‘I’ve been the luckiest guy’: Key Sacramento-area high school football coach steps down
Eric Cavaliere addressed his team as head coach one final time Monday afternoon.
The outgoing Oak Ridge High School football leader told his group that he was stepping down as their coach but not stepping away as a faculty member. He will be around and available.
Cavaliere hopes to continue coaching — is the golf gig open? — on campus, or in some football capacity on the El Dorado Hills campus, but he is ready for a recharge after 14 successful seasons heading one of the premier programs in the Sac-Joaquin Section.
“I’m an emotional person, and I have a hard time getting through a team banquet or letter-of-intent signing days, so I knew I’d be a mess, but I got through it just fine,” Cavaliere said. “I wanted to assure our players that I’ll still be here. I’ll help the next coach, whoever that may be, in any way that person needs, and I reminded the kids that they’re going to get a top-level candidate and that expectations are still high. Our goal is to always get better.”
Cavaliere spent 26 seasons as a varsity assistant coach and has been in football nonstop as a coach or as a player since his Vacaville High School days for nearly 40 years. He isn’t stepping down due to health, or to spend more time for family, the usual reasons coaches cite. Nor is it parental pressure or any heat from administration. This has been in the works for more than a year.
“Me stepping down is not anything tied to a negative reason at all,” Cavaliere said. “I’m as healthy as can be. My family loves me coaching and probably prefers me out of the house. I just want to mix it up, to try something different. My No. 1 priority is to support the new coach. I may help by being an assistant, or an administrative assistant, whatever he may need. My ultimate goal is to coach freshman football someday. I really want to do that, to get back to the basics of the game, the fun and joy of that level.”
Cavaliere isn’t the only Oak Ridge household name who has stepped down. So did Mark Watson, the Trojans head coach in the 1990s and early 2000s who worked as the quarterback coach for Cavaliere.
All stepped down as varsity head coach to recharge. The grind never ends, and it only intensified during a pandemic. Oak Ridge won the 2019 section Division I championship and expected another title run in the fall, a season pushed into the spring.
Despite going 2-4 in the shortened season, Cavaliere said his staff “did a great job,” considering all the off-field challenges during such tense and uncertain times.
Watson groomed Ian Book, who went on to win more games than any starting quarterback in the history of Notre Dame football, and Justin Lamson, The Bee’s 2019 Player of the Year who graduated early to enroll at Syracuse.
Watson has coached for 42 seasons.
“It is the end of quite an era with Mark stepping down because he’s been the heart and soul of this program since 1989,” Cavaliere said. “I am so proud of what we’ve done here. This is a school and a program where kids grow up here, live here, bought in here and it’s what I grew up knowing in Vacaville. It’s what I dreamed of being a part of. It seemed like a dream come true to end up at a place like this.”
Cavaliere said he enjoys teaching health and physical education on campus, and he cherishes having his own two kids graduate from Oak Ridge in Connor and Hannah. The next coach will have an on-campus job.
“I honestly and truly believe this when I say it, and it may sound biased, or that I’m selling this job, but there is not a better place to teach or coach than at Oak Ridge in all of Northern California,” Cavaliere said. “I’ve been the luckiest guy. It’s a great job. Everything is here to succeed: administrative support, the community with one high school, motivated kids who want to be here, coaches who love being here. This is the unicorn of coaching jobs.”