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The final curtain?
By JAMAL THALJI
© St. Petersburg Times, NEW PORT RICHEY -- Every time the whistle blows, every time he diagrams a play on the back of a plain manila folder, every time he sends a player out to the huddle with new instructions, Ridgewood coach Wayne Parzik wonders if this season will be his last. It just might be. "I'm contemplating retirement," Parzik said. "This could be my last season." Both from coaching and teaching. Parzik, 62, contemplated doing exactly that last season, when he led the Rams to a 4-6 record, the team's best showing in six years. He is 7-28 in four seasons with the team. "I had given it some thought because last season we had a good taste in our mouths," he said. "The players felt good, the coaching staff felt good. We had broken quite a few record. We had stopped a lot of nonsense going on about Ridgewood football." But then two students passed away in recent months, and Parzik was close to both. Former Ridgewood basketball standout Ashley Morrison, 16, passed away on Dec. 12 after contracting encephalitis. Football standout Jimmy Priest died on April 13 from injuries the 16-year-old suffered in an accident. "When she died, and then James, it was a very hard thing for me," Parzik said. So he decided he couldn't leave the school just yet. And with a good crop of football players returning, he thought maybe this could be a special season. "I thought about it last year, and I thought I'll give it one more year and see if we can do some more miraculous things," he said. But injuries have handicapped the Rams as they struggled to a 1-4 record this season. But now that the team is regaining its health and its starters, Parzik hopes to turn the season around. It won't be his first turnaround. When the longtime Rams assistant was hired as head coach in July 1998, Ridgewood was mired in what would become one of the worst losing streaks in state history. Dubbed The Streak (much to Parzik's displeasure) it was already at 0-20 when he took over. He was on crutches with a brand new knee when he interviewed for the job. Spring practice had already passed. It was a harbinger of things to come, as he went 0-10 his first season. "Everybody was down and the program was as low as I've ever seen it since I've been here," Parzik said. "That drove me crazy, the fact that I'd been with the school for such a long time and to see how depressed the program was, and how it affected the entire school." But Parzik knew it wouldn't last. The end came on Oct. 14, 1999, when Ridgewood defeated Wesley Chapel 34-21 to end The Streak at 35 games, four games shy of the state record for consecutive losses. "We just got crucified that second year," he said. "The kids would read all that streak stuff in the paper and think, "Gee, we must be horrible.' That was the toughest thing to sell, that "Hey, I'm not as bad as my school and the newspaper is telling me.' "That's why it took me such a long time to finally get that win. You'd think as a coach you should be really happy when that happened, but I was just relieved to get that monkey off our back. Because by that time it had grown to a 300-pound gorilla." The next season, the Rams went 4-6 and if not for two controversial penalties could have been 6-4, and perhaps done even better had leading rusher Michael Cassagnol's season not ended with a broken ankle. "But nonetheless it was such a great season and so rewarding because I knew the kids were capable of it," Parzik said. "This year I figured would be a follow-up, I figured we'd be doing great things, but once again we had some injuries and (losing Priest) and that set us back." Parzik said he will make his final decision after the season. This is his third head job in 25 years of coaching. Asked to pick his most memorable moment at Ridgewood, he couldn't come up with just one. "Anytime you turn a program around like that," Parzik said. "It's very satisfying."
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