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Just Call her Coach: Garza steps into larger Strength & Conditioning/Powerlifting Coaching role at Aldine High
HOUSTON – A whistle sounds, cutting through the August air over the sound of the band warming up and music blaring from the stadium speakers. Members of the Aldine football team run back and forth in their pregame routine across the turf on the first Friday night of the season.
Standing there, instructing each step and move, will be Aislinn Garza.
“I’ve got goosebumps,” Garza said of imagining her first Friday Night Lights in Texas on a football coaching staff next fall.
Garza was recently hired as the Aldine Strength & Conditioning and Powerlifting coach to serve on Cirilo Ojeda’s staff, becoming the second-known female staff member of a football coaching staff in Houston.
“When I was 14, I didn’t see a lot of women in these positions,” Garza said. “I didn’t see women working in professional sports. At 14, my realm of opportunities was shortsighted. I would have never dreamed of working at a 6A high school on a football staff ever in my life.
“I wake up in the morning and I work at Aldine High School. I am on a football staff at Aldine High School. A State and National Championship winning school. This is insane and amazing.”
As part of her on-field and in-game duties, Ojeda will handle the warmup and dynamic stretching during pregame and halftime. Then, during the game, she will work with athletic trainers Corie Cerda and Kelly Smallbeck.
“I see her impact showing in our explosiveness, physical ability, core strength and toughness,” Ojeda said. “Those are the intangibles that aren’t going to happen without a plan, and that’s what she brings to the football side of things. She will be at practices for warmup, cooldown and in season lifts.”
Garza was brought to Aldine by Ojeda from his previous job at Sharpstown High School, where Garza served as the Strength & Conditioning coordinator but was also the Dance Director. She didn’t have an on-field role. Her time was split between athletics and fine arts.
Now, starting this week, Garza is a key part of the Aldine football coaching staff, serves as the Strength & Conditioning coach for all sports, and will start a boys and girls powerlifting team next year.
“I have always loved working with football,” Garza said. “I’m excited to take a more active role on the coaching staff. I’m really lucky that Coach Ojeda is open-minded and supportive of hiring the best fit and the best people for positions.”
Ojeda added: “Her favorite saying is ‘How you do something is how you do everything.’ Her attention to detail is second to none, and the impact that is going to be made has no ceiling.”
Road to Coaching
Garza’s path to coaching is an interesting one.
At Katy Taylor High School and LSU, Garza did not play team sports, instead being a part of their dance teams. So, how did she end up as a strength and conditioning coach?
“I fell in love with the science of programming,” Garza said. “Understanding better ways of moving and learning better ways to develop things required on the field of play. That led me to getting my Masters at LSU in Kinesiology.”
Coming out of college, Garza got into Crossfit and then parlayed that into Olympic weightlifting starting in 2011.
In training for Olympic weightlifting, Garza said they use the bench, squat and deadlift to train – which are all used in powerlifting. Over the years, Garza started doing private training but then came on staff at Sharpstown High School as its strength and conditioning coordinator.
“My dance side helps me to being creative with some of the things we do in the weight room,” Garza said.
While serving as the strength and conditioning coordinator at Sharpstown, Ojeda was preparing Garza for the next step of her career.
“He did such a good job of integrating me at the program at Sharpstown that there weren’t nerves,” she said about accepting the larger role at Aldine. “Every year I fall more and more in love with strength and conditioning and with football, too. This year, I started playing football. It has been really fun to play and understand the game better. In five years, I would love to continue to be a part of this Aldine football staff. Breaking records, snapping losing streaks and see some playoff berths.”
Inspiring the Next Generation
As Garza walks the halls of Aldine High during her first week on the job, she thinks back to what her 14-year-old self would think. Face-to-face in a room, what would she tell a 14-year-old Aislinn Garza?
“You are not going to believe what you got yourself into,” Garza said with a laugh.
What she has gotten herself into is becoming a role model and example to 14-year-old girls today as a coach. That feeling hit her last summer at Sharpstown High School. A student was coming to SAC camp twice a day. In the morning, she would work out and then in the afternoon be her “demo girl.”
At the end of the summer, she asked “How do I get to be like you when I grow up?”
“I immediately said, ‘how do you get to be a dance teacher?’,” Garza said. “She said no. ‘How do I get to coach weightlifting?’ In that moment, I was like wow. These girls, when they see something happening, they believe they can do it too.”
That hit Garza, who has been inspired in her career by people like Missy Mitchell-McBeth, the Strength & Conditioning coach at Byron Nelson High School. Garza’s impact has been bigger than she could even imagine.
“I’ve always looked up to women who work in athletics and work in sports specifically with football, but in every sport,” she said. “Ones who are leaders and who are paving the way. I never considered myself one of those women until last year.
“It’s an overwhelming feeling, it’s an exciting feeling and a big feeling of responsibility.”
Ojeda has seen Garza grow over the years into the coach she has become today. And she is a role model to young women everywhere, because “she conducts herself in the model that what she’s doing is the norm rather than the exception.”
“It should be an expectation that what you get is earned by being qualified and experienced to do any job at a high level without being labeled,” Ojeda said. “Young girls that see what she’s doing can see it as inspiration that they can do anything they want to do with hard work and dedication to the path they choose. If that’s being a football coach, then they have a network that’s forming from people like Coach Garza.”
With Garza’s hiring, she joins Fort Bend Bush’s Kim Smallwood, who has coached running backs and receivers for the Broncos, along with being the head women’s basketball coach, as a female staff member on a football staff in Houston. The UIL had its first-ever female referee in a state football championship game in 2020. Several school districts in Houston are led by female athletic directors – Galena Park (Vivian Dancy), Katy ISD (Debbie Decker), Fort Bend ISD (Dena Scott), Lamar CISD (Nikki Nelson) and, most recently, Splendora ISD (Deanna Eubanks).The UIL is headed up by Dr. Susan Elza.
"It's a big deal and is awesome that women are getting these opportunities," Elza told VYPE in a 2021 story about women in coaching. "And for women who aspire to coach men's sports, whether it be soccer, basketball, baseball or football, I say go for it. Even if you didn't play the sport, head coaches are going to coach you up so they can coach their kids.
"We are in a time where decision-makers are more open to not looking at gender, but at the qualifications."
Garza is qualified and is ready to continue blazing the path that many others have taken steps on before her. Now, she will do it at Aldine High School.
From Injury to Prevention: Nick Mascioli's journey to the Second Baptist School
HOUSTON – Sports have always been a part of Second Baptist School's Strength and Conditioning Coach Nick Mascioli's life.
Mascioli's father played college basketball, which helped lead him to the court, but also to the soccer field and baseball diamond in high school.
Growing up in the Philadelphia area, Mascioli decided to stay close to home going on to play college baseball at Westchester University, 30 minutes west of Philadelphia, where he was a part of a national championship-winning team.
Along the way, Mascioli experienced a few injuries, which ended up spurring his interest in strength and conditioning and injury prevention.
"I had a contact injury in high school playing soccer. I rehabbed my knee, had a really good experience, and ended up being faster and stronger than ever coming off the injury," Mascioli said. "I reaggravated it in college my freshman year. At that time, I wondered if somebody who was training me in college knew what they were doing, could this have been avoided? That spurred me on to pursue exercise science."
While at Westchester University, Mascioli interned at a semi-private baseball facility during his senior year. After graduation, Mascioli went to massage therapy school and received his soft tissues license before going to Indianapolis to intern at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training from September to December in 2015.
Next stop – the Pittsburgh Pirates organization as a minor league strength and conditioning coach.
"That was such a great experience. It gave me a different feel of what strength and conditioning looked like," Mascioli said. "Bigger setting, larger scale, obviously professional athletes. More of a collegiate setting rather than a semi-private or private sector."
After spending three and a half years with the Pirates, the work hours and travel started to take its toll. Mascioli went back to school to get his masters.
Attending East Stroudsburg University, Mascioli served as a graduate assistant. He worked with baseball, football, field hockey and tennis athletes.
While there, Mascioli was connected with Second Baptist School's Head of School Dr. Don Davis and Director of Athletics Mike Walker, who were in search of a strength and conditioning coach. After a few meetings, Mascioli said the fit was right, bringing him to Houston.
"What makes this school so cool and special is, from an athletics standpoint, we have a group of coaches that love what they do," Mascioli said. "Every coach, from cross country to football, baseball, basketball -- we have a lot of experienced coaches and some have coached at the collegiate and professional level. They know what they are doing, so they really take the time to coach these kids up. We have an incredible athletic director and staff who want to make us successful at our jobs … There are a lot of resources here and the people are amazing."
Q&A with Nick Mascioli, the Second Baptist School Strength & Conditioning Coach
VYPE: What is your philosophy on training athletes in season?
Mascioli: "When these kids are 12 to 18 years old, many of them just need to learn general foundational movement patterns, how to work hard and have simple consistency with their training programs. So, a lot of my philosophy is to throw a lot of different stimuli at them, especially kids in high school, because they are still maturing and growing and so their bodies can handle a lot of different things all at once. They are going to get better naturally. We want to make all-around better athletes.
"They need to learn how to jump high, land properly, learn how to squat and have single-leg stability. Those are all tangible qualities we want to see in an athlete. If you're a football player or a tennis player, we want to be able to trust those capabilities."
VYPE: You played three sports in high school, what are your thoughts on athletes who play multiple sports in today's age?
Mascioli: "I played three; baseball, football and basketball. I think kids benefit from playing multiple sports. Playing multiple sports allows athletes to rest their bodies or more specific energy systems they are using from another sport. A lot of these athletes just need variability. If they learn to do a lot of different things, they can reduce the risk of injury."
VYPE: What's the biggest thing that you do for injury prevention?
Mascioli: "We do a lot of single-leg work. We do a lot of it. We do work that's going to promote stability. At practice, we incorporate pre-prep warmup. In the gym, we do some type of jumping, throwing and/or landing mechanics. Generally, we are just teaching kids to move the right way.
"A lot of our injury prevention comes from specific exercises. We let athletes choose the ones that work best for them and get them doing it cleanly. So, if they're moving better generally, that's going to clear a lot of things up. I would say in a nutshell, we make sure technique looks really good and that they're getting stronger in the process."
VYPE: How does your role as a Strength and Conditioning Coach at Second Baptist School fulfill your passion for coaching?
Mascioli: " It's really cool to see how my perspective of what it means to be a "Strength Coach" has changed over the years. Early on in my career, it was all about science, physiology, programming, exercise, and the list goes on. Very little did I think about the person, and what it means to be a Coach in that sense of the word. Creating good people, turning young boys into men, and young girls into women are just as much of my job description if not more, than creating a program to make athletes perform better. That's where my job at Second Baptist School truly fulfills my passion as a strength and conditioning coach. Our mission here is to help cultivate young men and women who love the Lord and to impact the world around them with Jesus being the focus. I get to instill that message and culture into my athletes every day. Although I have had opportunities to train in previous settings, Second Baptist has created this platform better than any other place I have been, and that is what drew me to this school. I am truly blessed to be here"