This week’s Q&A Lowellville’s Jeff D’Altorio

Jeff D’Altorio is in his third season as head coach at Lowellville. The Rockets were 5-15 his first two years and are 5-2 this season.

Lowellville dropped a 36-7 decision to Western Reserve last week, the second of three straight weeks facing Inter Tri-County League Tier Two powers. The Rockets had beaten Wellsville, 27-21, the previous week and face McDonald tonight.

Q. Your team won its last three games in 2012, finishing 4-6. How important were those three straight wins when it came to your offseason program?

A. After those three wins at the end of the season — and we beat two very good teams, Columbiana was 6-1 at the time and Southern was 6-3 — for our kids to come along and finally put it together, it led into a great offseason motivation-wise. The kids realized we had a good group coming back and it encouraged them to work hard in the offseason. That has paid off this year where we are sitting now.

Q. What were the goals your team set at the start of the season?

A. Lowellville hasn’t had a winning season in over 10 years and one of our goals last year was to have a winning season in the league which we accomplished. This year, number one we wanted a winning season overall and we wanted to have back-to-back winning seasons in the ITCL, another thing Lowellville hasn’t done. And of course we want to look at getting into the playoffs which also hasn’t been accomplished here for some time. We knew if we worked hard we could accomplish it. Where we are looks good now but we have three big games coming up and we want to stay on the one-game-at-a-time mode.

Q. Lowellville made the playoffs in 1995, 2000 and 2001. Are the kids aware of Lowellville’s playoff history?

A. It is starting to come up now. We have harped on on the one-day, one-week, one-game at a time all year and we’ve tried not to talk about the big picture. But now, looking at our computer points and where we stand in the region, it is coming up more. But we’re not there yet, we have three games left we need to win.

Q. Are you happy with the progress your team has made since the start of the season?

A. We’ve made so much improvement overall, on offense, defense and special teams. We always try to work and get better. Things have come up where we’ve got to overcome some difficult situations. We’ve had a couple games where we’ve made a few mistakes but we’ve gone back to work in practice and in film study to try to improve and I think we’ve done that. The kids are open-minded and want to win and are willing to work hard. We try to give them a good game plan, we want to put something together so they can go out and do something special.

Interview by Vindicator sports writer Doug Chapin. Email him at dchapin@vindy.com.

Q. Any pleasant surprises?

A. We have six core seniors who are two-way starters for us (Michael Minnie, Collin Pope, Nick Micco, Jesse Terwilliger, Robert Ciccone, Nick Lucente) and they have been the base of our program going into this year. They give us a solid foundation. And the play of our quarterback (junior Alex Harklerode), he is having a great year and has made a big difference.

Q. What was the attitude coming off the Wellsville win and heading into the game against Western Reserve?

A. We had a great week of practice before the Western Reserve game. One thing about that game that most people don’t know is we ran 20 plays of offense and they ran one play and we were losing 8-0. We ran 10 plays to open the game, had to punt and pinned them back. They broke a long touchdown run that should have been a 5-yard gain. We go another 10 plays and can’t score. For most of this season we’ve been able to score pretty quick, but what happened against Western Reserve is we moved the ball but were unable to score in large part because of their ability. We made some mistakes in that game we haven’t made all year long.

Q. What about this week’s opponent, McDonald?

A. McDonald is primarily a running team. They run four or five plays and they run them well and we are preparing for that. They are not a big throwing team, they mostly want to run the wing-T so we want to stop the run.