How the Montgomery High School football team got on the doorstep of making history
Zoran Milich will likely reach a milestone Friday. Head coach of the Montgomery High School football team, his Cougars are favored to defeat Scotch Plains-Fanwood in a 7 p.m. home game.
The win would be career No. 100. And also extend the season’s record to 8-0.
“That means I’ve been around a long time,” he said from his office last week, having finished his Social Studies classes for the day. He was wearing black sweats, and a black T-shirt with a yellow message printed on the back: Find A Way.
“It’s nice to know we’ve had success, it’s a nice number,” he noted, “but I have 100 losses, too. It depends how you look at it.”
The way Josh Hidalgo looks at it, the numbers are irrelevant.
A 2008 graduate of the school, Hidalgo measures his high school experience in a way few can. Though a captain senior year, his victories didn’t peak in that 9-2 season.
Said the 34-year-old who now lives in Las Vegas, “I owe coach Milich my life.
“What that man means to me goes far beyond the football field,” he began to explain. “I grew up in a single-family home, with a single mom, and coach Milich was very pivotal in making me understand what it took to be a young man in this world. There are a lot of principles I carry with myself to this day that were instilled by coach Milich.
“I was a handful,” he added. “That man stuck with me through a lot of academic turmoil, a lot of detentions and disciplines, and fights. He was the reason I was able to turn my life around.”
While he never imagined going to college, Milich drove him around the state his senior year, trying to get someone to give the kid a chance.
William Paterson did. Hidalgo would get a degree in Exercise Science, and for the past few years he has been a strength and conditioning coach. Some of his clients are players in the National Football League.
“That guy did a lot of things for a lot of players that people don’t know about, and that’s before we talk about X’s and O’s,” Hidalgo said. “He is far beyond a football coach.”
He is also Montgomery High’s only head football coach.
Milich was an assistant football coach at Somerville, his alma mater, before getting a teaching position at Montgomery.
“We started out on what was the Pop Warner practice field,” said Doug Ruhlman, a line coach for the Cougars when the program began fielding a freshman squad in 2000. The first varsity season was 2002. We rolled in lights at times. It was great.”
Milich played football, basketball and baseball at Somerville, with baseball actually his favorite. He coached baseball at Montgomery before taking the football position.
A graduate of Rutgers, he was a walk-on in football before a herniated disc ended his career before it began. He then gave baseball a try, but as he jokes, “They started throwing curves.”
Baseball never left his system, and on some weekends and evenings coaches a Legion team at Diamond Nation in Flemington. He also used to coach summer league ball. “It’s very cathartic,” he said.
But nothing like the emotions of coaching football.
“I love the Friday nights, to go onto the field and it’s my guys versus your guys. Let’s go. It’s that Friday night adrenalin. That’s hard to replace.”
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Games already lost cannot be changed. But the direction of a season can. Like in 2004, when the Cougars came off a loss to Ridge, 21-7, a nightmare that included seven fumbled snaps, left them with no quarterbacks and a record of 1-2.
Said Milich, “I told them, ‘It is what it is. And what we choose to do with it will determine whether we succeed or fail.’ We won five of our last seven.
“You want to win, obviously, but not everyone wins the state championship every year. So what are you getting out of the sport? You take them as boys and hopefully they graduate as men. Hopefully they learn a lot of life lessons. I want our kids to feel like when they come into this program that this is special. That at some point,” Milich said, “stop and take a look. I want things nice, like how we cater dinner after practices. We raised a lot of money for things like that. I want them to feel they had a great experience, whether they played a lot or not.
“Hey, there’s going to be tough times,” he added. “I’m going to be all over you. I’m not going to make it easy for you. Life’s not easy, right? But every play is a chance to do something special. Every day is a chance to do something special. That’s what I want them to take out of this place.”
And what will Milich take out of Montgomery? Is this his final rodeo?
“I evaluate that after every season,” he said. “Part of it depends on my health. Do I still have the fire to burn, and all that stuff. Many times you finish a season and you’re like, ‘I’m done.’ One more year would be 25. That’s a long time.”
Maybe he’ll walk away if this team wins its first state championship. Maybe he’ll go out on that round number of 25. Whenever he does, he’ll owe a lot of that longevity to the school and its parents.
“I’ve been really fortunate,” he said. “Since I was hired, the administration, the Board of Ed, the parents, they have been really supportive, or I probably wouldn’t be here 24 years. The community’s been great.”
While the support hasn’t changed, the coach has. Well, maybe.
“I’d like to think I have more wisdom” he said with a smile. “I might be a little softer.”
On the sidelines, headset on, green and yellow shirt, black sweats and yellow sneakers, he is as enthusiastic as always. Arms outstretched, sometimes clapping, sometimes yelling: “What are you doing?”
But as he says, “At the end of the day, it’s only a game.”
For some of his players, it is clearly much more than that.
Paul Franklin is a freelance reporter for MyCentralJersey.com.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: NJ football: Montgomery High School seeks 100th win
