High school football: New coaches bring their own vision to Somerset, Olympic Heights

Correction: Because of a reporting error, in a previous version of the story, The Palm Beach Post misidentified a Somerset Academy Canyons coach. It was an assistant coach, not head coach Alex Gonzalez. The photo has been removed from the story and replaced with a picture of Gonzalez.

BOCA RATON — For Somerset Academy Canyons and Olympic Heights, first-year football coaches Alex Gonzalez and Brandon Knight are looking to rejuvenate their respective programs — with a new outlook and fresh talent.

The teams met in a spring exhibition game on May 27th that saw Somerset emerge victorious by a 14-13 margin, but the game was about far more than just the final score for both programs.   

Gonzalez's Cougars showed improved comfort and aggressiveness in the second half, as the coach settled into the game just like his players.

Somerset’s first-year head coach graduated from Palm Beach Central in 2009 before playing Division II football followed by a stint in the arena league. He returned to Palm Beach County and ended up as Somerset’s offensive line coach in 2017.

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When former head coach Tom Halikman stepped down for personal reasons this offseason, Gonzalez’s promotion was a goal realized.

“I was grateful and humbled and blessed for the opportunity,” Gonzalez said. “It was something I envisioned as a goal of mine, and it came a lot sooner than I expected, but I’m excited to lead this program to a new direction.”

That new direction comes on the back of the program's most successful season, as the Cougars went 3-2, which included a 35-34 loss to 8A Weston-Cypress Bay. It was the program's first winning season in school history, according to Gonzalez. 

But after graduating a significant senior class, including Post small-schools first-team running back Giordani Point Du Jour, Gonzalez said the spring was all about development — both for those stepping into larger roles on the team and for those on the roster completely new to the sport.

“We have a lot of new players that have never played the game of football, but we have a nice core group of seniors coming back,” he said. “We have about fifteen returners, but we graduated a lot last year. And the goal of this spring is to just develop — develop our players and make sure they understand the game and play their hardest.”

Paving the way will be seniors Matthew Oldano, Nathan Stracke, Benson Barnes, Christian Tondreau, and Nichola Consalvo, all of whom Gonzalez pointed to as the central cogs in Somerset’s leadership.

“My expectations are to continue to develop our team, our program, and obviously win ball games,” Gonzalez said. “I want to win ball games as much as anybody.”  

Though the Lions were on the losing end of the spring game, coach Knight believes Olympic Heights is trending upwards. 

“I think what I took away from this game is, looking at the scoreboard as a 13-14 game and seeing the pain in the kids’ eyes,” Knight said. “It hurts, and that’s good. The worst thing you can see as a head coach is when you lose and the kids are, ‘eh it is what it is.’ You can tell tonight that it hurt, and that’s going in the right direction.”

After three years as the defensive coordinator, Knight was promoted to interim head coach just one day prior to the start of spring football following the resignation of former coach Kevin Wald.

“It was just an unfortunate situation,” Knight said. “The day before spring football actually started, they named me the interim head coach and I had to make some tough decisions. We went with a new offense, so we’ve been installing a new offense for three weeks. New guys on defense, playing both ways, so it’s been a curveball for the kids. It’s been a learning curve for all of us.”

Knight coached last month's spring game under the interim tag and has since been named the full-time head coach, assistant athletic director Joe Roberts said in an email Monday. He takes over a team coming off a 1-5 season.

The run-heavy offense Knight and the Lions coaches employed in their spring game was at times effective, and at times, not so much — but that’s largely a result of Olympic Heights’ playbook still being in flux. 

“The players are learning my system and the standard I’m setting,” Knight said. “I think we’ve spent more time instilling the system and instilling the culture we want here than the actual Xs and Os.”

While there is a lot of youth on the team, Knight believes that growth will be expedited once the playbook is finalized — and he expects a lot of that development to come from new quarterback Zack McCormick, who is learning his third offense in three years after not seeing many starting reps last season.

“I think the biggest area we had to work on was our quarterback,” Knight said. “We went from a spread offense last year, in the gun every snap, running a lot of RPOs, to now being under center in I-formation and one back ... He’s going to see the most growth.”

And now that the on-paper preparation is just about ready for the Lions, the real work can begin.

“Pretty much 95 percent of our playbook is now in, so we’ll clean that up over the summer, and we’ll be ready to go for the fall,” Knight said.

Content editor for sports Phillip Suitts contributed to this article