New Football Coach Aims To Bring Family Culture To Manchester

MANCHESTER, NJ — Tom Farrell Jr. has been on a football field seemingly all of his life.

“I don’t remember life without football,” Farrell said earlier this summer. There were games at Monmouth University where his father, Tom Farrell Sr., was an assistant coach. He would join his dad on the sidelines at then-Monsignor Donovan High School, draped in a Donovan jersey that hung to his ankles, when Farrell Sr. was the head coach there.

Farrell, who went on to play football at Donovan Catholic and in college at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, is back on the sidelines. This time, however, it's not as a spectator or as a player, or even as an assistant coach. This time, Farrell is on the sidelines as head coach of the Manchester Township football program.

Farrell, 27, is one of the youngest head football coaches in New Jersey, and has taken on a football program that has struggled to be consistent over the years. But he’s spent the summer working to create an atmosphere that draws players in and brings with it success.

It starts, Farrell said, with creating a feeling of family and community, with discipline and having the right priorities.

“Coming from a family that’s all about education we’re going to focus on academics,” he said. His father is the superintendent of the Brick Township Schools, and his mother is a kindergarten teacher, also in Brick.

At the start of summer practices, Farrell told the players that he expected them to put in hard work on and off the field, with the priorities being their family and their grades before football.

“I think you could see the weight come off their shoulders,” he said. While he has been strict, demanding players be on time and ready to go when practices started, working to help those who have family difficulties impacting them.

The team’s motto is DIG: Discipline, Intellect, Grit, a motto Farrell picked up at Stonehill. "I tell them to keep digging."

The players, he said, have repaid him with a commitment to the team. After working as an assistant coach at programs that had fewer than 50 players, Farrell had nearly 90 players come out for the Manchester football team, including 30 sophomores.

“I couldn’t ask for better players, they’ve bought in,” Farrell said, with players getting themselves to practice by any means necessary. When he learned one player was walking to practice every day, Farrell had the team present that player with a bicycle.

“I’m trying to flip the script,” he said.

“He was strict in a good way,” said Tyrone Benjamin, one of a handful of seniors on the Manchester team. He didn’t know much about Farrell before the coach first met with the players, but there was one thing clear from the start, he said:

“He was ready to get to work. He was just as fired up as we were,” Benjamin said.

Farrell doesn’t just stand on the field with a whistle, however; he runs sprints and drills with the players.

“I wouldn’t ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do,” Farrell said.

“When he does that I get a feeling he wants to be here,” Benjamin said. Farrell’s energy infuses the players with enthusiasm, and it has the whole team eager for the season, he said.

“There’s a whole different point of view from previous years,” said Benjamin, who plays wide receiver and cornerback. “This is going to be a special year. This not going to be the Manchester of the past.”

It will be special in another way, Benjamin said, because it will be the first football season that feels normal since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020.

“That’s something to look forward to,” he said.

Farrell, who lives in Manchester with his wife, Sophie, is teaching in Manchester’s Communications career cluster. He received his teaching certificate through New Jersey’s alternate route program, after realizing the classroom was where he wanted to be.

Farrell, who has a degree in communications from Stonehill and a master’s degree from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, worked at NFL Films for a time and was an assistant coach at New Egypt High School. Later he was an associate producer at Chasing News, a TV news show in New Jersey. When the show was canceled, he turned his focus fully to teaching.

That teaching includes ensuring his players are respectful and hard-working off the field as well as on it.

“I want people to look at us and see gentlemen,” Farrell said. “It’s how hard you work when nobody’s watching. How hard can you work in the front of the classroom.”

“That’s really the values deep down,” Farrell said. “If you take care of the little things the big things will take care of themselves.”

Farrell has not taken the challenge of coaching lightly, surrounding himself with experienced coaches to help bring out the best in the team.

Gerard O’Donnell, who is Farrell’s uncle and his father’s best friend, will be co-offensive coordinator with Jeff Brown, who played and coached at Jackson Memorial and won a state championship there. Dimitrius Smith, who will be his defensive line coach, “was a stud” when he played at Monmouth University, Farrell said. Chris Blaine and Alex Lunn, who played at Manchester (Lunn also played at Ursinus), are coaching the junior varsity, and Alex Zulewski, who played at Toms River East and Montclair State, is the freshman coach.

Also assisting is Bob Mussari, who coached at Monsignor Donovan and the now-closed Admiral Farragut Academy, returned from Florida to coach the inside linebackers.

“He was my dad’s head coach,” Farrell said. “He’s the perfect linebackers coach” because he brings a tough, no-fear attitude to the field, borne of his time in the military: Mussari is a Purple Heart recipient, who survived being hit by a live mortar shell.

Farrell also credits the lessons he learned from watching his father, who was 29 when he took the head coaching position at Monsignor Donovan.

“I wouldn’t be where I am from a football standpoint and a man standpoint if it wasn’t for him,” Farrell said. (He reiterated that point in a tweet after Manchester beat Lakewood, 43-26 on Saturday. See it here. “I couldn’t be more blessed.”

He is hopeful the lessons and culture he has been working to impart during the summer practices and efforts to build the players’ confidence pays off.

“I don’t want people making excuses for me because of my age,” he said. “Just judge me on wins and losses.”

“I just want to see these kids succeed,” he said.

Update: On Saturday, the Hawks traded scores with Lakewood then held the Piners scoreless for the last 13 minutes of the game, which was played in Lakewood.

Manchester’s remaining football schedule is as follows:

• Sept. 9 at Toms River East, 6 p.m.
• Sept. 16 vs. Matawan, 6:30 p.m.
• Sept. 23 vs. Jackson Liberty, 6:30 p.m.
• Sept. 30 vs. Manasquan, 6:30 p.m.
• Oct. 7 at Barnegat, 7 p.m.
• Oct. 14 vs. Freehold Township, 6:30 p.m.
• Oct. 21 at Pinelands, 7 p.m.