More Than Football: Brick's Warren Wolf Leaves Legacy Of Respect

BRICK, NJ — Twenty years ago, Warren Wolf was on the cusp of a milestone, about to log his 300th victory as a high school football coach. It was a milestone few coaches in New Jersey ever have achieved, and Wolf, the legendary Brick Township High School coach, had logged them all with the Dragons.

But as he sat in the office of the Jordan Road home he built in 1958, when he and his wife, Peggy, came to the town, and reflected on the moment that was in the offing, Wolf shared a memory of one of the most difficult moments in his coaching career.

Wolf told Asbury Park Press sports columnist Bill Handleman about a season-opening loss and a player’s remark after the game, that the better coach had won. He told of his snap reply when they got back to Brick, one from a man who wasn’t given to such responses: That he was going to resign.

“If I don’t have the respect of the team, I’m done, I’m finished,” he told Handleman that day as we sat there, Handleman interviewing, me providing backup, to make sure we didn’t miss a detail in honoring the 300th victory milestone. “I felt I had lost the respect of the team.” Telling the team he was going to resign was a moment, he told Handleman, that he was not proud of. “I should have been a little more mature.”

Respect was one of the lessons Wolf taught his players for more than five decades. And Friday evening, as high school football playoff games were kicking off around New Jersey, respect summed up the responses to the news that Wolf, the venerable coach whose teams put Brick Township on the map, had died at the age of 92. Read more: Warren Wolf, Brick Icon, Legendary Football Coach, Dies At 92

Wolf was respected not just because of his 51 years on the football field, and not solely because his teams racked up 361 victories and multiple championships in that time. He was respected because he pushed his players not just to be good football players, but good people.

Respect. Hard work. Giving your best and doing what was right. And it’s a lesson that hundreds learned on the football field under his influence.

It’s why the news of Wolf’s passing at the age of 92 reverberated across the Shore Conference on Friday night. Text messages flew, phones rang and memories were shared near and far of a man whose lessons were not about how to get a ball down the field and across the goal line, but about how you work together, through good and bad — especially through the bad.

“He often said that character is shown by what you do when no one is looking,” said Dennis Filippone, who played for Wolf in the early 1970s and later served as an assistant coach while teaching in the school district. “He never took credit when things were good, and he took all the blame when things were bad.”

Wolf was demanding of his players, said Dan Duddy, who played for Wolf from 1970-1973, and was the Dragons’ starting quarterback in ‘72 and ‘73. But it served them well, he said.

“When he said no, he meant it,” Duddy said. “Being tough and having high expectations could be the greatest form of love there is.”

That toughness mellowed as the young men in football uniforms transitioned into adults mentoring the next generation. He never forgot a player's name, even as the years passed.

“He was the antithesis of who he was on the practice field,” Duddy said of the relationship he had with Wolf as both men grew older. “He always wanted to know how we were doing, would ask about our families. He wanted us to know he truly loved us.”

“He had a relationship with kids that I never saw anywhere else,” said Ocean County Freeholder Joe Vicari, who was hired by Wolf to become a teacher in the Brick schools in 1969. “He was able to transfer the spirit in his heart to the kids.”

It was those lessons Duddy, who was an assistant coach under Wolf for several years, took with him when he became a head coach, first at Central Regional High School and later at Donovan Catholic, where he currently is the pastoral minister of athletics.

"There isn't one day where I don't say, 'What would Coach Wolf say,' " Duddy said.

Duddy is just one of a long list of former players and assistant coaches who carried Wolf’s lessons to their own programs. The list includes some of the most well-known football coaches in the Shore Conference: Vic Kubu, who coached at Middletown North and Manasquan for a combined 31 years. Al Saner, who played at Memorial High School, West New York, when Wolf was an assistant coach to Joe Coviello, and coached at Point Pleasant Boro for 29 years. Dennis Toddings, who played for Wolf in the first three years of the Dragons’ existence, and coached at now-Donovan Catholic from the 1970s into the 1990s, when it was known as St. Joseph’s and later Monsignor Donovan. Tim Osborn, who played for Wolf from 1974-76, was the first head coach at Jackson Liberty High School until he died in April 2013. Jim Calabro, who coached Brick Memorial, played for Wolf and was an assistant, as was Don Ayres, who coached at Middletown North. There was Don Reid, also at Toms River East.

Bob Auriemma, who made his mark on Brick Township in the ice hockey rink, played football when Wolf was an assistant in West New York and then took over the hockey program in Brick after Wolf got it started. Ron Signorino Sr., another of the most respected coaches in the Shore Conference, teamed up with Wolf for more than 15 years in between long stints as Wolf’s rival as the head coach at Toms River South. Tom Gialanella, who was the superintendent of the Jackson Township schools and came back to Brick as an interim superintendent, was an assistant under Wolf.

That list just scratches the surface and doesn’t include the players who came back to the Brick schools to support and carry on Wolf’s traditions, people such as Filippone, Rich Caldes, Donovan Brown and Rob Dahl, the Dragons’ head coach for a few years before current coach Len Zdanowicz Jr. was handed the reins.

“He had an impact on thousands of people,” Filippone said.

Tony Graham, a longtime sportswriter for the Asbury Park Press, said when he first arrived at the newspaper in the 1960s, Wolf was the first coach he heard about.

“Jim Sullivan (who was a well-known Asbury Park Press sportswriter) told me what a great coach he was, what a gentleman he was.” It was a description that Graham witnessed first hand as he covered Shore Conference football and other sports from the late '60s until retiring a few years ago.

“In decades of being on the Brick sidelines, I never heard Wolf utter one four-letter word,” Graham said. “Rarely, if ever, did he chastise a player on the sidelines.” On the contrary, he had a consistent message.

“As a high school football reporter, I was always on the sidelines, and I used to get over near the huddle,” Graham said. Wolf always told his team, “We gotta play our best, and we gotta do it for God and Brick Township.”

It might seem over the years that Brick was blessed with a little magic on the football field. Graham recalled that first state playoff game in 1974, where Brick took on Camden in Atlantic City and won 21-20. Camden had the opening kickoff return for a touchdown called back, because an apparent whistle in the crowd caused Brick to kick off before the officials had started the game. Then a punt return for a TD was called back on a penalty. Brick then stopped Camden’s big star running back on a 2-point conversion.

"You didn't think Warren Wolf was going down there and lose?" Graham recalled Dick Brinster, another Asbury Park Press sports editor at the time, saying later.

There was the 7-6 victory over Cherokee in 1983, when the Chiefs’ extra point hit the upright and bounced away, snapping Cherokee's 30-game winning streak. And, of course, there was the memorable 28-24 victory over Central, on an improbable pass play with time running out. Duddy still winces at that memory.

“He was a visionary, a genius, and without a doubt, the greatest motivational speaker I’ve ever had the privilege to be around,” said Gary Bonavito, who was Brick’s quarterback in that Cherokee game in 1983. He led the Dragons to two of their three straight championships, in '82 and '83. “He was so smart. He was always two steps ahead of anyone else.”

The real magic, however, wasn’t on the football field and isn’t in the trophies that fill the glass cases near the auditorium at the high school. It was in the messages Wolf delivered to his players and staff that pushed them to be better people.

“There was a certain immortality about him that ran through our veins,” Duddy said.

“At the end of one’s life, to have people in complete agreement that you were a good and decent man is the greatest compliment of all. Coach Warren Wolf was that and led by example,” said Joseph Pangaro, a former Brick resident, on a Facebook post about the coach’s passing.

As a Brick Township graduate who was among the hundreds of students in the stands as the Dragons won those three straight state championships, I knew how beloved the man was in the community. I’d respected him as a student the way most students respect the school’s educators — respecting the title but not really knowing the man behind it.

But as I sat there that afternoon in September 1999, listening to Wolf tell Handleman the story of the lowest point in what became a 361-win career, what shined through wasn’t the football; it was his humanity and his humility.

Wolf was beloved not because he demanded respect, but because he taught so many that giving respect mattered, and that admitting mistakes wasn’t weakness, it was a strength.

Respect is earned, not given, and Wolf earned every bit of the respect he is receiving. Rest in peace, Coach. Dragon Nation will never forget you.

Note: This article has been updated to correct Jim Sullivan's position with the Asbury Park Press.

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