(courtesy of Pete Tobey, The Post Star)

Read Article on The Post Star Here

La PLUME, PA - July 14, 2018 - As of this summer, the Keystone College football program has no players, no equipment, not even a locker room.

It does have a head coach, though: Warrensburg, N.Y. native Justin Higgins, who is building the program from the ground up.
 

Higgins was hired in March after Keystone announced it was restarting its football program for the first time in 70 years.

"It's a process," Higgins said. "Obviously there's a lot to put into place — it's basically the introduction of a new program. But we're excited, the school is excited, the community is excited."

Keystone — a small, private liberal arts college near Scranton, Pennsylvania — will field a club team in 2019. The Giants will go full varsity in 2020, as members of the NCAA Division III Eastern Collegiate Football Conference, which includes Castleton University.

Higgins, 40, is in charge of everything football at Keystone. He's not completely alone — last month, he hired former Glens Falls standout Dominick Guglielmo as his offensive line coach.

"He worked with a guy that I worked with and he got a great recommendation," Higgins said of Guglielmo. "Dom is a young, energetic guy — his career goals match where we are. He'll do a great job recruiting and he's super-organized."

Higgins always had an affinity for coaching, even as a high schooler, when he was a player-coach for his summer baseball team going into his senior year.

"I always thought it might be a potential career for me," said Higgins, who lives in the Scranton area with his wife, Korrie, and their four children.

A 1996 Warrensburg graduate, Higgins has made several coaching stops since his first taste of it during his senior year at Ithaca College, where he played football and baseball. He has coached at Kean University in New Jersey, Lehigh, SUNY Morrisville (twice), Utica College, and spent last year at Division II Seton Hill University near Pittsburgh. He has primarily coached defense and special teams in his career.

Higgins — no relation to former Corinth and Greenjackets coach Jeff Higgins — also taught at the elementary and high school level at Richfield Springs and New York Mills in central New York. He spent a year as head football coach at Richfield Springs.

"I've coached at all levels, but I like the Division III level," Higgins said. "The Division III college experience is what I always wanted to do — it was my experience when I played at Ithaca."

Higgins said he appreciates that Division III athletes are there for a different reason than Division I scholarship players, many of whom are looking for a stepping stone to pro sports.

"The kids are there because they want to be at the school," Higgins said. "It's a different culture. They want to further themselves as a person and in their careers. That's the No. 1 focus: teaching them to be better people, building people with good character."
 

Guglielmo, a 2011 Glens Falls graduate who was an offensive lineman at Brockport State, spent the last two years as an assistant coach at St. Scholastica in Minnesota and Heidelberg in Ohio.

"It's pretty exciting," he said. "I'm two years into college coaching and I'm able to be part of building something from the ground up."

Guglielmo has been impressed with Higgins in the last month he has worked with him.

"Coach Higgins is beyond organized. He's the ultimate head coach — he has a plan, he has a timetable, he has a job for everyone," Guglielmo said. "I'm 25 years old and I'm a full-time coach at a school without even a locker room. It's nice to have a strong leader as head coach. He knows what it takes to be a successful program — he's already done that."

For now, Higgins and Guglielmo are working on recruiting and laying the groundwork for a brand-new team. Keystone will be upgrading its facilities: new locker rooms and new bleachers and press box at the field — the Giants also play soccer and lacrosse — are planned.

"I've had opportunities to work for rebuilding programs and established programs, I was at Seton Hill when they were transitioning to Division II," Higgins said. "It's different when you're starting your own program from scratch."

"We're getting all the background stuff done, things you don't even think about in a football program," Guglielmo said. "We're building a recruiting system, we're identifying kids who fit our mold. It's exciting — you travel all over to (summer football) camps, you meet a ton of kids. We're getting a lot of interest from kids."

Located an hour south of Binghamton, Keystone is smack in the middle of a rich recruiting ground in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York state.

"We're in a perfect spot to recruit," Guglielmo said. "Location-wise, it's a focal point between Philly, New York City and Syracuse."

"We have a good area to recruit, but it's a heavily recruited area," Higgins said. "We're competing with a lot of other schools for players."

Both men said they plan to recruit in their old Section II stomping grounds, as well.

"I was in Minnesota and Ohio the last couple of years, now I'm only 3 1/2 hours from home," Guglielmo said. "I know a lot of kids in Section II — some kids, like the Glens Falls kids, I've known since they were in kindergarten."

Higgins said Keystone will likely have 10 or 15 players in the program this fall, getting acclimated to the academics, the coaching staff and the strength and conditioning.

Even though the first season is more than a year away, the anticipation is still there for Guglielmo.

"It's exciting because you can only guess what that first kickoff, that first snap is going to feel like," he said. "It gets you through the long days."

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