After coaching head varsity football for 10 years, Coach Sunil Smith left to coach football at Hartnell College. This resulted in Alisal having to find a new head varsity coach. Coming from Santa Maria High School Coach Corey Costanza took interest in coaching Alisal after a friend mentioned the coaching opportunity, despite not knowing anything about Alisal.  Costanza decided to come to Alisal because he saw it as a “challenge” and said, “I like a good challenge. I knew the boys had a great season last year and as my first time being head varsity coach I felt like I could take this challenge in helping the boys succeed.”

Costanza played football in UC Davis. He played as a linebacker and defensive end for four years. After his playing days were over he got a coaching job at UC Davis as an assistant coach where he coached for one year. After UC Davis, Alhambra High School in Martinez California reached out to Costanza to coach as an assistant coach for three years. After Alhambra, Costanza coached at few different high schools up and down the state, but mostly up north. He has 10 years of coaching experience, coaching freshman, junior varsity, and assisting at the varsity level, but has never been a head varsity coach, until now.

Last year, his Santa Maria team wasn’t strong, winning only won one game. But that didn’t intimidate Costanza; he was ready to take on a new chapter on his coaching career. When Costanza first arrived at Alisal he said, “My first impressions of the boys were that they were great, very respectful, and seemed to really want to play football.” He also said, “This made it easier on coaching because I felt comfortable; Coach Smith did a really good job on the football program.” Costanza also felt that he had a strong group of boys and can have a lot of success throughout the season.

On the team’s performance so far, Costanza says he is proud of them. He says that jamboree was a great and fun way to start off the season. Although Ricky Muniz suffered a knee injury at the jamboree, he says he is glad that Lorenzo Novoa was able to step up and take over Ricky’s position with such a great performance in the Soledad and Alvarez games. Costanza said, “I hope that Ricky is able to recover in a month. Ricky is such a great player; he is what we call an x-factor, with Ricky the team has more weapons.”

Against King City, Costanza said how he was worried because King City had bigger boys, but that wasn’t a problem. The team was able to take the victory home with the score of 26 to 8, and brought the team’s record to 1-2 going into the Homecoming game.

The Homecoming game completed a happy ending to the day and the preseason with a 22-19 win over North County. Costanza said, “I was happy for the boys that they won their homecoming game especially for the seniors, but I was disappointed in how many mistakes they made. They should have won by 40 points.” Though the boys didn’t do as well as expected, Costanza highly believes they can reach their potential in being one of the top teams in the league. Costanza feels in order to survive in this tough league they need to stop making as many mistakes because the boys have shown him that they are great players.

When it comes to expectations for the team, Costanza said, “I don’t feel pressured into making sure the boys play as well as they did last year, but I feel that as a football coach we always feels pressure to have the team do well.  I know it will be a difficult task for the boys to repeat what they had last year, but what I do feel pressured for is to have the boys have their own identity and being successful in that way.” Costanza expects the boys to be able to keep giving their all when stepping foot on football field as well as them to keep working hard in every practice because “game day is like payday”, meaning that boys work hard all week long and once the Friday night lights shine it’s the boys time to show exactly how hard they have been working.