A few years ago, Doug Provenzano was at Mingus for a wrestling tournament. During a break between matches, he took a walk around the campus, saw the football field and felt a connection. As a football coach, he told himself then that if the Marauders head coaching job ever became vacant, he’d strongly consider applying. Following the 2019 football season, that thought became a reality.
Provenzano was offered the head coaching position over spring break. After some deliberation, he decided to accept the offer and become the new head football coach for Mingus Union High School.
“They reached out and offered me the position,” Provenzano said. “I took a couple of days to pray about it. I took tours with the athletic director. After the tour and seeing everything, I said ‘these are all good signs and I’m ready to sign my letter of intent.’ They were pretty excited.”
Athletic director Yancey Devore confirmed that feeling, writing in an email, “We are excited to have him on our staff and believe he is going to get the football program going in the right direction.”
Getting a football program going in the right direction is not new to Provenzano.
In 2014 when Provenzano became the coach at Paradise Honors High School, located in Surprise, he was taking over a team that had gone a combined 3-16 over its previous two seasons. In his first season, the Panthers went 6-4. In his second year, Provenzano guided the Panthers to an 8-3 mark.
That history followed him to Phoenix when he took over the job at Goldwater High School in 2017. The Bulldogs had struggled to a 1-19 mark over the 2015 and 2016 seasons. He turned that around in 2017, bringing Goldwater to a 4-6 mark. The following year, the Bulldogs went 6-4, the first winning record for the school in more than a decade.
Mingus went 0-10 in 2019 and was outscored by an average of more than 30 points a game. Despite that, the Marauders’ overall history in football is as a powerhouse. That appealed to Provenzano.
“They have a tradition and history of being really good at football,” Provenzano said. “They have tough kids. It’s also a tight knit community. They support football. The locker room, the smell of it, you could smell the tradition and feel the energy of tons of great players that have come through over the years.”
Provenzano is looking forward to getting a chance to meet not only the team, but the community — something that he anticipates will happen when the COVID-19 fears begin to subside.
While he hasn’t yet had the chance to meet the team, he has watched film. He saw the team that struggled so mightily in 2019 as a young squad with a lot of potential. Quarterback Zachary Harrison and running back Drew Meyer — both of whom are set to return to the gridiron in 2020 — caught the eye of the new coach.
Provenzano grew up in northern California. When he was a kid, he spent a lot of time with his uncle in the town of Petaluma, 40 miles north of San Francisco. Driving through Cottonwood brought those memories back, he said.
Something else that struck the coach was how much of an institution the school and its football team are in Cottonwood. When Provenzano — who will also be a PE coach at Mingus — met some of his fellow faculty, he was impressed by how many of them were Mingus alumni. Now he’s hoping to influence the current Marauders students.
“I felt that they just needed somebody like me for the kids,” Provenzano said. “It was more instinct than anything. Everything just fell into place. If you had told me six months ago that I’d be coaching there, I would have said, ‘I don’t think so.’ But when I went through the interview process and met some of the people, it felt like a place that I could stay and build some longevity.”
Having a longtime football coach is something Mingus is used to. Current Sedona Red Rock High School football coach Bob Young manned the Marauders’ sidelines for three decades. Provenzano was impressed by the impression Young left and hopes to follow in his footsteps.
“Bob was there for 30 years — he’s a legend,” Provenzano said. “Anyone who put in that much work, that much time and had success, I tip my hat to. It’s something that I feel that I can continue in my own way. I keep telling myself that it feels like a great place. I can’t get away from it. My gut told me to take the job, make the trip. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
