Southington football: A necessary turn of the page

I could spend time here speculating on Bill Mella’s resignation Monday as head coach of Southington football.

I could just take it at face value: Mella, a college assistant at Trinity before he came to Southington in 2005, got an opportunity to do the same at Wesleyan and, as he said, it was too good to pass up.

I could also wonder if he was pushed in that direction.

Maybe that was the end game always in sight from last year’s brouhaha, when the Southington football coaching staff imploded.

You know the story. Long-time assistant coaches Frank Stamilio, Mike Prairie and Tony Mazzarella Sr. raised questions over Mella’s handling of fundraising money and resigned. School officials investigated. So did the police. An independent audit was done.

Mella was exonerated, but the football program’s finances were brought under tighter oversight. Two independent checking accounts were closed. In the end, no money went unaccounted for. It just wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

The appearances are what looked bad. The amount — $4,000 — didn’t warrant booting Mella, the father of three young children, from his teaching job, though perhaps union shall and shall-nots factored into the equation.

When it came to the football position, though, that was probably another story. A lack of trust, a sense that here was a guy who played by his own rules, may have settled in some minds, and so Mella had to go.
But all this is just speculation and so it will remain, because even if I’m hitting nails, who would confirm it publicly?

All I can say with any certainty is what I know from being around Southington football for the past 12 years on a pretty intimate basis. While I have good relationships with all the football teams I cover, I came in the door during Southington’s 1998 state championship run, lived with the team for a week in 1999 for a feature story and easily fell in with the family atmosphere former coach Jude Kelly instilled in the program.

Not that that atmosphere went out the door the minute Bill Mella came in. In fact, I was impressed at how well Mella and the coaches he inherited from Kelly’s staffed blended together.

Because that was the arrangement: Mella was in, but the old-guard assistants were to remain.

Normally, a new guy is entitled to have his own people, but guys like Stamilio, Prairie and Mazz Sr. helped Jude Kelly build the Air Raid version of Blue Knights football. They are men of value, and for Mella’s first two years they helped him piece together two straight undefeated runs to the state finals. And even though Southington lost both of those games, there was a good thing going.

Of course, winning smoothes out rough edges, and those edges became rougher with time and diminishing returns on the field, culminating with Southington’s failure to make the postseason in 2008. Then came the messy divorce in May 2009.

I told both camps I was surprised the marriage lasted as long as it did and that by hanging in there and making it work, the football players of Southington benefited.

Which brings me to the only point that matters in all this. By the end of the 2009 season, the Southington football program was a shell of itself. Not because the team went 5-5, but because all the joy had seemed to run out of it, and that was painful to see.

I’m not going to just dump that on Mella. The guy had gone through a lot. The season was just the natural fallout of controversy and fractured relationships.

So, in the end, this had to happen. Southington football had to go back to a Square 1.

No one really loses. Mella still has his teaching job and he continues coaching, back at the college level, where he’s arguably best suited. Stamilio and Prairie are coaching over in New Britain, still involved in the high school game, where they are arguably best suited. And the next wave of Southington players comes of age under a fresh regime.

If behind-the-scenes maneuvering produced all this, it did OK in my book. The challenge now is to make a good, strong hire to continue a good, strong tradition.