This is the final installment of the Valley News’ weekly profiles of local high school coaches this summer. It’s been a chance to better know some of the people guiding the area’s student-athletes. Today, we meet fifth-year boys soccer coach Alex Montano, who previously coached South Royalton and will now oversee a new squad at White River Valley, which merges students from the Bethel and Royalton school districts.
Family: Montano’s father, Arnulfo, worked as an agronomist for a seed company. Alex’s mother, Lidya, stayed home to take care of him and his younger brother. Alex and his wife, Macgregor, have four boys. Bailey is a 23-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and rocket scientist for SpaceX, the exploration technology firm founded and owned by business magnate Elon Musk. Diego, 21, works locally at Hypertherm. Oscar, 19, is a college student in Michigan, and Emilio, 17, is a senior soccer player at Woodstock High.
Donde estoy?: “I was born in Mexico City, then we lived in El Salvador for a couple of years, then back to Mexico City. When I was 13, my dad got a job in Southern California. I arrived at St. Bonaventure High in Ventura, Calif., and I learned to speak English in two months. Everyone was very nice, but for weeks I was in the wrong classrooms and I didn’t know how to get the right locker combination, and there was no way to figure it out.”
Flaky: “I played tight end and kicker in football and was (all-region). I got some interest from universities, including Columbia, but we didn’t understand the whole recruiting process, and I didn’t take the SAT. The Purdue University coach said, ‘Show up and we’ll see how it goes.’ So I flew out to Indiana, having never seen snow in my life.”
Boilermaker Booter: “I showed up at Purdue three days before school started, and I hadn’t even applied. The coach didn’t know what to do with me, but he decided that if somebody wanted to go to school there that bad, he should probably take him. The athletics academic advisor was fantastic and got me into school. But I realized in the first 20 minutes of practice that tight end was no longer in my future.”
Spill in Aisle 3: After dressing for games as a sophomore, Montano left the football team and landed a job at the local Smitty’s Foodliner grocery store stocking shelves and driving a truck. He graduated from Purdue in 1987 with a journalism and communications major and a psychology minor and began searching for a job in television.
Cross Country: “I drove from California to Vermont, going from small (television) market to small market, trying to talk to news directors. In Alexandria, Minn., the news director said, ‘You seem like you’ve got your stuff together, but people around here don’t like your kind.’ That happened a couple of times. Or people would tell me to try in Texas.”
Mountain time: “I knocked on the door of a low-power TV station in Killington and it turned out someone had quit that morning, so I got their job. Our signal didn’t even reach Rutland, and we ran a lot of ski movies and weather and skiing conditions in which the word ‘ice’ was not allowed.”
Novice Newscaster: A year later, Montano moved up to WBKB in Alpena, Mich. The town is on Thunder Bay in Lake Huron, in the northern part of the state and not far from Canada. “People there said the call letters stood for ‘barely knows broadcasting,’ ” said a chuckling Montano, whose annual salary was $11,000. “My first newscast was a disaster. I was an anchor and did the weather as well.”
Cold Hands, Warm Heart: Lugging 20 pounds of camera gear to record video of a car crash on a cold, blustery night, Montano’s hands froze and he stumbled into a nearby doctor’s office. Working there was a young lady who warmed his hands and accepted his date proposal. Macgregor Littler and Montano were married in 1993.
Packing and Unpacking: Job stops in Temple, Tex., Lansing, Mich., and Kalamazoo, Mich., followed. Macgregor enrolled in pharmacy school in Ann Arbor, Mich., and later accepted a job at White River Junction’s Veterans Administration medical center. Alex had previously transitioned to website development and business photography and, during a three-week period, the family sold its Ann Arbor house, drove to the Upper Valley and bought a house in Woodstock.
Coaching Progression: Montano entered coaching when one of his sons’ recreation teams couldn’t find a bench boss. He moved on to club and then a high school junior varsity team. Upon his family’s move to Vermont, he spied the South Royalton job online and landed it in 2014.
Diversification: “Coaching here was a real adjustment because my Michigan club players played year-round. There were kids whose life was soccer and who traveled three hours a day to play it. But some of them got burnt out and didn’t even play in high school. To see kids here playing multiple sports, I would much rather have that.”
Futbol fun: Montano had to reapply for his coaching job earlier this year because of the school merger. He said his new group of players and those from Woodstock organized a recent scrimmage and then came to his house to eat pizza and compete in video games. “From the early indications, I don’t think combining them is going to be as big a challenge as I thought it might be,” he said.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.