Cardinal Newman coach Richard Sanchez eager to put his stamp on football team

When Cardinal Newman football coach Richard Sanchez graduated high school a little more than three decades ago, he decided that he’d follow in his father’s footsteps, hitting the open road in a big rig and becoming a trucker.

It didn’t take long to figure that wasn’t it.

“I was driving big rigs at 18,” Sanchez said. “About a year into it, I said, ‘All right, Pops, I’m going back to college.’ He said, ‘It’s about time.’”

If Sanchez knew then that he’d be crisscrossing the country for football coaching jobs frequently in the next 30 years, he might have kept the long-haul truck.

In the midst of his first season leading the Cardinals, Sanchez knows he has quite the challenge ahead of him, with an impressive act to follow at a school where performance is paramount.

But it’s far from the first challenge for the 54-year-old San Diego native and longtime coach who has worked at the NCAA Division I and NAIA levels, in the community college ranks and with high school football, with almost each step of the journey involving uprooting his family and moving on to the next opportunity.

In the past three decades, those opportunities have taken him from San Diego to, in order: the Los Angeles basin (Montclair High head coach), back to San Diego (San Diego High head coach), down the street (San Diego State graduate assistant for coach Ted Tollner), San Diego again (University of San Diego running backs coach) Indiana (Valparaiso University defensive backs coach), Sacramento (Sac State special teams coordinator), back to San Diego (St. Augustine High head coach), still in San Diego (San Diego State defensive backs and special teams coach) and finally his previous position as the assistant head coach/offensive coordinator at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida.

Despite being settled in Florida, and a reluctance to move on so quickly again, the eventual draw of a new challenge started to come around to him this past summer.

While on a recruiting trip in the Bay Area this summer for Southeastern, Sanchez had a phone call with longtime friend and Newman alum Matt Collins, the head coach of Hartnell College in Salinas, to inform him Sanchez wouldn’t be able to make it to Hartnell to recruit.

In the end, it was Sanchez who wound up being recruited.

According to Sanchez, Newman officials reached out to see if Collins would be interested in the Cardinals’ football job, and so while speaking to Sanchez, Collins asked him if he would be interested in the job.

“I didn’t really hear the conversation as much because I wasn’t interested,” Sanchez said.

But that lack of interest only lasted until he was walking his dog with his wife back home in Florida a few days later, when Cardinal Newman admissions director and defensive coordinator Patrick Piehl reached out.

Sanchez said the conversation with Piehl involved the story of how Cardinal Newman students had gone through multiple wildfires in recent years and how former coach Paul Cronin had left this past spring to become the head coach at Windsor High after 18 years.

It was everything Sanchez wanted to hear.

“I just felt attracted to helping, No. 1,” he said. “I knew I would be a good fit because the type of program they are, of being a Catholic school. I’m a Catholic guy and born and raised a Catholic. I wanted to be a part of that again.”

After Newman’s close 19-17 loss to rival Rancho Cotate on Friday night, Sanchez and a priest led his players in a sideline prayer.

“I felt that my calling would always end up back at high school,” he said.

So, once again, Sanchez packed it all up and moved back west. Although he acknowledged a big reason to come back was to be closer to family, the allure of leading a program like Newman’s was a big draw.

“We turned down several other jobs up to this point because I enjoyed what I was doing,” said Sanchez, who is also Newman’s associate athletic director.

He has an adult daughter who is married and lives in the Bay Area, and spending time with a future grandchild was a major part of the decision, he said.

“Just in case she planned on having any kids any time soon, I didn’t want to be away from that,” he said.

But the success on the football field remains his goal.

“Cardinal Newman, the traditions here and help raising these young men, is an honor and privilege,” he said. “Obviously, we need to get better as a football program.”

Through eight games, the team is 5-3 overall and 2-1 in the tougher North Bay League Oak Division.

The highly anticipated matchup between Newman and Windsor was canceled two weeks ago due to COVID-19 contact tracing in the Cardinals’ program, and this week’s regular-season finale against West County was pushed to Saturday as the Cardinals emerge from the related protocols.

The Cardinals’ winning record comes despite a lack of time for the team to completely adjust to Sanchez’s balanced pro-set offense.

“That’s nothing yet,” Sanchez said of the season so far.

Sanchez won multiple section titles at St. Augustine High School in San Diego in the past decade, reaching five straight section title games at one point. St. Augustine finished as runner-up in the Division 4 title game in 2012, then rose to complete in the Open Division, the CIF’s toughest, in that time. Sanchez’s teams won the section title in Division 2 (2013) and Division I (2014). He led one of his teams to a San Diego Section Open Division championship game, losing to Southern California power Helix in 2015, before getting back to the Division I title game in 2016.

His coaching mentor, San Diego Section coaching legend Gene Alim, still remembers Sanchez the football player at Sweetwater High.

“Richard was a part of an era at Sweetwater High School where we won 37 games in a row, something that’s very difficult here in San Diego,” Alim said.

Alim came to visit Sanchez for the Cardinals’ game against De Anza earlier this season and said he spent 90% of the game watching the Cardinals’ new coach.

“He’s intense on the sideline,” Alim said. “He’s very intense … I could see his brain working two or three plays down the road. You always do that as an offensive coordinator. You’re looking at plays and setting up a chess game.

“He plays that chess game very well. Very well.”

While talking to Alim before taking the Newman job, Sanchez told his mentor he didn’t know any of the coaches already on staff..

“I told him it’s quite an accomplishment — to prepare the coaches to pick up your system and execute it in such a short time is very impressive,” Alim said. “It’s not as easy as it looks, sometimes.”

And Sanchez doesn’t spend time thinking how his program compares with the success his predecessor brought to Newman.

“Well I don’t really think about it that much,” Sanchez said. “I have a program that I run. I know how to coach the coaches, I definitely know how to coach the systems we put in and install. I don’t think about it other than what the kids have learned and are used to, I see the difference. Whether it’s good or bad.

“I’m going to do things the way I think is the right way to do it. I don’t ever sit back and ponder, ‘Well, this is how Cronin did it.’ And he’s a legend. We sat down and had a great meeting for a couple of hours just to talk about Cardinal Newman and his experience. That went fantastic. I think he’s a great coach and obviously he’s coached a great program for many years.

“Is there any added pressure following a guy like that? I don’t feel pressure. I’m too old to worry about that kind of stuff … all I’m worried about is winning games and being successful with the kids and how we develop our kids.”