New Immaculate football coach Brian Pinabell
UPDATED (8:45)
News-Times writer Kevin Duffy has the whole story on how Bryan Pinabell landed in Connecticut at Immaculate after an entire coaching career spent in the south.
Immaculate pegs Georgia high school assistant as next football coach
Hint: His wife led him to Shangri La.
UPDATED (4:10)
We just got off the phone with new Immaculate coach Bryan Pinabell and, yes, it is the same Bryan Pinabell of Atlanta that showed up in our cursory web searches.
It’s an exotic hire to be sure. But for a foundering program like Immaculate, desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose.
Pinabell’s quick bio, taken from the St. Pius X high school website and a Q&A he did with with a Catholic news site in 2006: Pinnabell is 39-years old and was born in Boston, but moved to Florida as he was entering his freshman year of high school.
He played football (linebacker and guard) and was an all-state baseball catcher at Melbourne Central Catholic High School. He went on to play baseball at Central Florida and graduated with degree in secondary education.
Pinabell spent several years as an assistant coach, first at his alma mater Melbourne Central Catholic, then moved to Georgia and spent a year at North Gwinnett (Ga.) and, beginning in 2001, five years St. Pius X under coach Paul Standard.
Pinabell took over as head coach of Our Lady of Mercy in Fairburn, Ga. in 2006 and spent two seasons there going 1-9 and 4-6.
He returned to St. Pius X where he remained until now.
We briefly caught up to Pinabell today, but he was attending a party for his young son. “My CEO and CFO won’t be too happy if I stay on the phone,” he joked in reference to his wife, Andrea. “I get the feeling I won’t get too much more time (with his family) over the next six months.”
He said he’d get back to us later.
PREVIOUS POST (3:30)
With the start of fall practices just over a month away, time was of the essence.
Still, Immaculate worked surprisingly quick to hire its next football coach. It took a week and a half since Gary Bellagamba suddenly resigned. It took just six days since Immaculate announced the opening publicly.
And the new head coach is…
Bryan Pinabell.
I’m sure everybody is having the same reaction as me:
“Um… who?”
Immaculate is working to get out a bio to us, but a cursory web search of his name only brought up one Bryan Pinabell from Tucker, Georgia — a suburb of Atlanta.
Incidentally, this search says he’s also a football coach who spent 2006 and 2007 2006 to 2009 as the coach of Our Lady of Mercy catholic school in Fairburn, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. Several other bios (from when he took the job at OLM), describe Pinabell as a Boston native who moved to Florida when he was a high school freshman. Pinabell is 39-years old now.
Football coach. New England and catholic school connections… our Spidey sense says this is the same coach who just took the job at Immaculate.
That’s enough spelunking for today. We’ll confirm all these details when Immaculate releases a bio.
They could have Bill Parcels as their coach, with 30 kids on their roster they’re not going to go anywhere. I’m predicting a 1-9 season with their schedule, maybe a 2-8 if they can scrape by Stratford or New Milford.
Wow that was quick. This dude was hired b/f we could even get a good “Jack Coachran and/or John Murphy is interested” thread going!