Cordova High School has named Kyle Williams as the new junior varsity football coach.

“In the short time that I’ve known coach Williams, he seems to be a man of integrity, and he wants to bring back a culture of being a good human being, putting a thing of being a good person over being a football player,” Cordova athletic director Mark Beamish said. “He’s trying to take his boys and teach them how to be a good man.”

Even though Williams is a somewhat inexperienced coach, Beamish said he deeply cares about his players and their well being outside and inside the school. 

“I expect him to make sure that the athletes that he is in charge of learn to be better men, how to act right on the field and how to act right off the field,” said Beamish. “ I expect him to be an example for them.”

Before he began his coaching career, Williams went to Cordova, where he played football and developed his love for the game.

“Football is my past and I love the game, I respect the game, and I feel like I owe it to the game,” Williams said.

Before becoming a coach, Williams played in a semi-professional football league for seven years. After he decided to leave the league, he started teaching. From 2010-2013, Williams was an assistant coach at Cordova. He then traveled to other schools coaching or helping coach football.

Before coming back to Cordova High School, Williams coached at Oroville High School as the freshman line coach and at Pleasant Grove as the JV coordinator.  Williams plans to end his coaching career at Cordova High School.

Football is about more than just winning a game. It’s about discipline, hard work and teamwork, Williams said.

“Well, I feel like it can teach them discipline,” Williams said. “It can teach you how to have … great teamwork, and you know, it teaches you that other people are gonna love you besides your family.

“In football we all love each other, we’re going to war in every game, you know, so we have to trust our teammates.”

Roxanne Tursi, a Spanish teacher at Cordova High, said she believes Williams became the junior varsity  coach for the right reasons – meaning he’s reliable and strong. She said the only drawback of being a coach at Cordova is the lack of a community boosters program dedicated to supporting athletics. The school has such a program for music, she noted.

“I also think that Cordova not having an athletics boosters is a huge drawback for the sports at the school because schools that have athletic boosters, it’s like a big money raiser and also builds the school community around athletics, because it gets parents to be involved …,” Tursi said.