The Clipboard

With fall sports less than a week away, Seaforth coaches discuss challenges, excitement levels

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The opening of Seaforth High School is upon us, which means that the Hawks are closer than ever to suiting up for the first time, donning their sleek crimson and gray and competing as Chatham County’s sixth high school in the Mid-Carolina 1A/2A conference. With the Hawks set to fly onto the scene this fall, the News + Record spoke with three coaches — Terrance Gary (football), P.J. Petrides (tennis) and Giovanni Viana (soccer) — who have played instrumental parts in the creation of Seaforth’s athletic department and are sure to make noise once sports resume on Aug. 16.

Terrance Gary — a 2004 graduate of Guilford College, where he played football — is no stranger to coaching, having spent the last 13 as a head football coach and defensive coordinator, among other roles with different recreational teams, middle school teams and even a women’s semi-professional team, the Carolina Phoenix, before making a four-year stop at Northwood as its special teams coordinator and quarterbacks coach, his role this past season.

P.J. Petrides — a 2006 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, where he played tennis under legendary coach Sam Paul — spent his post-grad career in both Oklahoma and Colorado, where tennis was a side activity rather than a career. However, just a few years ago, he moved back to N.C. and took the job as the head coach for the J.V. boys tennis team at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh before taking the varsity head coaching position at Seaforth.

Giovanni Viana — a 2000 graduate of the University of Miami — has more than 20 years of coaching experience from all over the map, which doesn’t even account for all of the time he put in as a player before making the switch. He’s been an assistant coach in Brazil, where he also played professionally, along with being a head women’s soccer coach at Newbury College and Beaver Country Day High School, as well as the head men’s soccer coach at Brookline High School and assistant coach at Lasell College, all of which took place in Massachusetts. Since then, he’s spent the last seven years as a youth coach with N.C. Football Club (NCFC) before taking over the Seaforth program this offseason.

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

TERRANCE GARY, FOOTBALL HEAD COACH

This is your first high school head coaching gig. What’s your plan to make sure it’s a successful one?

TERRANCE GARY: To set a standard of what the expectations are. Yesterday, we had a talk — we always talk about this — about effort. We set the bar high on effort and energy. We’re not going to bring any negative energy after practice, whether it’s your attitude or your body language. Effort is 100% from the first time you step a toenail onto the field and when you step off of that field, even when you’re in class, we’re all effort. In this program, nobody’s going to out-effort us. We’re going to win the national championship in effort and energy every single day.

What has this summer been like for you and the rest of the Seaforth athletic staff with trying to build both a football program and athletic department from the ground up?

Full of surprises. When you’re starting things from scratch and you’ve always been in places where you already have the sled there, so you have to maybe get a part for the sled, it’s a lot different. You’ll order a lot of stuff and you’re like, ‘Man, I didn’t know I needed this or that chinstraps didn’t come with helmets.’ We ordered a chute that came yesterday and I’m thinking the whole chute’s going to be put together and I’d just unload it off the truck, but it came in like a million pieces with four pieces of directions. And I’m not handy, so it was a challenge.

You guys started tryouts last week, so how have those been up to this point? What are the participation numbers looking like for this upcoming season?

We’ve got 30-plus kids. The thing about being in this county compared to other places that I’ve been — I’ve kind of had some experience with it by coaching the women’s (semi-pro) team — is that a lot of people out here, a lot of kids out here don’t have experience with football, so even though you have a 9th grader or a 10th grader, this is like the first time they’ve ever played actual football or put shoulder pads on or buttoned their chinstrap, so you’ve got to teach all of those things too. It’s patience. I’ve done it before with a group that I’ve coached, but it’s got to bring a realization to everybody else that these kids have never stepped on a field. I think out of the 30 kids we have, we have eight or nine that have actually played a football game before.

Coaching is teaching. I don’t know why people try to separate them. You start from the foundation, the fundamentals, you teach you all of that. You look at this year — the victories are going to be different this year. They’re not necessarily going to be on a scoreboard, but it’s going to be that “Little Johnny” has progressed so much within his first year, then seeing “Little Johnny” when he’s in 12th grade and see how much he’s changed and stuff. It’s those victories in a weight room, beating maxes or getting deep enough in a squat. It’s small things, coming together as a family, being a community and seeing everything grow.

One of the largest differences between being a special teams coordinator and being a head coach is that you’re having to manage all aspects of the team rather than one specific unit. How are you preparing yourself to coach offense, defense and special teams this season?

I’m pretty organized when it comes to my football stuff, I think that helps out a lot. It helps having a good staff, too. We have a pretty good staff here, and I’ve got one guy that coached at Northwood, so he knows me, he knows I have some quirks about being organized and everybody else being organized, too. Just like with the student athletes, I set a certain standard for the coaches, as well. And they have responsibilities, too. I’m not going to micromanage, but if you’re not doing something up to the standard, then I have to say something because that reflects on the whole program. I’m not going to do everything, either, so if certain coaches, if they’re good at something, I’m going to let them do it. It’s better than me trying to do everything and stressing myself out even more.

I kind of like that stuff, the logistics and trying to be the most efficient at practice and seeing where we started from day one and the first practice over the summer to where we’re getting at now. The first couple practices, people out here really don’t know football, but summer is a very important time, so just seeing the progress from that first day that we actually had an official practice until that last game, just to see how much we can build with defense, offense and techniques. Man, I don’t know, I just love that stuff.

If there’s one or two things you’d want incoming athletes to know about you and your coaching style, what would they be?

I’m not as mean as I look. I’m a pretty nice guy. I don’t talk a lot, but I’m pretty easy to get along with as long as you’re doing what you need to do. Incoming athletes need to know that I’m going to have a high standard for them, as well as myself, so they might not have that standard for themselves, but I’m still going to hold them up to that standard. A lot of people can do better than what they think, it’s all about your mindset.

You’re not necessarily in the business of making predictions, but if you had to project how this season’s going to go, what would you say?

It’s going to go well. I mean, we’re not going to win the state championship, obviously, since we’re J.V., but this year, we’re laying that brick in the foundation. We want that to be a solid brick, we don’t want a hollow brick to build on top of. We talked yesterday about how that was the third practice in the history of the school and when they’re old and when their kids and grandkids go here, they want to be able to say that they were a good start to this program, they’ll be able to wear their Seaforth stuff with pride.

What does it mean to you that you’re the first football coach ever at Seaforth?

It’s very humbling, but also, it’s hard to put into words, but I get to put my footprint on it without following behind somebody else. It’s also kind of like a catch-22, though, because if the person in front of me wasn’t good, then I would have higher expectations of myself to be better than that person, but if the person’s great, like Bear Bryant or somebody, then I’d have to follow behind Bear Bryant. But right now, it’s just me and I’m going to set the bar really high. And when I get too old to be able to walk around or whatever, hopefully I have somebody underneath me that’ll be ready to take over and keep that same standard, so that when I’m 89, I can come back and stand on the sideline and do something.

What are you looking forward to most about the season starting in just a couple of weeks?

Just football in general. I didn’t find out that I got the job until pretty late, so I was late getting started and getting staff together and all of that. Anybody that knows me knows that I’m football 24/7. My wife would tell you that I’ve got little pieces of paper with football stuff on it all over the house and she’ll find it when we clean up. I just love everything about football, man. I really love practice, almost more than the game. Putting all of that stuff together, the chess match between the coaches, preparing the kids and finding out what we do best, what we don’t do that well and trying to get better at it than the other team, every freakin’ minute thing about football. Analytics, everything, just all of that stuff that comes out on Thursday on Friday nights. I love it.

P.J. PETRIDES, HEAD COACH, MEN’S & WOMEN’S TENNIS

With all of the chaos of starting an athletic department from scratch, what has this summer been like for you and the tennis program as a whole?

P.J. PETRIDES: It’s been a challenge because we can’t just start a workout and just wing it and just go with the flow. We really have to have a game plan from every workout to every practice to every match because we’re dealing with just freshmen and sophomores here, some who are just beginning the game and some who may be intermediate but not super advanced yet. I know that I’m going to have some time with these ladies to develop them, but the biggest thing has been to taper expectations for everybody. I don’t want people to think we’re going to come in and just start blowing everybody off the court. We’re going to have a lot of bumps and bruises along the way and it’s just important to really have a game plan so that we can get through some of these tough days I’m sure we’re going to have coming up.

We’re jumping into varsity this year and we’ve got two scrimmages starting this week, then on the 16th, we open at Northwood, just right away. Last week we had to postpone tryouts because of the rain, so we only got really one day of tryouts on Wednesday, and then we had a full practice Thursday and postponed Friday, so it was like, “All right, we’re going right into the fire here.” But that’s been the thing, I’ve been talking to the girl’s parents like, “Hey, I’m super happy y’all are positive here and it’s fantastic for us. Please keep that momentum going, even when there are some bad times,” so that’s the thing is we’re trying to get going and get our expectations going.

What has the interest level been in tennis so far this summer among incoming students?

Pretty good. The summer workouts were optional. I offered different start times to try to make sure some people could come or not, make sure schedules would work. I would say, over the summer, we had anywhere from 12 to 15 players come out and have a workout. At tryouts this week, we had a total of 14. We’re going to keep 12 total, which I think is a pretty solid number for tennis and that’ll be good for everybody for practices, too. I was impressed. I’ve heard soccer has gotten great numbers for tryouts, too, and volleyball, so I’m very glad that these kids are coming out and wanting to participate.

You mentioned that there will undoubtedly be “bumps and bruises” along the way, but what will be some of the keys to fielding a competitive team of underclassmen at the varsity level this year?

I think a lot of ways for us that we’re going to be able to have an edge is each match that we’re going to go into, these girls are going to have a game plan. I’m going to — and that’s the beauty of my background and me having seen 25 years worth of experience and seeing all different kinds of tennis players along the way, from the good and the bad — I’m going to be able to know within the first 10 to 15 minutes or so where the opponent’s weaknesses are. I’m going to be able to go up to our player-in-coaching and give them a kind of game plan and say, “Hey, if you follow this path, if you continue to hit it to her backhand two times in a row, you’re going to get her to make a short ball or a mistake soon.” And that’s where we’re going to take advantage. So I think our edge this year is going to be to out-think and outwork the other players because we are going to be going up against older, bigger, stronger players. So we have to come up with ways that we’re going to compete and I think just being organized and having a solid game plan in the match is going to be our best chance to try to get some points on the board.

If there’s one or two things you’d want incoming athletes to know about you and your coaching style, what would they be?

My coaching style is that I’m going to give you what you’re going to give out with me. I don’t set an expectation that you have to meet or else I don’t want you on my court. Our match practice times are from 5:30 to 7:00. During that period, we have our drills, we have our things that we’re going to do to get better. I want you to buy in and participate. If you don’t, then I’m going to notice, and you will be adjusted accordingly in the roster. But my hope, my hope is to provide as much of a positive experience in practice and my coaching during our matches, I want that to be encouraging to our players, so that they want to continue to be competitive and try to win. I would just say that my style is going to be a positive reinforcement on the stakes and definitely encouragement to continue to work hard because that’s how we’re going to get better over the season is just getting after it.

Last season, with all of the sports taking place in the spring semester, the women’s tennis season was hot, rainy and sometimes just flat-out miserable. How are you feeling now that things are back on schedule and you won’t have to necessarily battle the weather on a regular basis?

I’m very glad that we don’t have to deal with, “Well, is it over 90 degrees humidity today? OK, I’ve got to cancel practice.” I’d much rather look out in the sky and say “Oh, well there’s some rain, so we’ve got to cancel.” From that standpoint, it’s a lot easier to communicate with the players. But there’s an extra level of hope this season, in addition to being at a new school, that maybe, if we continue to do everything right — and comply with all of the policies, whatever our school policy says and the county policies say — if we continue to do everything right, just maybe we’ll have a good season and not have to be subject to cancellations or postponements. There’s an additional sense of hope there for a lot of our players and for myself, too, in addition to being at a new school and new team. It’s more of jinx thing, like if I say it out loud, I don’t really want it to blow back up in my face, but that’s kind of where I’m at. We’re hoping and definitely crossing our fingers that we’re going to be good to go this season.

Now that you’ve put in the work — and the players have put in a lot of the work, too ­— what’s your excitement level for the season to start?

Through the roof. Absolutely through the roof. To quote a fellow Tar Heel alum, “The ceiling is the roof” for us. And I cannot wait to get started. I feel like every time Coach Jason Amy goes on vacation, I just call him nonstop, like “Coach, I’m sorry, I just want to make sure that this form is good to go,” because I don’t want anything to stop me from starting the season or any of my players, it’s just been such a long process this summer to get to this point. I’m so glad we’ve gotten done with our first week of practice and now we can really start focusing on these matches coming up and, hopefully, a really fun season for everybody.

GIOVANNI VIANA, HEAD COACH, MEN’S & WOMEN’S SOCCER

You’ve coached seemingly all over the place, from Brazil to Boston, so what have those experiences taught you that’s going to help you lead this program at Seaforth?

GIOVANNI VIANA: I think the biggest thing I have learned is that I’ve learned different ways to build relationships with different personalities. I think that the great coaches, they get to know their players well and they learn what motivates them. Different players have different motivations. For some, it’s all about winning, some it’s about camaraderie, some it’s about praise, it’s all different. And learning the little things that makes each kid perform at the highest level or that makes each kid feel special in a certain way and build those deep relationships with them, I think that is the biggest thing I have learned throughout my journey. I think when you’re a young coach and you start out, you have all these grandiose ideas and you kind of want to impose those ideas on kids , but now I’m much more about getting buy-in from the group. I’ve become more of a player’s coach in my older age, where I try to include them as much as possible, make them feel part of the project, get to know what makes them tick and hopefully find positive ways to get the best out of them.

Have you ever been in a situation like Seaforth, where you kind of had to build a program from the ground up? How does it compare?

I’ve been on a program that was borderline on probation for not being able to field a squad. When I took over Newbury College’s women’s team, they had five returning players. The coach had just done a poor job with recruiting. Imagine a college program with five returning players. The coach had kind of let their whole recruiting thing go and their previous class was slim and then there was some turmoil on the team with personalities and a bunch of kids quit, so when I took over the job, it was like, “Oh my god, we have five kids.” They couldn’t get together for the spring season, which is a violation of the conference rules at the time, they weren’t able to field the team for the spring season, so I came in and was able to go out and recruit 13 players and fielded a team that was mostly freshmen for my first season there and we made it all the way to the quarterfinals with a class of all freshmen, so that was probably the most challenging situation that I had. We lost on a P.K. shootout. We had a couple breakaways there that had my striker been a little bit more technical, we could have walked away and gone to the semis, so that was a program that I literally built from scratch. At Beaver Country Day School, they had like one win in five years, it was a private school that I coached in Massachusetts, too, and, again, we went to the conference playoff my first season there and were able to get six wins, but I think the Newbury College one, where you’re coming in and you have five returning players and you have to recruit like a maniac in the spring season, that was probably my best hocus-pocus job.

What has the soccer program been up to this summer as part of the school’s first offseason?

Coach Jason Amy said he wanted to get some more training in, but the challenge was that most of the kids were on vacation, so I kind of had a mixed group. One of the days in June, I had 13 kids out there, boys and girls. Most of the soccer junkies came out, the high-level club kids came out. We had three trainings a week through the whole month of June and then in July, we had the two dead periods where were only able to train one week. I kind of went through basics, just to see where these kids are at. With these kids — even the club kids, where there’s so many different levels of coaching experience at clubs — you never really know what they know or don’t know, so I kind of went through the basics of defending, basics of attacking, basics of possession, just the basic things in a game to see what they understood, terminology and stuff like that. Since doing that, I’ve been putting together some documents to teach them. I just saw that there was a lot of varying knowledge on the team of who understood the basics of the game, even though they knew how to play, they kind of didn’t understand a lot of things that are important from a classroom standpoint to understand and be able to play the game positionally. There’s a lot of work to be done there, but we tried to address a little bit of everything and that’s been the approach, now, in the offseason, getting ready for Chapter B. We started with defending, then we’re working on team possession, then we’re going to work on offense and we’re going to train set pieces, then test some formations at these three scrimmages we have coming up.

With this being a brand new program, what are your expectations for this upcoming season?

That we compete. When you first think about it, like, “Wow, I’m going to have 14- and 15-year-olds playing against 17- and 18-year-olds,” so you know that the speed of the game is going to be faster. These older boys are going to be more physical, they’re going to run faster, so you know you’re not going to have a lot of time on the ball, so I’m like, “OK, if we can move the ball quickly, if we cannot be static, we’re going to be able to compete if we can be solid defensively.” My whole point right now is just trying to compete and still develop. I don’t want to focus on results. I know it’s cliche to say it’s not about the results, but it’s really not, it’s about building for the future, because you have freshmen and one sophomore going to play varsity against teams that have been together, kids that have been together for a long time, coaches that have been there, so it’s going to be a real challenge. It’s about making sacrifices, maybe playing the positions you don’t like, but that you’re good at, to help the team. Just compete. I want them to compete. I don’t want to sit down and defend for 90 minutes, I want to try to play a game. But my expectations are that we’re able to compete, that I can teach them enough, based on my experience — I’ve already talked to a lot of the boys and they’re picking it up like sponges — and just teach them enough so that we can we can be competitive.

If there’s one or two things that incoming students — especially student-athletes interested in soccer — should know about you and your coaching style, what are they?

I’m a player’s coach, I seek the players input, I want them to be a part of the process, I involve them in the decision-making process. I explain everything I do, I don’t dictate to the kids. A lot of times, kids will have a coach that tells them XYZ and then I’ll call them and I’ll tell them ABC and they’ll be like, “Well Coach, my so-and-so coach said this,” and I’ll sit down with them and explain why there’s not one right way to play soccer. There’s multiple ways and I try to explain to them why I think my way’s best and then, hopefully, they can buy into that. They’re going to learn things from me that they haven’t learned from any other coach and it’s hard to say that without trying to sound grandiose — I’m a coach that’s still learning every day, I’m always seeking out new knowledge — but I just think that there are a lot of coaches out there that just have never been at a high level, have never coached a high level and don’t really understand some of the intricacies of the game. There’s all these intricacies of who you are in the moment on the field and if you don’t know that, you can’t play collectively, so right off the bat, I see, “OK, there’s a lot of knowledge that need to impart on these kids.” I think that a lot of coaches just focus on formations and the basics of the game, but not the educational part of the game. It’s really important for players to know what their roles are on the field because your role dictates what your responsibility is at a given moment. There’s a lot of learning to be done and I think that’s one thing I’ve found in my 20-plus years coaching in America, especially, is that a lot of kids will get formation and they’ll get basic roles and duties of the positions, but they’re not really taught the overall responsibilities beyond their unique positions. I’m a very educational coach.

Now that the program has spent the summer working, what’s your excitement level for the season to start?

I’m beyond excited. I just want to get there and see. I think these scrimmages that we have coming up, this Jamboree on Aug. 14, is going to tell me a lot, because I know club soccer really well in North Carolina. I’ve been coaching North Carolina Football Club for seven years at all levels, so I get it. I know NCFC is the big club, I know that our kids are usually more talented than the other teams and I know the other teams are usually more physical. In my seven years with NCFC, most of the games I lost, I lost because the other team are just more physical, more aggressive and our kids weren’t, but we always dominated possession, we always played better, we always played soccer, we didn’t play this direct long-ball that a lot of people play. My excitement level, based on the talent, the ability of this core of 12-13 players that have played high-level soccer is giddy. It’s just now pulling it all together, just kind of seeing if the high school level correlates to the club level. I’m pumped up about my team, I just kind of have that curiosity of what am I going to face? How does it look out there? Once I go through this first season and see what our opponents look like, then I’m going to be in a much better position, not only for when I coach the girls in spring, but to tweak for next season for the boys. It’s all excitement right now. It’s kind of like, let’s get there, let’s see what it looks like, let’s get an idea and just start playing.