Lou Racioppe was abruptly placed on administrative leave in October after he was accused of creating an unhealthy environment in his football program. He spoke out Thursday for the first time.
VERONA — Lou Racioppe was on his way to football practice at Verona High School last month — same as nearly every fall afternoon over the previous 20 years — when he received the phone call that tore apart his life.
Verona principal Josh Cogdill was on the other end of the line, Racioppe said, telling him he had been placed on administrative leave and was to stay off school grounds and to have no contact with his players or assistant coaches. All Cogdill would say was that Racioppe’s banishment was due to “student concerns,” Racioppe said.
Racioppe was “completely blindsided” and “flabbergasted” by the possibility of issues among his players, he said. In two decades as head coach of the Hillbillies, he had won four state championships, presided over one of the most successful programs in New Jersey and had become a fixture in the Verona community.
Suddenly, everything he had built was in jeopardy.
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Now, Racioppe, 61, remains on administrative leave and his tenure at Verona appears all but over after the Verona board of education released parts of an internal investigation Nov. 4 that accused the coach of creating an unhealthy and at times unsafe environment for the team. According to a partial survey of team players, some said they ran sprints for punishment, were withheld water, grabbed by the facemask or reprimanded for pulling out of practice for injury or exhaustion.
In his first extensive interview after his ouster as coach, Racioppe told NJ Advance Media Thursday from his attorney’s office in Verona that he never mistreated his players or used any coaching tactics that would merit a suspension.
“I’m embarrassed by this,” Racioppe said. “I’m embarrassed for myself, I’m embarrassed for the players that were involved in this. I’ve devoted almost 40 years of my life to coaching and I think I have a pretty good reputation. It’s important to me that my reputation not be stained. I want to get my good name back.”
Racioppe and his attorney, Greg Mascera, blasted the school district’s handling of the investigation and said the coach was never afforded an opportunity to properly defend himself. After the phone call from Cogdill on Oct. 10, Racioppe said he was provided no further information or explanation about the situation until an Oct. 19 meeting with district officials.
“I just sat around in a state of limbo,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. They left me hanging for quite some time.”
Racioppe and Mascera also were highly critical of the district’s survey questions given to players, which the pair said were misleading and vague. Most of the 16 questions asked if certain situations had happened around the team without inquiring about specific details.
"It's ridiculous for anyone to think or conclude that Lou would put any players' health in jeopardy," Mascera said. "The suggestion that Lou has disregard for his players' well being, mental and physical, is ludicrous."
Speaking firmly and in measured tones Thursday, Racioppe, wearing khaki pants and a zipped up hoodie over a light blue collar shirt, called the survey “ridiculous” and “outrageous.” He pointed to one survey question that asked if players ran sprints for punishment on a hot day.
“We begin practice on August 9th; pretty much every day that we run, we run in heat,” Racioppe said.
Players were required to run a lap if they were late to practice, Racioppe said. He added the punishment was in place to hold players “accountable,” and he dismissed any notion that he ever pushed players to unhealthy levels of exhaustion.
According to the survey, 68 percent of the team said they had seen a player pushed to a level of exhaustion that would be considered unhealthy.
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“In my mind and through my years of coaching, if you don’t push the kids your chances of being successful are very limited,” Racioppe said. “And if you don’t push the kids in practice, how are they going to respond in a game when you’re playing against other teams that are much bigger than you and are looking to beat you up? We need to push ourselves in practice if we want to compete on the level that we’re competing.”
Racioppe also said he has never withheld water from a player who needed a drink.
“We always have water breaks,” he said. “Would I say that we’ve taken water away from them at a certain time in the huddle when we’re trying to focus on something, maybe the two-minute drill and we can’t be grabbing water? Yeah, we’ve done that. If somebody interprets that as me withholding water that’s really misleading.”
Racioppe said he had adjusted his coaching style in recent years to remain aligned with acceptable practices. When he has his players work on tackling, most times it’s against a sled, he said. His practices also are low on overall contact, he added, and charts are tacked to the locker room walls so players can judge their hydration based on the color of their urine.
He said his methods have relaxed to the point that an assistant coach told him earlier this season, “You're getting soft in your old age.”
“The practices that people went through 25, 30 years ago, today’s child would never make it through those type of practices,” Racioppe said. “I’m aware of that and we’ve adjusted our practice because of that. We’ve certainly made adjustments to deal with the modern kid.”
Racioppe said he has no idea what sparked the investigation. When asked if Verona superintendent Rui Dionisio, who has a son in the football program, may have had something to do with it, Racioppe said, “It makes a lot of sense to me.”
The school district has denied Dionisio had anything to do with Racioppe being investigated.
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“In this day and age, you know that you’re a phone call away from being in trouble,” Racioppe said. “All it takes is the parent with the loudest mouth that has an ear that’s going to listen to them. They can get you if they decide they want to come after you and if they have enough support. With that in mind, it made me even more careful with the things that I was doing.”
Racioppe said he has been told he will meet with administrators at some point this school year and at that time his future at Verona will be discussed. Even so, he is not expecting to return to the school he led to back to back state titles in 2014 and 2015, leading the team to a combined record of 23-0.
He left open the possibility that he return to coaching at another school, saying "I’ve been coaching for a long time and I don’t think I’m ready to give it up. It would be interesting to see what would be available to me out there."
He said he thinks often about the values he has tried to instill in his players over the years. He falls back on those memories when his current suspension weighs him down.
“I tell my kids all the time: I don’t care how many games we win, I don’t care how many games we lose,” Racioppe said. “My goal is to meet you on the street in 20 years and to see you’re dressed properly, to see that you’re successful, that your family life is going well. Hopefully the reason why you’re successful was because of some of the things that you learned on the football field from me. That’s something I’ve said to every class that I’ve ever had.”
Matthew Stanmyre may be reached at mstanmyre@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattStanmyre. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
