One fought in the UFC. One played in the NFL. Now St. Dominic's Gian Villante and Central Islip's Eric Unverzagt coach football.
Gian Villante has stepped into the cage before massive throngs all over the world. Some nights the crowds treated him like a villain and others like a hero. Then there are nights from his 13 years as a professional MMA fighter that sound uniquely special when the Levittown product describes them.
In those, he was derided when he stepped onto the canvas and victoriously cheered when he stepped off it.
“You earn their respect with the passion and effort in how you compete,” Villante said. “You earn their appreciation and then it becomes a moment like right out of ‘Rocky IV.’ ”
Performing before huge crowds is something Eric Unverzagt knows, too. He was a star player for a championship football team on Long Island, a starting linebacker when Wisconsin won its first Rose Bowl and a member of the NFL's Seattle Seahawks.
“What always stayed with me is the way a football program can [touch] everything around it,” the Central Islip native said. “It can give a school or an entire community something to be proud about.”
Villante and Unverzagt were both Long Island high school football stars who ascended to play their chosen sports at the highest level. Both returned to the Island after retiring. And this year, both took over as head coaches at local high school programs that have grown quiet in recent years.
Villante is at St. Dominic. Unverzagt is at Central Islip, his alma mater. And each is now tapping into his rich experience with a goal of returning his program to prominence.
Among the things Villante wants for the players in a program that has, according to Newsday records, won 18 games in the 12 seasons since the school brought back football?
“Make the fans in the stands appreciate how you compete and the other team to know that it’s been in a fight,” he said.
Unverzagt wants the players in the Musketeer program — which is 28-135 over the past 20 seasons, according to Newsday records — to have what he had at Central Islip.
“I want them to be the pride of Central Islip,” he said. “I want them to see people wearing CI gear and talking about whatever the next game is.”
LEADERSHIP AND ALLURE
Gian Villante won the Thorp and Piner awards while at MacArthur High School, was an All-American at Hofstra, fought in the UFC for a decade and coached football at Salk Middle School in Levittown before becoming head coach at St. Dominic High School.
Villante’s last UFC match was in 2021 and it was easy to envision he’d be writing his next chapter on Long Island. He had led MacArthur to a county championship and received Newsday’s Thorp Award as the Nassau’s top player in 2002 but eschewed scholarship offers from big-name colleges to play for Hofstra.
Last fall, while completing his bachelor's degree in physical education, he tried his hand at coaching with a middle school team and liked it. Just months into this new gig at St. Dominic, the 37-year-old looks to be a fine fit. The Bayhawks have their biggest roster in a decade at 31 players, and in addition to physical education, he has about two dozen boys and girls taking classes he brought to the administration called "Leadership."
“I played football for three seasons and no one ever looked to me as someone to follow,” senior safety Luke Woodstock said. “I believe I am becoming that because of the class.”
The Bayhawks' roster includes 10 students who never played football before. Villante is a big part of the draw. They’ve seen him in the UFC octagon and competed as him in the EA Sports UFC 3 and UFC 4 video games.
“I thought it would be cool to play football this season because I wanted to get to know him and learn from a professional athlete,” senior linebacker Willie Olesen said. “I had played the video game, but now I think it's kind of funny to fight as my coach.”
“I never really followed him in particular but now I watch all videos of him [on YouTube] and play him in the video game,” Woodstock said. “He’s nasty.”
Villante left Hofstra early to train for the NFL Combine. When he found that avenue closed, he ultimately decided to try fighting because, he said, “I always believed I could be a professional athlete.”
“I’d never been punched in the face until the first time I was sparring,” Villante said. “But I came to like it . . . Now I think I hold the record for taking the most punches [in a fight].”
(He doesn't, but he does ranks sixth in UFC light heavyweight history with 741 significant strikes landed.)
As it was with MMA, so it is with coaching. Villante called MacArthur football coach Bobby Fehrenbach and former Generals wrestling coach Howie Greenblatt the “people I always looked up to” and cites their influence as something that drew him to coaching.
“He’s a force for us, someone who you can see changing the culture,” Woodstock said. “It’s there in the way we practice and prepare. It’s there in the lessons he teaches us from his life. It’s even there on our bus. He makes everyone ride together because he says, ‘We ride together — we die together.'"
“I’d like to see St. Dominic become a football destination on the Island,” Villante said of the CHSFL Class A program. “A lot must happen first, but I already feel it going in the right direction.
'I BELONG AT CI'
Eric Unverzagt after a game at Central Islip in 1990 and coaching for Central Islip in 2022.
Asked about the 1996 NFL Draft, Unverzagt paused for a moment. When he broke the silence he said, “In that moment in time I felt like I was living the dream.”
He was the best player on the 1990 Central Islip team that won the Suffolk Large Schools championship — a pinnacle before the 1992 advent of the Long Island Championships — and was named to Newsday’s All-Long Island team. He chose Wisconsin over a host of other big-time programs and was central in the group of players that helped put the program back on the map, culminating with the Badgers’ 1994 Rose Bowl defeat of UCLA. The Seahawks took him in the fourth round.
“I’d [aspired] to play at the highest level and I was going to,” Unverzagt, 49, said.
The dream, however, was not long-lived and ended hard. He was released two games into his second season with Seattle. He pursued an NFL career into the 1998 season with an invite to camp with the Detroit Lions, but he didn’t make the team. Next came a stint training high-level athletes with a franchise on Long Island and after that an invitation to try his hand at coaching on the staff at Kings Park.
“The transition from playing professional football isn’t easy — at some point you realize it’s not your decision,” he said. “I wasn’t initially crazy about coaching . . . but the pieces started falling into place.”
After five seasons as a Kings Park assistant coach, Unverzagt found the lure of an opening on the Central Islip staff in 2004 was too strong to resist.
“I felt it then and I realize it today: I belong at CI,” he said. “I am from Central Islip. I went to school here and played football here and was part of something here. I can be a positive role model for the students.”
He switched posts with head coach Mike Pyle before this season and is realizing he needs to use his own journey to inspire — something that doesn’t come naturally for him.
“A lot of kids on the team don’t even know that he played in the NFL,” senior defensive back/running back Ryan Antwi said. “They find out and they are [astonished] that someone who has done all he has would come back. But he has done what we all want to do. It shows up in everything he does.”
Antwi said he feels inspired daily when he walks past the school trophy case displaying mementos from the 1990 championship season. He isn’t sure if teammates are even aware.
“It’s not my personality type to speak about myself but I realize, as head coach, I don’t do it enough,” Unverzagt said. “I can show them that football can open doors: to college, to a career path in life, to being part of something special with your team and community.”
A TASTE OF VICTORY
Progress comes incrementally. Villante’s vision for St. Dominic as a football destination is going to take time. So is Unverzagt’s mission to put Central Islip back on the gridiron map. But at least in their first seasons at the helm, each helped his team get a first taste of victory on Sept. 24.
St. Dominic scored a 10-8 Homecoming Day win over Ramapo as Vincenzo Sicuranza kicked the go-ahead field goal with eight minutes left and Woodstock iced the win with an interception. The Musketeers, too, won on Homecoming Day against rival Brentwood: a 12-7 triumph on Antwi’s touchdown run with 2:18 to play.
“There was a big response to it for them,” Unverzagt said. “Their friends were talking to them about the game after winning. They had a reason to feel proud and the students at the school were proud because of them.
“I want them to want that every week.”
There is another goal both seem already to be accomplishing: Showing their seniors that they are the foundation for future success.
“Being a part of [Villante’s] first season, I can see this becoming something great and I love the idea that I will have been a part of that,” Olesen said of the Bayhawks' program.
“I see our program turning around with [Unverzagt] as coach,” Antwi said. “I hope it turns into something I can look at and say ‘I was a part of that. I was part of something special.' ”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
