New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Oxford’s Stochmal steps down 17 years after starting program
When Joe Stochmal became the first head football coach at the new Oxford High School in 2007, he didn’t have much to work with other than a commitment from the administrators who hired him and the players who first strapped on the blue-powder blue Oxford uniforms.
Seventeen years later, Stochmal can drive up to the school, past a gleaming turf field, complete with stands, a snack bar and other amenities. It’s now home to a football program that capped its best season in history with its first state playoff appearance.
Coincidentally, Stochmal privately had decided last summer that the 2023 season would be his last as head coach. So last year’s breakthrough, nine-win playoff year wound up being an ideal way to go out.
On Monday, Stochmal confirmed his decision to step away from the program he built from nothing into a player on the statewide stage. He let players know on Feb. 29.
Stochmal, 54, said he’s been involved with the sport as a player and coach for 44 years, including 29 as a coach. “It’s a long time. I just think it was time for me to step away from coaching,” he said. “I’m older now and the sport is so demanding to coach. I’ve been here 17 years. I just felt it was the right time to step down and give somebody else a shot.”
Stochmal, who played quarterback at Seymour High School and Southern Connecticut State, agreed to become Oxford’s first football coach in 2007, after winning two state championships in 10 years as an assistant at Hillhouse.
His program played every game on the road that first junior varsity season. When it moved to varsity in 2008, Oxford’s field was an off-kilter cowpath of rocks, snakes and jagged
cliffs and poison ivy around the perimeter. The goal posts were built from glued-together PVC pipes bought at Home Depot. The Wolverines were beat up weekly by much more polished regional teams. “We were dodging a lot of bullets the first year or so,” Stochmal siad.
Eventually, the new field alongside the school’s access road was built. Wins also started piling up. Oxford went 67-86 in 16 varsity seasons under Stochmal. His best was his last: 9-1, an NVL division title and the school’s first playoff berth. He also had winning seasons in 2012 (8-2), 2013 (6-5) — both while members of the SWC — and in 2016 (8-2), three years after moving to its current home in the NVL.
“Coaching football is a 12-month-a-year commitment,” Stochmal said. “Between weightlifting, community service, passing leagues, early camp and now summer conditioning, it’s long days and long nights and weekends. It’s work that a lot of people don’t really understand what it takes to run a football program.
“We’ve come a long way in a very short time.”
After talking it over with his father last summer, Stochmal felt comfortable with ending his tenure after 2023. He said
he kept it to himself because he wanted to keep the focus on his players rather than waxing poetic about his last time coaching vs. Seymour or Ansonia.
“The reason I got into the coaching profession is to help mentor young adults and help them to become good people,” he said. “It’s not about wins and losses, but more about developing good-character kids. I think we’ve done a good job with that.”
Stochmal — who thanked former principal Frank Samuelson and former superintendent Judy Palmer for hiring him — will remain as the school’s athletic director and a health and education teacher, which he said will allow the program to seamlessly transition to new leadership while keeping up offseason training.
“I’ll still be here,” he said. “I’m just not going to be calling plays or roaming the sidelines. Instead of being inside the 25-yard lines, I’ll be outside of it.”
As athletic director, Stochmal says Oxford will post the job on Tuesday in hopes of having candidates interviewed and a coach picked by April 15.
“We’ll bring as many candidates in as we need,” he said. “We want as good a fit for our program. It’s strong. We have hardworking kids. We’re going to be in good hands going forward.”