The new head varsity football coach at Fayetteville-Manlius is the old one.
Paul Muench, who guided the Hornets for 13 seasons before stepping at the end of the 2012 season, was named Monday to return to the helm to replace Damien Rhodes.
“I love the game and I love coaching,” said Muench. “I’m really looking forward to being back with the kids.”
F-M athletic director Scott Sugar said that Muench was the first name considered after Rhodes, citing time constraints between coaching and his full-time job, resigned in December, though that decision was not made public until Jan. 14.
According to Muench, the time away from coaching after 26 years proved refreshing, and it wasn’t like he had retired and left F-M. He serves as a world history teacher at F-M High School, instructing many of the players that he will coach again.
“Coaching is part of my core as an educator,” he said, adding that when he left coaching (temporarily, as it turned out), he started to change his perspective in terms of where football, and other extracurricular activities, bland into the larger picture.
“When you step away, you realize the academic pressure that students are under,” he said. “My job is to keep (football) upbeat and put it where it fits with the academic mission of the school.”
A Jamesville-DeWitt graduate, Muench got his first work as a head coach in 1993 at Oswego. He was there for seven seasons, until 2000, when the F-M job opened up.
Getting a chance to return close to home, Muench didn’t waste it. In his second season, 2001, the Hornets, led by Rhodes, won the Section III Class AA title.
More success followed,, and the Hornets made it to two more sectional finals (in 2004 and 2005) as Muench attained a record of 73 wins and 46 defeats.
But at the end of the 2012 season, Muench stepped aside, and Rhodes, who had returned to his alma mater in 2008 as an assistant coach after attending Syracuse University and a brief professional career, took over.
Though many thought that Muench was done with coaching, he did not, saying that he realized, over those two years, that he still wanted to be on the sidelines at some point. Then, when Rhodes resigned, the chance to coach F-M again proved too difficult to resist.
Muench returns amid an atmosphere of change within the local coaching ranks. CBA has yet to name a successor to Joe Casamento, who stepped down earlier this month to take an administrative job at a school in Washington, D.C.
Though Muench’s coaching staff is not finalized, he said he hopes to retain assistants Jim Fiacco and Kyle Keeney, and that the JV team will return in 2015, too. F-M will have a large cast of returning players next fall after so many saw action during the Hornets injury-riddled 2014 campaign.
