Richard Luongo, or Coach Lu as the boys lacrosse team liked to call him, stepped down last season from his 11 year coaching position due to a position change at his full-time job. He left behind a legacy of success.
Luongo started as the junior varsity boys lacrosse coach in 2005 and moved on to coach the varsity team in 2007.
“I met Mr. Whitten and I saw an opening for [the] JV [coaching position] and I applied and that was the start of my high school coaching career,” Luongo said.
Under Luongo, the boys varsity lacrosse team won three district titles in 2007, 2011, and 2012. In 2011 and 2012, the team competed in the district and state finals. Luongo saw his team climb to district final games six of the nine years he coached the team.
As a student himself, Luongo played lacrosse at Medford High School and Westfield State University.
“[Playing lacrosse] allowed me to meet kids that I normally wouldn’t have met and gave me a good outlet for team building,” Luongo said. “That’s what I tried to emphasize with the kids in high school, that camaraderie. There are guys from college that I still see that I played college lacrosse with.”
Luongo took his passion for the sport and applied it to coaching.
“[I started coaching] for the love of the sport and the love of the players,” Luongo said. “To instill good values in young kids who are trying to figure out how to get into adulthood. And I love the game. But really it’s about instilling those lifelong values in the boys that you get out of playing a sport.”
In order to further instill those values, Luongo created an acronym which he implemented into the lacrosse program called DES [Discipline, Execution, and Stay with the program] in 2009.
“What I’ve found is that’s the main value [DES] that most kids are getting out of the program, and it’s that philosophy that the program is built around,” Luongo said. “It’s great to win, it’s great to be successful, but it’s what you take out of the program, that team and DES camaraderie, that we’ve built into the team.”
Senior captain Colton King agrees that DES and Luongo’s philosophies impacted him and his team in a way that reached beyond lacrosse.
“[Coach Luongo] always believed in family first,” King said. “He never wanted someone to just be one person on a team; he always wanted you to be one eleventh of a team since there are eleven players on the field.”
Luongo retired from full-time coaching due to a shift in his work at EMC Corporation. He looks forward to utilizing the skills he has acquired coaching towards managing his team at work.
“I’ve learned a lot from running the team that has helped me run teams at my high-tech job at EMC,” Luongo said. “I’ve used strategies that I learned with the kids to drive teams at EMC and it works quite well.”
Luongo will still be active in the Central Massachusetts lacrosse community. He coaches for the club team Seven Hills Lacrosse and will continue to affiliate with the sport he is passionate about.
Above all, Luongo says he will miss the lacrosse team and the players who strived to do their best for him.
“I’ll just miss the kids and going out on the field every spring,” Luongo said. “It’s been a great ride and a lot of fun. They learn life isn’t simple and you don’t always get what you want. But hard work is important and will help you be successful. I’ll miss learning from them as much as they learn from me.”