Joe DeLucca entered the 2023 football season thinking his days as a coach may be nearing an end.
DeLucca correctly felt that head coach Nick Barbieri could be entering his last season. He thought that former head coach and defensive coordinator Lon Hazlet could be doing the same. And, DeLucca’s son Drew was going through his third and final season as starting quarterback of the Patriots.
Instead of wrapping things up there, however, DeLucca has decided to accept more responsibilities for the future. He was named Tuesday as head coach of the Patriots when his appointment to the position was approved at the monthly school board meeting.
“Going into this season, being that it was my son’s senior year and I had a feeling that both coach Hazlet and coach Barbieri that it was going to be their last year coaching,” said DeLucca, who has three decades of experience in education and coaching, but has never been a head varsity football coach, “I thought it was going to be my last year coaching football as well. My goal was to enjoy every minute; every practice; every game.
“I did. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I developed some great relationships with our players.”
So much so that when Barbieri announced his retirement, DeLucca thought twice about his own.
“Once the season ended, as most football coaches know, you know when it’s time and when it isn’t,” DeLucca said. “There’s just a fire burning for football. I couldn’t stop thinking about our players, our program.”
DeLucca coached the special teams six of the last seven seasons, sitting out his son’s sophomore season, then returning to be part of the staff when Barbieri guided the Patriots to their first title in 20 years. The Patriots rebuilt in 2023, putting freshmen and sophomores in more than half the positions many times, but still going .500 in the regular season and returning to the District 2 Class 5A playoffs.
“Coach Barbieri hadn’t really made up his mind at the time,” DeLucca said of the immediate aftermath of the season.
Around Thanksgiving, Barbieri made it clear that he was ready to step aside.
“I discussed with him taking over the program,” DeLucca said. “One thing I’ve always said about coach Barbieri is he leaves places better than he found them. Coach Barbieri certainly has left Pittston Area on solid ground. He ran a top-notch, first-class program.
“I’m honored to follow in the footsteps of him and his late father (Bob), who created a legacy there while coaching at Pittston Area.”
DeLucca said he appreciates the school and administration trusting him with that task, saying he is “incredibly honored and excited.”
The director of administrative services for the Luzerne County Intermediate Unit, DeLucca got into coaching in 1994 as a head junior high and varsity assistant coach in the Wyoming Seminary football program.
Since then, he has coached at Wyoming Area, as well as Mid Valley and Pittston Area. He was a head coach in track and field and cross country as well as a junior high basketball and track coach and a varsity assistant in football on three Wyoming Area championship teams and the most recent at Pittston Area.
During the same three-decade stretch, DeLucca has worked as a teacher, counselor, assistant principal and interim superintendent at local high schools and in administrative positions at the intermediate unit.
The experience coaching special teams will be helpful as DeLucca becomes a head football coach.
“We put a lot of time and dedication into special teams over the last several years, which we will continue to do,” DeLucca said. “Our kids have bought into that. It’s a major facet of the game, which we take seriously.”
DeLucca said offensive and defensive schemes will be dependent on the team’s personnel.
“Our main thing is to put people in the right spots,” DeLucca said. “I don’t want to build an offense and make kids fit into a particular scheme.
“I want to fit the scheme around who our players are. I don’t believe in putting round pegs into square holes. … We’ll use the best scheme around the players we have.”
As it does in most football programs, the work can start now.
“First and foremost, our number-one goal is to increase our dedication in the weightroom,” he said. “We’re going to strive to be bigger, stronger, tougher, faster. That’s the number-one mantra.
“It doesn’t matter what scheme you run if you don’t take care of that first.”
DeLucca played football under Frank Parra in the late 1980s, prior to his graduation from Wyoming Area in 1990.
Initially recruited to play football at Mansfield University, DeLucca instead played baseball for a year there and continued that sport after transferring to Bloomsburg University where he became a team captain.
