Longtime Grant High School football coach Alberghini ‘stunned’ by end of coaching career
Mike Alberghini exited the barber shop late Wednesday morning, marveling at what was done to his otherwise smooth dome.
“There wasn’t a lot of artistry done,” the old coach said with a laugh.
Something else was weighing on Alberghini’s mind: the sudden end of an era for regional sports. Alberghini was still digesting that he is no longer the head football coach at Grant High School, effective days earlier when he met with school principal Darris Hinson, who offered a lot of thanks for a career well done but punctuated the discussion with the dreaded theme of, “we’re going in a different direction.”
It pained Alberghini to recall the conversation. Grant has been his football program since 1991, his school since 1969 and his legacy starting when kids long ago told him they had changed their lives. Alberghini was a tireless advocate of kids of any walk of life, any passion. He won a Sac-Joaquin Section record 282 games and is so revered that the football field bears his name. All of this work was done on a campus in the heart of gritty Del Paso Heights, where sports bind the generations and keep kids on track; students won’t call him “Coach” or “Mr. Alberghini”, but simply, “Coach Al.”
Hinson said he told Alberghini he is welcome to remain with the program as a mentor to the coaches, but the program is being turned over to longtime assistant coach and one-time Pacers linebacker Carl Reed. Alberghini said it was his expectation he would coach one more season before bowing out. As he closes in on 75 years old, he has slowed physically, no longer barks to the point that it peels paint, but he still has a zest to coach.
“I feel good for Carl and I like Carl very much, but I was still stunned by this,” Alberghini said. “I just didn’t think this would be the way I’d go out. I was angered by it at first. When you’ve been at a school for more than 50 years and you’ve done a pretty good job ... I don’t know. It may turn out to be a good thing. Maybe it’s time to get off the old treadmill and slow down.”
Alberghini paused and added, “I’m still trying to digest it. I know I don’t want to go to another school to coach in any capacity. I’ve been at Grant my whole life. That’s where I belong. It’s home. I wanted this to be my own decision. That’s what upsets me.”
“It’s humbling to be Coach Al’s successor, the greatest coach of all time in this section, and I was part of it as a player for him, and it’s a great opportunity,” Reed said. “I’m excited and excited for the program.”
Alberghini retired as a full-time Grant faculty member years ago but has the last several seasons has taught one physical education course. He is undecided if he wants to return in that role. Coaches as famed as Alberghini also can be let go as a head coach because they have yearly at-will contracts.
Won his record 282nd and final game
A 1988 Grant graduate and a school administrator for 22 years, Hinson said he can feel for Alberghini. Grant went 2-0 this shortened spring season, capped by the spirited Pacers rally to defeat Capital Christian on April 16. The postgame scene included an ecstatic Reed, also the school’s athletic director, presenting Alberghini with the game ball for the milestone 282nd victory with players shouting, “We love you, Coach Al!”
Said Grant senior Donovan Laban not long after scoring the game winner at Capital Christian, “Coach Al is Grant football, and we’re all excited to play for him. What an honor.”
Reed is a Grant product to a core, as is his father, Lynn Reed, another fixture on the Grand Avenue campus for years.
“The thing I love about Carl Reed is his humility and humbleness, and he’ll preserve Coach Al’s amazing legacy,” Hinson said. “We want Al to remain as a coaching mentor, and nothing can change his legacy and what he’s done. I approached it as Carl and his staff are young and hungry and they would continue to benefit from his great mentorship. The conversation I had with Al wasn’t about pushing him out but setting the stage to continue his legacy.”
Alberghini pondered coaching retirement before his final game, but what does a man do after football has consumed so much of his life? Alberghini doesn’t golf, fish, gamble or shop. His biggest love is Mary, his bride of more than 40 years. She bear-hugged her husband after many a championship moment on the field but stopped attending games several years ago to avoid the temptation to reach over and flog the next guy who second-guessed every play.
“I don’t know what I’ll do now,” Alberghini said. “I’ll have to find that new niche in my life. We’ll do a little traveling. I owe Mary so many special days and dates for all the time she’s let me commit to coaching. Maybe I can start rewarding her.”
Baseball kid does good
Alberghini was a baseball kid at Mira Loma High School in the in the 1960s who never played a down of football. He played baseball at Sacramento State and thought he’d play the sport forever. Then reality set in during a heart-to-heart with his Sac State coach and mentor Cal Boyes.
“I could be a knucklehead at times back then but Cal, what a great man, helped me with a career plan,” Alberghini said.
Boyes told young Al to get into teaching and coaching, to make a difference, to shape young lives. Alberghini started teaching physical education in the Grant district in 1969 when he was 23. He coached varsity baseball for 18 successful seasons, ending in 1991, and he was the football defensive coordinator throughout the 1980s. Alberghini’s first Grant football team as head coach was in 1991, a campaign that started with the Pacers unranked by The Bee. Grant peeled off its first of eight 10-0 regular seasons under Alberghini.
Coach Al won 17 league championships, seven section banners and the breakthrough 2008 CIF State Open Division championship with a late rally to stun national No. 3 Long Beach Poly. All of Sacramento rooted for him and the Pacers that night in Carson. Upon a triumphant return to Sacramento, there were parades downtown, Coach Al waving as the man of the hour.
He also made sure he left a Grant cap in the Poly locker room with a block G on it, explaining later, “They’ll think the G stands for God or Grant, but they’ll know we were here.”
A shambling prince in a T-shirt
Alberghini was a shambling prince in a T-shirt, shorts and that familiar Pacers cap at Grant, always in motion, always taking a moment to say hello, to check on students, his blue eyes blood shot from too much sun or too many hours on the grind. He was deemed the school’s “Godfather” by former principal Craig Murray, who told The Bee in 2012, “There’s just one of him. I don’t think the school would still be standing if he wasn’t still here.”
On campus, Coach Al called students “brother” or “sweetie”, depending on gender. Everyone trusted him. A distraught girl might tell him she was pregnant, afraid to tell her parents. He would console her and urge her to let her parents know.
Scholars would use Alberghini’s stuffy old office to study up for a calculus exam. He gave more rides home for students after school or games than a chaperone on prom night. Alberghini appealed to his players because he connected with them, a white coach surrounded by diversity. He once joked that he could curse in eight different languages.
Alberghini often told his players the grim truth, or, as people tend to say now, he kept it real. He would tell a captive audience of players before a big game that school and football can be a ticket out of the rough streets here, or, “prisons are full but there’s always room for anyone who wants to throw their life away. Don’t be that guy.”
He urged his players to not allow any bullying on campus, saying, “People respect Grant football players here. Do your part to make it a safe campus.”
Loss of players to violence pained Al
Loss always pained Alberghini. For all of his championships, it was the near-misses that hurt him more than the joys of triumph, explaining to me several times, “coaches always have next season. Seniors don’t. You feel for those kids.”
Image also bothered the coach. In 1996, I covered a Grant home game from atop the press box when a nobody with a gun peeled out of the parking lot in the third quarter and fired a shot into the air. The bullet landed harmlessly, but it blew holes in Grant’s home image. League opponents refused to play night games at Grant, so Alberghini took it out on them by running them ragged, some scores as high as 81-6.
He apologized for none of it, and he bristled after a Bee poll generated angry thoughts on Alberghini, be it book keepers, probation officers, carpenters, coaches or housewives.
“What really hurt was seeing housewives quoted in the newspaper knocking me,” Alberghini said then. “At least when coaches knock me, we can settle it down the road on the field. What am I supposed to say to a house wife?”
Alberghini especially hurt in losing people, including players and assistant coaches to gun violence or murder-suicide or kids to the streets. He celebrated former Pacers who reached the NFL, including Shaq Thompson, who has called Alberghini, “the greatest guy.”
When popular Pacer football player J.J. Clauvo was shot while driving three teammates for a quick food run in 2015, hours before a home playoff game, a teammate took the wheel of the car and hustled right back to Grant. Not to the hospital, but to campus, where he knew Alberghini would be there to help. Clauvo was gone by the time Coach Al could rush over to hug him.
Days later, the playoff game moved to a Monday night, players and coaches from seemingly every school in the region lined the Grant field during a moving moment of silence. Everyone had team uniforms on, all of it testament to the old coach and man, all saying without words that they were there in support, that they shared his grief and the school’s loss.
“There isn’t anyone better for these kids than Coach Al,” said Reverend Tommie Williams after that game. He was a longtime Grant statistician and spiritual leader. “As great of a coach Al is, he’s an even better humanitarian. We’d be lost without him.”
On-field losses also stung the coach. Grant and Alberghini led the region in victories in the 1990s and in the 2000s, but the area closed the gap on the fierce and ferocious Pacers in the last decade. His last great team was the 2014 group that went 14-1. Grant’s section-record string of 27 consecutive playoff berths ended in 2017. A one-win season in 2019 was what Alberghini called a, “knee buckler,” but Grant showed its old resolve this spring with a host of underclassmen leading the charge.
Winning two games in the final moments so impressed Reed, the new coach, that he said after Alberghini’s last victory, “with all we’ve gone through, the delays, the tough times, the hard year (in 2019 with one win), these two wins feel like the biggest we’ve had since the 2008 state championship season. I feel a resurgence here. I feel just great for Coach Al.”
Said 1980s Grant star quarterback Aaron Garcia now coaching at Capital Christian, on the Alberghini impact, “Coach Al’s done so much for that school and that community and football around here in general, and for guys like me. Just a great career and guy.”
Alberghini said he’s proud Pacer for life. Pained to leave, but proud.
“When I think about it, I know I was really fortunate to be in the right place, the right school for me, the kind of kids I loved to coach and needed to coach,” he said. “A lot of great times and people and memories. I’ll remember that the most.”
This story was originally published May 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.