It would be a cold day, a rainy, raw day, or maybe even a snowy day.
Matt Cargiulo and his Manhasset football teammates, all two dozen of them, would be feeling miserable outside on the practice field. The wind would swirl, and drips from the sky would pelt their helmets and facemasks, and it seemed like a great idea to just go inside and curl up under a blanket.
Only one guy seemed truly happy on those days, Cargiulo recalled, and that guy was the one in charge. Jay Iaquinta, the football lifer and then 70-year-old, would prowl around the field repeating a mantra that Cargiulo would never forget:
“Where else would you rather be?” Iaquinta would shout. “Where else would you rather be than here?”
“And he meant it,” recalled Cargiulo, the quarterback on Manhasset’s 2021 county championship squad. “He was always so happy being out there on a football field.”
For nearly a half-century, Iaquinta has patrolled Long Island sidelines in the fall and most of the time, he and his teams would win.
But after leading Set to another wonderful season last fall, reaching the Nassau County Conference III title game, Iaquinta began to think it might be time to hang up his whistle.
And now he has. The 74-year-old, who won 235 games in his career, has announced his retirement from coaching. Manhasset named Casey Neilly as his replacement.
“It just felt like it was time, given the energy required and how much travel I was doing back and forth to the school,” said Iaquinta, who commuted from Wantagh to practice. “I’ve loved doing it. I loved last year’s team, but the energy and the stamina to keep doing the job the way I wanted to, I just didn’t feel like it was there anymore.”
According to published reports, Iaquinta, who finished with a .590 winning percentage, leaves quite a legacy in his wake. He was a head coach at St. Agnes School in Rockville Centre starting in 1978. He then moved on to Lynbrook, Hewlett, and, since 2018, Manhasset.
At each school, he inherited a program that hadn’t won a championship in a decade, but by his third year, he had ended that drought.
Usually running the triple option offense, a running-based attack that required the quarterback and two running backs to make quick decisions based on what they saw from the defense, Iaquinta’s teams piled up points and victories.
“Jay always got the most out of all his teams,” said Wantagh head coach Keith Sachs, another coaching lifer. “They were always very innovative and very difficult to defend. He was always ahead of his time.”
“I believe the triple option is the best offense there ever was, and each group learned to run it well,” Iaquinta said. “It takes a lot of work (to teach), but when it’s done right, it’s very, very difficult to stop.”
Maybe Iaquinta’s final masterpiece on offense was last season’s county semifinal win against Floral Park when Set scored on six of seven possessions and rolled up 418 yards in a 42-20 win.
He admitted that he did think about coming back, but he believed he could only succeed if he put in as much work as he thought was necessary.
“I feel like, when you’re done, you’re done,” Iaquinta said.
Asked how he’d like to be remembered, the coach said simply, “As firm but fair, and a guy who gave everything I had.
“Hopefully, I have touched the lives of many of the young men I have had the pleasure of coaching and made a positive impact on more important things than blocking and tackling.”
Neilly, a 43-year-old who was the head coach at Locust Valley High School from 2016-2022, will now take over the Set program.
He’s been on the Manhasset staff for the past two seasons as an assistant.
“It was such a hard hit hearing he was retiring because it was such a pleasure to work with him,” Neilly said. “I thought I knew football, but then I met him and was like, ‘Wow, I really don’t know anything about football.’”
Neilly said he plans to continue the triple option offense, which he called “one of the greatest things ever created on this Earth.”
“Jay was so organized and detailed, and that’s something we’re going to continue and hopefully have the same success,” Neilly said. “He left the program in great shape, and I hope to keep it going.”
