Winning 2 state titles as football coach, Saint Stephen's Creneti 2 wins shy in lacrosse

SARASOTA — When he became the head football coach at Saint Stephen’s, Tod Creneti knew little about the program.

What he did know was that it wasn’t good.

The year before Creneti’s arrival, 2010, the Falcons finished 2-8 under Stan Brown, who was let go after the season. Saint Stephen’s allowed a whopping 453 points in those 10 games, losing three by scores of 76-38, 76-40, and 63-23.

'No sense of community'

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Indeed, the Falcons weren’t close to their opponents on the field, nor were they close to each other off it.

“There was no sense of community,” said lineman Dylan Davis, who played for Creneti from 2016 to 2020. “The football team had been really bad for years, and I don’t think the school really supported it.”

Prior to coming to Saint Stephen’s, Creneti, the son of a football coach, had coached at St. Pete Catholic, Melbourne Central Catholic, St. Pete Lakewood, Hilton Head High School, Georgetown University, and first, with his dad at West Springfield High School in Virginia.

Creneti had certain coaching tenets he subscribed to, and nowhere among them was the belief that football players, performing the sport that requires the most teamwork, should eat lunch alone.

One day, Creneti walked into the Saint Stephen’s lunch room and saw his players scattered about. To a coach who preaches the gospel of togetherness and family, all in the pursuit of team success, this wasn’t going to fly.

Creneti said his players must sit together to eat. “There’s not enough tables,” the players told him. “Push them together,” he said. “That just became the thing our program did. You would walk out in March, and the tables would still be ⅔ football players. But they started to connect with each other. They started to care about each other. Started to have this sense of team.”

Said Davis, “He encouraged us to get together on weekends and build that sense of community. He helped foster those relationships among the players.

“We had upper-classmen, we had guys who were signed to play college football, and we had freshmen who had never played any football, and they were sitting next to each other.  No one sat alone if you were on the football team. We were a band of brothers.”

And, soon, they were a band on the run. The Falcons finished 0-10 under Creneti his first season. But the seed of family and loving your teammates and playing for them and not just for yourself had been planted.

Soon, it began to yield fruit.

The season after finishing 0-10, the Falcons improved to 4-7, 6-5, 8-3 and 9-2. In 2016, the Falcons won their first of two back-to-back state titles. “He’s a great motivator,” said Davis, a lineman at Illinois. “I think that every player who plays for him, loves to play for him. He really believes in them.”

A change of sports

Fast-forward several years. Creneti, now the head coach of the Falcon girls lacrosse team, didn’t dump his mantra of togetherness and family just because his charges were girls. He didn’t have them push together tables in the school cafeteria.

What Creneti did was have his players pick out a “secret sister” on the team. The Falcon would buy her secret sister her favorite snack with a written message. “It was something that was so silly,” said Sophia Creneti, Tod’s daughter and a player on the Falcons, “but it made us so much closer.”

“Team ice cream” is another method Creneti uses. The players simply sit together, freshmen and seniors alike, and eat ice cream. “I wanted to hang out (with the underclassmen),” Sophia Creneti said. “I like getting to know them.”

Different sports, football and lacrosse, played by different genders. The common thread between the two is success. And Creneti himself.

The football Falcons advanced to four consecutive Sunshine State Athletic Conference title games, winning two. Creneti finished his nine-year career with a 68-32 record and the satisfaction of putting the Falcon football . program on higher ground.

Creneti may need room for more championship hardware. His Saint Stephen’s lacrosse team hosts Community School of Naples Friday night at 5 in the region 3 final, two victories from a state title and further proof that Creneti’s coaching style of family and all for one and one for all may be the best way to reach high school athletes.

Stepping down and stepping up

“I think I really thrive on the mental side,” he said, “the motivational side of it. If you can’t get your kids right between the ears, what they’re like from the neck down doesn’t matter.”

After stepping down as coach after the 2019 season and earning his master’s degree, Creneti returned to Saint Stephen’s, primarily to serve as a “lacrosse dad” to daughter Sophia, who was entering high school. But when the person the school hired to replace former coach LeeAnn Fronckowiak backed away at the last minute, Creneti knew what he had to do.

“I had to step up, or step out,” he said. “The one thing I felt I could do was run a program. I was going to have to figure out the lacrosse side. I knew very little about lacrosse. My lack of knowledge was pretty shocking. I knew nothing from the jump.”

Creneti got level 1 certified through USA Lacrosse. He picked the brains of other lacrosse coaches, and watched tons of video. He then brought on people who truly knew the sport.

Unlike the football team he took over, Creneti inherited a good — but not great — Falcon lacrosse team. “Our girls work hard for the success of the team,” Creneti said. “The girls came in wanting to be great, whatever work it took.”

Creneti’s daughter said her dad made an already tight team even more united. “He just made more opportunities to do so,” she said, noting how Tod Creneti hands out “practice packs” to his players that contain matching shirts and backpacks.

“It makes us more like a family,” she said. “He’s very good at communicating. Anything he says can sound inspirational. He makes everyone on the team know they are loved and valued.”

Two more victories and the Falcons will sit atop the state’s lacrosse mountaintop. At one time, the school’s football team did likewise, the common denominator being a coach who unconditionally loves his players, holds them accountable, and will always communicate with them.

“They believe in what they’re doing,” Tod Creneti said, “and they believe in each other.”

That’s because their coach believes in them. And always will.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Winning 2 football titles, Saint Stephen's coach close in lacrosse