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Former Poland standout now head coach at Centerburg
Ex-Bulldog now
guides Centerburg
By Charles Grove
After calling the shots on defense for the past six years, Poland native Andy Colella has taken over as head football coach at Centerburg High School.
Recent successful seasons for the program, particularly on defense, made Colella the district’s man to keep the Trojans in the hunt for titles in the Mid-Ohio Athletic Conference.
“I’ve been at Centerburg for eight years now and the previous head coach [Jim Stoyle] I coached under for six years,” Colella said. “He got the program back in the right direction. It was a heck of an opportunity and I felt a draw to stay here and keep moving the program in the right direction.”
That right direction began in the fall of 2005 when the Trojans rebounded from a 4-6 season in 2004 to a state semifinal appearance. From there Centerburg missed out on the playoffs each year until 2013, when it rattled off a perfect 10-0 regular season, but stumbled at home in the first round of the playoffs.
In 2014, the Trojans nearly duplicated the success of 2005 when they fell in the regional finals to Lucasville Valley, a win away from a state tournament appearance.
With the program’s recent resurgence, Colella’s defense has been one of the best in the area. The Trojans have allowed just 16.5 points per game in non-overtime contests the past three years and with Colella still calling the plays on defense this fall, he expects much of the same this year.
“We’re not going to do anything differently than what we did then,” said Colella, also the Trojans’ head boys and girls track coach. “It’s all about getting kids to buy in and getting them to do what you want them to do. That’s ultimately the goal and last year we weren’t far off. We lost one game on the one-yard line and lost another game in overtime.”
Colella was a senior captain of the 1999 Division III Poland football team that took home the school’s lone state football title under then-head coach Paul Hulea. Colella said the reason for that team’s success was its chemistry top-to-bottom, something he’s trying to replicate at Centerburg.
“It’s all about the relationships you have with each other,” Colella said. “I think if you asked anyone on that [1999 Poland] team, coaches included, they’d tell you there was a bond on that team from the seniors all the way down to the sophomores that was pretty special. I think when you have that you’re going to play harder for each other and you’re going to do all the things necessary to be successful. For our senior class, that was our goal from the time we were in middle school to achieve that and it was a heck of a ride.
“It’s something I’ll never forget and those experiences are something that I use now to try to relate back to the kids that we coach.”
Work ethic and those bonds between teammates go hand in hand according to Colella. That message he learned in the late 1990s in Poland is a big part of the coaching philosophy for the 2016 Trojans.
“The closer you are, the harder you’re going to work for each other, and that goes for anything in life,” Colella said. “If you respect that coach, that person, that teammate, you’re going to go a little bit beyond what you normally would do. And I think in today’s society that work ethic gets lost in the shuffle and we try to preach to our kids that the only way you’re going to achieve anything is to put in work, put in time and you’re probably going to have to do things you don’t want to do. But if you want to be successful, those are the things you have to do.”
Colella says the culture of that 2005 state semifinal team is strong at Centerburg. The staff not only brings in players, but also the head coach of that team to try to continue the Trojans’ winning culture.
“We bring in guys who were part of that team and we let them talk to our teams now so they can relate their experiences to our kids,” Colella said. “[Brad Burchfield], the coach of that 2005 team, who’s now the head coach at Bishop Hartley and just won a state title this year, we’ve brought him in and he’s talked to the kids as well to communicate those same messages because sometimes hearing it from others makes the message stick a little bit more.”
Despite being about 150 miles away from his alma mater, Colella said he still is quick to find out how the Bulldogs did each Friday night saying he owes a lot of his success to the lessons he learned at Poland.
“Every Friday I’m checking to see how they did,” Colella said. “That program is something that has helped me to be where I am today so I don’t forget those guys and where I’ve come from.”