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Pittston Area has tried various ways to get its football program back on track.
The school brought in a coach from across the state. It looked north to the Lackawanna Football Conference, hiring a veteran and later replacing him with a younger assistant out of the LFC. When those three didn’t produce as hoped, an alumni with no head coaching experienced was hired.
Now, Pittston Area dips into its past — sort of — as Nick Barbieri will be making his head coaching debut Friday as the Patriots host Crestwood as the Wyoming Valley Conference season kicks off. The surname is familiar. His father, Bob, was Pittston Area’s first coach in 1966 before being replaced after the 1988 season. The fieldhouse was named after Bob Barbieri in 2014.
“I’m not really nervous about what we have to do,” Barbieri said. “There’s always those question marks about what we have. I don’t know if I’d consider it nervous necessarily.”
Barbieri’s four predecessors were given three years each to turn around a program that hasn’t recorded consecutive winning seasons since 2002 and 2003. Since then, the Patriots have had just one winning season, when they finished 6-5 in 2008 under Dip Donato. They were 2-8 in 2016.
So now Barbieri becomes the program’s fifth coach in the last 13 years. By comparison, cross-river rival Wyoming Area was also born in 1966 and has had five coaches total in its history.
Barbieri knows something about building a program. He began coaching in 1994 as an assistant at Delaware Valley, just two years after that school began football. DelVal was brutally bad for a decade — losing games by scores like 76-7, 71-0, 66-8 and 58-0 — and going 9-94 before posting its first winning record in 2002.
DelVal eventually developed into a perennial power in the LFC and in District 2.
“I was there for the awful and then watched it grow and get better,” said Barbieri, who played for Pittston Area and teaches there. “It’s kind of the same thing we want to accomplish here at Pittston, but I don’t have 20 years. But if we can get to that level where we can compete every year, that’s the goal.”
Crestwood coach Greg Myers faced a similar situation when he took over at his alma mater in 2005 after a year running the Lake-Lehman squad. Crestwood had 13 consecutive losing seasons, but Myers had the Comets in the postseason in 2007. They won the District 2 Class 3A championship in 2014.
Crestwood doesn’t have much info on Pittston Area’s new system, just a tape of the Patriots’ tri-scrimmage with Mid Valley and West Scranton.
“There are a lot of unknowns,” Myers said. “You try to look into some history, but you really only have that one scrimmage to go off of. We do know they are a well-coached football team. It certainly showed that in their first scrimmage.”
Crestwood knows about Pittston Area quarterback Walter Coles and receiver Kevin Krawczyk. The duo formed one of the top aerial attacks in the WVC last season.
Crestwood will also present the Patriots with some wrinkles. The Comets will still use the Single Wing formation, but won’t run it in a traditional sense. Instead, they will use elements of it mixed with spread formations.
“We’re running more of a spread version of it,” Myers said. “You’re not going to see a lot of the power stuff that you’ve seen over the years. I just don’t think we have the power running backs like we’ve had over the past three or four years. We have good running backs, but they’re different running backs.”
