them harder than the average high school athlete. It’s an incredible honor to work with these 55 kids, plus managers. It’s tough, but it’s awesome.
I think life is about relationships, and football is all about relationships. The ability to build relationships in a football program is so easy, so fluid, so natural, because you’re all going through, honestly, hell together. You start to bond and forge lifelong relationships.
LH: How have you seen the team dynamic change from year to year?
LS: Oh, it’s so weird. Every year, there’s the same group of coaches, but you never know what the dynamic is going to be within the team. When we took over the program as a group of coaches in 2014, we weren’t expected to do well, because we had just come off of a losing season. But the whole season played out like a Disney movie. They just kept winning and winning. The kids focused on the right things — what they needed to do each and every play, the decisions they made off the field, and the relationships that they had with each other. We had three excellent captains, incredible figureheads, who really set the tone for our program’s future. After 2014, there was a target on our backs because we had shocked the league. The 2015 and 2016 teams had to deal with being the teams that everyone wanted to beat.
The dynamic has been really neat this year because we have kids from all over the world and three day students as captains. Those three, Matt Albino ’17, Sam Blank ’17, and Jake Kastenhuber ’17, along with the other seniors, have been able to connect the team really well and set a good example. They can get along with and motivate anyone. So within this group of kids that come from everywhere, even the first-time players feel loved and valued because of our senior leadership.
