There are two things you need to know to understand how tough the only head coaching experience was for Joe Zabielski.
Zabielski never won a game as a head football coach.
The former Susquehanna Sabers coach was asked to step down in the middle of a season, a rarity on the high school level.
There are two things about what Zabielski did next that say a lot about where he is now.
Zabielski resigned as head coach, but remained with his team as an assistant, trying to help the Sabers dig out from the program’s lowest point.
The next step for Zabielski was coaching as an assistant on the college level, commuting 65 miles from his teaching job in Susquehanna during the school year, in a way going back to school himself to learn to be a better coach.
Zabielski has two shining examples of what kind of coach he is now.
At Valley View, where he is also a math teacher, Zabielski is a prominent part of two of the Lackawanna League’s biggest success stories. He went to the state football playoffs in the fall and all the way to the softball state championship game in the spring.
With Zabielski as defensive coordinator, Valley View won the Lackawanna Football Conference Division 1 and District 2 Class AAA championships.
Zabielski’s defense held the first 11 Valley View opponents to single digits in scoring. In the 12th game, the Cougars kept Dallas off the scoreboard for the final three quarters, giving the offense the chance to recover from a tough start and advance the team into the state playoffs with an 18-12 district championship victory.
Defense is the hallmark of Zabielski’s work on a different field in the spring.
As assistant coach, he works with the outfielders who made two of the biggest plays of the postseason while helping Valley View reach Friday’s state Class AAA title game where it lost for the only time all season, 2-1, to Big Spring.
The Old Forge High School and Bucknell University graduate rose quickly in coaching after a college football career in which he was a part-time starter at tight end and three-year letterman. Zabielski’s reward was one of the most difficult assignments in northeastern Pennsylvania high school sports before his 30th birthday.
Zabielski’s first season as head coach was the last season that Susquehanna tried to sponsor football on its own as one of Pennsylvania’s 10 smallest public schools with a team.
The guy who had about as tough an experience as a head coach can go through is now thriving in two of the best situations of which an assistant coach can be a part.
“It feels the same for me if I was the head coach or assistant coach,” Zabielski said. “It doesn’t make a difference. It’s the same amount of coaching.
“I still have to run the same amount of things. I just don’t have some of the intrinsic factors and all the other phone calls.”
Zabielski earned the experiences of the past year with the work he has put in since his trying days with the Sabers.
At Susquehanna, Zabielski arrived in time to take over a program that was in decline in the years after becoming a state contender before Dick Bagnall’s first retirement. Although the wins and losses had been falling off slowly before he took over for Ron Mulka, the damage was more visible elsewhere. Zabielski’s first team had a roster of just 19 players, putting the team’s future in jeopardy.
A more experienced coach may have fared better, but Zabielski kept up the fight, meeting with students and officials at Blue Ridge to help encourage the cooperative sponsorship the two schools started. The losses continued, but Susquehanna’s program was saved and students at Blue Ridge, which had earlier failed in its own attempts at football, now had a place to play.
Zabielski’s second team had 50 players, although only 18 with football experience in school. Another winless season was followed by an 0-3 start start in 2004 when Zabielski was convinced that he needed to step aside and make way for Bagnall to return as the team’s coach.
“I look at it as a win,” Zabielski said. “It might have been a failure in record, but I look at it as a win in that we kept the program together.”
Zabielski called his days at Susquehanna a learning experience and credited them with getting him a shot at Wilkes University where he said he became a better coach.
His coaching ideals are no different, but Zabielski said he learned about working within a program during his four years at Wilkes. He said he also found out just how disciplined and rigorous his approach had to be in order to be successful.
In addition to the big picture, Zabielski learned about attention to details. When he prepares Valley View’s defense for a high school opponent, Zabielski does it exactly as the Colonels prepare for a college game.
Valley View supplied him with tremendous talent, including Penn State recruit Nyeem Wartman, but Zabielski also won the respect of colleagues and opponents with his preparation.
“I would attribute everything I learned on breaking down a film and doing my study to Frank Sheptock at Wilkes,” Zabielski said. “I do exactly the same system he uses.
“I use the same nomenclature, do the same breakdown of down and distance and tendencies.
“I really worked out the numbers game and percentages. I learned everything from him.”
The results were evident on the football field last fall. They are there again in softball where Zabielski joined in a system head coach E.J. Weston had in place. Zabielski said Weston is effective in getting all his coaches, down through junior varsity and junior high, to teach the same way and they connect in having the same approach to coaching.
Zabielski was an oversized quarterback in his era, but succeeded in leading the Blue Devils to a pair of Suburban Conference titles by taking a level-headed approach to the game. He finds it easier to bring that approach to coaching on the softball field.
“Softball is my reprieve,” he said. “I don’t have to be so intense on the field.
“It takes me back to high school or even college when I was more cerebral, more focused, more calm.”
The results have been unmistakable.
Valley View lost just once in each of the last two seasons, each time by a run in the state semifinal or final. Friday’s 2-1 state championship game loss to Big Spring still left the Cougars with an 11-2 record in district and state tournament games over the past two seasons with a combined scoring margin of 86-11.
“It takes a lot of work and a lot of hours, but there’s a lot of payoff,” Zabielski said.
TOM ROBINSON writes a weekly local sports column for the Susquehanna County Transcript. He can be reached online at <mailto:RobbyTR@aol.com>RobbyTR@aol.com or followed on Twitter at @tomjrobinson.
