Paravicini takes winding road to Bradenton Christian head football job

LAKEWOOD RANCH — If it’s a given young players make mistakes, does that apply to young head coaches as well?

“Absolutely,” said first-year head coach Scott Paravicini of the Bradenton Christian football team. “I’m sure I’m going to make a ton of them. I’m sure I’ve already made some, if I look back on the time I’ve been hired to now. I just hope that they’re not huge ones. That we can rebound from and build from.”

The “local boy makes good” storyline can’t have a more local protagonist than Scott Paravicini, at 28, the youngest head football coach in the area. He was born in Sarasota, and his dad took over a pest-control business his father started in 1967. Paravicini’s mother moved to Sarasota while in elementary school, while a grandfather worked as a sheet-metal worker around Tampa.

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At 4, Scott’s family moved to east Bradenton, so when the time came to attend high school, Paravicini enrolled at Lakewood Ranch High and became a Mustang football player. But if you think the story continues with Paravicini becoming a star on the team, college offers arriving from everywhere, that story belongs to someone else.

“I was average,” he said. “I wasn’t very big (160 pounds) and I wasn’t very fast. Luckily, I knew that to be successful, I needed to understand the scheme we were playing in and needed to be good at the fundamentals and do things the right way.”

Paravicini didn’t delude himself into thinking he was better than he was. Even then, he realized he would have to approach the game with the mindset of a future head coach and not that of a player. But the path Paravicini would take to get there was unknown even to him. Coming out of high school, he wanted to become a marine mechanic. Working for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission was another possibility.

He enrolled at State College of Florida for two years “to see where my path would take me.” But Paravicini stayed in shape, and truth be told, never lost the bug to play football. He sent his high school film to a couple of NAIA schools in Florida without any luck.

Then, he got some. His girlfriend at the time had played softball at SCF before accepting a scholarship to NAIA Warner University in Lake Wales. While she was there on orientation, she asked one of the football players what he had done to get recruited. “Oh,” he said, “I just emailed the head coach.”

Paravicini did likewise, and ultimately received preferred walk-on status. But, once again, he was in a football environment where he wasn’t the best player. Far from it.

“I played minimally,” he said. “Again, I was the smallest linebacker. I weighed 180 pounds and the next smallest was 200 pounds. Again, an uphill battle.”

But Paravicini had already started the process of thinking like a coach. “I sat in the meetings and soaked up everything up everything I could soak up.”

He graduated from Warner with a degree in exercise and sports leadership.

“I knew I  wanted to coach football. But I knew football doesn’t pay the bills. I really didn’t know what my real job would be.”

Paravicini bounced around a bit, working for a time at YouFit, before getting a spot at Bayshore High working with the team’s linebackers. While there, Paravicini was asked by the team’s defensive coordinator if he had thought about substitute teaching.

Paravicini began subbing at different schools before landing a job at Lakewood Ranch, working with Mustang linebackers. Mick Koczersut, who had been a coach when Paravicini played, took the question one step further: did you ever think of becoming a full-time teacher?

“I have no idea,” Paravicini said. “I had never really thought about it.”

But his career as a football coach was beginning to take shape. A third party introduced Paravicini to Greg Williford, the head coach at Bradenton Christian. Before long, Williford hired the 25-year-old to be his defensive coordinator.

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“Even when he hired me, I told him at one point I wanted to be a head coach. This is part of my journey; it’s a chapter in the book and I’m grateful for it, but I wanted to a head coach and I always expressed that to Greg. I didn’t know how sooner or later that would be.”

As it turned out, sooner than Paravicini ever could have expected. After one season experience as a defensive coordinator, Paravicini was the guy picked to replace Williford, who will remain as the school’s facilities director.

“I’m really thankful for Greg on the chance he’s giving me," Paravicini said. "Greg kind of lobbied for me in the past and I definitely owe a lot to Greg.”

Paravicini knows what he’s getting into. At his first spring practice as defensive coordinator, he saw 14 kids show up. He asked Williford, ‘how do you want to practice with 14 kids?’ Williford responded, ‘you’ll see.’’’

He has 35 for spring practice, not everyone a savvy football veteran. The quarterback forgot to bring the ball bag to one practice. A couple others had to be shown how to put on their helmet. Rather than grabbing it by the ear holes and pulling down, they tried pushing it down on their heads from the top of it.

If that’s the worst Paravicini has to confront, he’ll be fortunate. Mostly, he wants to continue what Williford started. And, yes, with mistakes along the way.

“I think Greg set a precedent of how we’re going to do things,” he said, “and let the wins follow.”

SPRING FOOTBALL GAMES

WEDNESDAY

Tampa Jesuit at Palmetto, 7 p.m.

North Port at Booker County, 7 p.m.

THURSDAY

North Fort Myers at Port Charlotte, 7 p.m.

Seminole Osceola at Lakewood Ranch, 7 p.m.

Venice at Lakeland, 7 p.m.

Bradenton Christian at Bayshore, 7 p.m.

Charlotte at South Fort Myers, 7 p.m.

Southeast at Sebring, 7:30 p.m.

Cambridge, Saint Stephen’s at Out-of-Door, 6 p.m.

Indian Rocks Christian, Sarasota Christian, Southwest Florida Christian at Keswick Christian, 7 p.m.

Evangelical Christian at Lemon Bay, 7 p.m.

IMG Academy scrimmage

FRIDAY 

Island Coast at Cardinal Mooney, 7 p.m.

Pinellas Park at Braden River, 7 p.m.

FRIDAY, MAY 27

Manatee, Riverview at Sarasota, 5:30 p.m.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Paravicini takes winding road to Bradenton Christian head football job