By rssfeeds-admin In a video of the meeting between Anderson and the players provided to Sports Central by the Fresno Unified School District, Anderson is heard telling the players, “I know it’s not gonna be the most favorable decision,” and that “some of you might decide this is not the football program you wanna be in.”
“When she was saying, ‘you might not be happy with our choice,'” said Sunnyside Athletic Director Sue Farmer. “You could just see the body language on the kids (changing), so she messed with ’em a little bit.”
Sunnyside senior-to-be quarterback Johnathon Diaz felt “a little shook” listening to Anderson, but moments later, the program’s new head coach revealed himself by walking into the gym, and the players went absolutely nuts in celebration.
“I’ve been in education for 40 years, and I’ve never seen kids react to anything like that,” said Farmer. “They were running so fast, the banners in the gym wall came off the wall. I mean, it was like Christmas ten times over.”
That’s because the new coach who had been hired was Gio Guzman, a former Sunnyside offensive lineman from southeast Fresno, who was part of the previous staff as an assistant, spent last year as the junior varsity head coach, and also works as a restorative counselor at the school.
“Just surreal,” said Guzman, about the players’ enthusiastic reaction to him being named head coach. “Obviously, I know a lot of these guys love me, and we’ve built this relationship over the last couple years, and I’ve been knowing some of these guys since they were 13, 14 (year’s old).”
Guzman’s connection to these kids goes beyond just the x’s and o’s.
“Where it really starts is when kids decide that I have a choice,” added Guzman. “I have a choice to make a difference in my life, and that’s exactly what happened with me.”
Gio says he struggled at times in high school, but with the help of administrators, teachers and coaches at Sunnyside, including the late Justin Garza, who was the varsity head football coach at Sunnyside when Gio was a freshman, Guzman got his life headed on the right path.
“When I was a freshman, (Garza) would talk to me all the time, in a weightlifting class, or seeing me, sometimes ditching campus, and he talked to me like, ‘hey, what are we doing?'” says Guzman. “It just made me feel like ‘man, a varsity coach is talking to me, I’m just a freshman, I’m a nobody,’ but at the end of the day, he made me feel like somebody.”
Which is something Gio has been paying forward, both as a counselor on campus, and on the field as a coach, to the next generation of Wildcats.
“He connects with us, and we connect with him, because he’s been through the stuff we’ve been through,” summed up Diaz.
“He’s just a genuine guy who really cares about people,” added Farmer.
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