Coach Spotlight: James Wood girls' soccer coach Donavan Russell

Donavan Russell led the James Wood girls’ soccer team to a 14-5-1 record (8-3-1 Class 4 Northwestern District) in his first season as head coach in 2019.

The Colonels’ 14 victories were a school record. James Wood also qualified for the Region 4C tournament, the first time they had advanced to region tournament play since 2012.

Prior to taking on the girls’ soccer head coaching job, Russell was an assistant soccer coach for five years at James Wood. The first four of those years were with the boys’ team, and in 2018 Russell was an assistant coach with the girls’ team. Russell started coaching in 2005 with Winchester Upward Soccer and in other recreational leagues.

Russell is a 1993 graduate of James Wood, where he was a goalkeeper and defender for the soccer team and a small forward for the basketball team. Russell also played one year as a goalkeeper at Bridgewater College before he had to step away due to a medical issue.

Q. What are your favorite memories as an athlete?

Russell: It was always fun to play for James Wood in either sport. It was tough, it was exciting, it was nerve-wracking. When I think back to when I played ball as a kid, I just think about team and that camaraderie and being together and common goals. The laughter with the guys, the heartache after a loss. I laugh at my friend, Mark Weisbrod, we played together in school, and his brain just remembers every single detail of all those things, and I just really don’t. I laugh and tell him it’s a goalkeeper’s brain. If you get scored on, you’ve got to forget about it and keep moving on.

I played a lot of [Winchester] United soccer as a kid and traveled. My favorite United moment, we beat Herndon. I guess it was probably ‘92, and we had to beat them to go to the State Cup. We beat them 2-1. A friend of mine Jeremy Smith smashed a nice goal late in the game. We never beat teams like Herndon back then, so that was a really special moment.

But the team aspect was the biggest thing I remember. I made a lot of good friends who are still my friends today.

Q. When did you know you wanted to be a coach?

Russell: I’ve always enjoyed teaching. When my two older kids [Lauren, a 2019 James Wood graduate who played soccer in high school, and Ethan, a 2020 graduate who played soccer, basketball and golf] started playing sports when they were 4, 5, 6, I would volunteer and help, and I started realizing that I remembered a lot more than I realized about different sports and being athletic and doing things. It was fun to share those learned experiences with kids and try to pass them on and help them understand how to be better athletes, better people.

It kind of grew from there. I just really enjoyed doing it and started coaching other teams besides the ones my kids were on. Being involved with them was truly gratifying, to help kids along on their athletic journey, and hopefully teach them some life lessons along the way.

Q. Who are your biggest coaching influences?

Russell: My father [Gary] was probably my very first coach, not necessarily coaching a team, but in the backyard, shooting hoops. Basketball was his game, and he taught me a lot about it. It was important for him to teach me how to analyze the issue, analyze the problem. Why is your shot going left to right? Where is your elbow supposed to be? Analyzing that and figuring how to fix it, it became like a game, where he would say, ‘Well, what did you do wrong?” My kids will laugh because they hear that all the time. “What went wrong, and how do we fix it?” I still think that way a lot, playing and coaching, because of him. It’s standard coaching stuff, but I was a young kid at the time, so it was a big lesson to learn, and that applied to a lot of different things in life. Why are you struggling in this class, why is this happening? Just figure it out and fix it.

Coach Ed Ruths, he still coaches. He was my seventh-grade basketball coach at Aylor. He was my first real coach. He just broke it down, fundamentals. He was tough, but you knew he cared about you. If you were on his team, he always defended you. He pushed you. He was very positive. Back in the time when coaches weren’t always positive in the late ‘80s, he would really build you up, and work on your strengths, and help you focus on things. He really taught you how to play as a team and kind of be a team. That was really big for me. The years after that, we used to have a summer league team he put together. He was a special coach. I still call him Coach when I see him to this day.

Coach Dino Morgoglione (who was instrumental in creating the Blue Ridge Youth Soccer Association in 1977). He was the first great soccer coach that I ever had, and that was for United travel. He was an old Italian coach who played in Italy as a kid. You listen to his stories about how tough it was and what the game was and what it meant to people back then. He taught us so much about the game. He leveled the playing field. We were all players. There were no stars on his team. You all had to work equally hard. He had high expectations for each one of us. He really pushed us to be better as a team, and that was back in the day when it was James Wood and Handley only [for Winchester-Frederick County high school soccer], and we were a team made up of James Wood and Handley players. It was tough. Sometimes, we didn’t like each other. You kind of come up that way in high school. But we became great friends [with Morgoglione’s help].

[Former Handley boys’ and James Wood girls’ soccer coach and former Winchester United director] Jim Carden, he coached United not long after Dino. Jim came right in there and coached with Dino and coached us. Back then, he was a different type of coach. He was hard-nosed, but boy, he made you better. He was more of an in-your-face type of coach. But it was all quality coaching. He really influenced me. It was a joy to play for Jim, to coach for Jim — when I first came over to Winchester United, he was the director still. He brought me in to coach a team and taught me how things work, and what that means to coach a club team. Then to coach with him at James Wood was just awesome. He wasn’t the same coach that he was when I played for him at 17. I used to pick on him and say, “You’re getting soft in your old age,” and he’d laugh. But the things that taught me here, it was just full circle. He really taught me how to be a mature coach with players. He showed me how to be a little easier on the players. I’d be like, ‘Coach, we’ve got to work, we’ve got to work!” He’d say, “No, they need a break.” He just taught me stuff like that. I felt like I learned a lot from Jim.

Q. What’s the best coaching advice you’ve received?

Russell: [Carden] told me before left, “This is one of the hardest things to learn as a coach. You have great seasons, you have terrible seasons. You have seasons where things go well, seasons where the ball doesn’t bounce right and you lose. The coach that stays even through those kind of things, it will help you, it will help your team. You can get excited, you can be down, but don’t let things affect you emotionally where you’re up and down constantly, Try to stay as even keel as you can.”

That first season after he left, I remembered that a lot. Because it was an exciting season. We did well. We had big wins, and some big losses, and I remembered that Jim said to try and stay even. You sleep with this stuff in your head every game — “How do we change it?” Jim taught me to roll with things. To see things the way they are. That was important to me, as a younger coach teaching a big varsity team like I had that first year.

Q. What have been your most difficult coaching moments?

Russell: This whole COVID-19 situation has been tough. It was tough watching seniors like Audrey Hottle and Bailey Riggleman and Amber Messick not have a season. Then beyond that, looking at my 11 juniors, all that game experience they get and the memories they get for those 16-plus games. That was difficult, when you start thinking about how they missed that. Then you think about your great players like Sadie Kerns. Great goaltenders don’t come along that often. It was tough losing a season with her. It was tough losing a season with all the girls.

Q. What have been your favorite coaching moments?

Russell: For the boys, we beat Millbrook [in the Conference 21 West first round in 2017, a game in which Donavan’s son Ethan preserved a 1-0 win by stopping a penalty kick with 90 seconds left by diving toward the left post, then dove back in the other direction to stop the rebound]. That was a big win for the boys, because we hadn’t had a lot of big wins in the last few years before that. That was an emotional game.

Having Lauren as a senior there my first year I came in [as head coach, in 2019], and that group of seniors, that was just a special, special team. Going to regionals, I was really proud of the girls. My happiest moment was actually that game [a 2-0 loss to Loudoun County in the Region 4C semifinals]. Even though we lost, we executed everything perfectly, like we talked about, like we wanted to do. They had a couple off the crossbar and the post, and they had a couple go in. You never want to lose, but we did the best we could against a really, really good team. I was so proud of the girls, so that was a really, really special moment for me.

— Compiled by Robert Niedzwiecki