NISKAYUNA. – Not every former player makes a good coach. Not every alumnus returns to his alma mater. Not every coach with a breadth of experience is able to translate it into wins.
Occasionally, however, stars align and you get Brian Grastorf at Niskayuna High School. The 2006 Niskayuna graduate, in his sixth season leading the Silver Warriors, has guided the varsity football team to a 7-2 record and its first Section II semifinal since 2010. Niskayuna will play La Salle at 7 p.m. Friday in a Class A semifinal at Schenectady High School.
Win or lose, this will end up as Grastorf’s best season, topping his 6-4 mark last year. If Niskayuna wins Friday, it will have reached its first final since 1996, when it lost to Troy in the Class A final. His overall record still isn’t .500, but he’s re-established the program.
A three-sport athlete in high school, Grastorf quarterbacked Niskayuna for three years as a player before going on to Ithaca College, where he played football and baseball. You don’t have to remind La Salle coach John Audino of that fact. Audino was the head coach of Union College when Grastorf was making his college choice.
“Oh my gosh, I recruited the heck out of him,” Audino recalled. “He was our number-one prospect at quarterback, and it came down to Union and Ithaca. I knew of him as a young man, and he was just excellent at all sports. You could tell he was going to be successful. We didn’t really have the major he wanted, and like a lot of young people, he wanted to get a little farther away from home.”
After earning his bachelor’s degree, Grastorf spent a year at Ithaca as a graduate assistant football coach. He then spent three years at Colonie High School, then three years at Niskayuna in various roles before becoming head coach, taking over from John Furey, who had led Niskayuna for 20-plus years.
Furey, who assists Grastorf by working with the linebackers and special teams, said he felt completely comfortable handing the reins to Grastorf.
“Brian takes everything in stride,” Furey said. “He works well with the kids, has a good sense with them, but he’s got a football mind to start. He works hard with his assistant coaches and with the players to keep them interested.”
Grastorf said that when he first took over as head coach, he wanted to build up the program’s numbers. He also credited Furey for smoothing his transition.
“There was a good group of 10th-graders that could have come up to varsity his final year, but he kept them together on JV. I coached them freshman year and sophomore year, then moved up with them to varsity. That was a good group of guys that helped get Nisky back on track,” Grastorf said.
Grastorf was able to get the participation numbers up, as well, and he did it by using a page out of his own playbook.
“Football was not exactly a year-round program,” Grastorf said, “and to build the sport, we needed multi-sport athletes to make it work. I was pretty flexible in the beginning. Kids are being pulled in different directions and told they should concentrate on one sport. I told lacrosse and basketball players, ‘Hey, I need you in the fall and whenever you can, but I understand.’ I was a three-sport athlete in Niskayuna. I felt they were comfortable with that.”
His numbers came up recently, too, and he thinks it may have been an offshoot of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think it made more kids say, ‘I want to take advantage of opportunities’ and helped increase numbers,” Grastorf said.
Once he’s got them on the practice fields, Grastorf keeps his players engaged.
“He has a great way to connect with the kids,” Niskayuna High School Principal John Rickert said. “He delivers his messages in a way they relate to. He does some creative things with practices. He does some creative things with his off-the-field activities and team bonding. He’s the ideal person to lead our program.”
Audino, having known the Grastorf family for a while, is happy to see the young man having success. Of course, once Friday night’s first whistle blows, he’ll want the success for his Cadets. La Salle enters with a 5-4 record, but one of the wins was a 25-7 verdict against Niskayuna on Sept. 16.
“He’s disciplined, knows the different aspects of the game,” Audino said of Grastorf. “He has a good offense; he’s running a college offense in high school. He gets the kids to execute. He’s doing some really nice things offensively, and this year he’s got the defense going too. We’ve got our hands full, and we did the first time.”
Rickert said that Grastorf is also good about connecting with alumni.
“We have a lot of alumni attend or check in from wherever they’re living as to how the team is doing,” Rickert said. “It’s very important and special.”
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