Irvine football coach Tom Ricci retiring after eight seasons leading Vaqueros

Tom Ricci leads the Vaqueros onto the field before a game in 2025. (PHOTOS: Fernando M. Donado, For OC Sports Zone).

Irvine football coach Tom Ricci said Monday he is retiring after coaching high school football for more than 30 years in Orange County.

Ricci, 56, spent the last eight years coaching the Vaqueros, leading Irvine to a 6-5 record this past season. The Vaqueros lost to Fillmore 20-19 on the road Friday night in the opening round of the CIF Division 8 playoffs.

Ricci said he will continue to teach at Irvine.

“I’ve decided to call it quits, I’ve been coaching since 1989 so it’s been a long time, football has become more and more year-round,” Ricci said in an interview with OC Sports Zone. ” ….. Right at Dec. 1 we start with eighth graders and go all the way through June and it’s become non-stop.”

To see additional photos, click on the first picture:

Ricci said he was frustrated that another on-campus coach wasn’t hired to help him out. The staff is comprised of part-time coaches, but no other on-campus coach, Ricci said.

“I’ve tried to get coaches hired at the school, but I haven’t had a coach hired on staff in the last eight years,” he said.

Ricci said he had one coach in mind.

“They had an opportunity to hire him and hired someone else, I told them, ‘I can’t do this by myself anymore, it’s just getting to be too much.’ So, when I found out I wasn’t going to have any help for this year, I told them this was going to be my last year.

“It’s just tough not having that on-staff guy you can lean on to help you out, so I end up doing everything within the school day by myself. I got a great staff, but they’ve got their own jobs outside of this. It makes things really difficult.

“I don’t have any down time, I love what I do and my plan initially was to go about four or five more years if they hired {the new coach} because I felt he would have taken a lot of the load off. Without that, it’s just become a lot.”

Ricci was also head coach at Savanna and spent 17 years coaching at Katella and also coached at Villa Park. He wound up with 50 wins at Irvine and took Vaquero teams to the CIF playoffs in five of the eight seasons he was coach. No playoffs were held during the COVID year.

“This is it for now, I feel like after over 30 plus years of coaching, I’ve done the things I’ve set out to do minus the CIF title, but we’ve had some good runs at Savanna and Irvine,” Ricci said. “What people don’t see after games on a Friday night, I have to come home and ice both my feet and my back. I’m just beat up and I wake up sore as can be on Saturday and I didn’t even play a football game.”

As for the future:

“I’ll finish this year {teaching} and then I think I’m going to go one more year and after that, I’ll retire from teaching, that’s kind of the plan. After that, if something arises, I might go …. kind of like Coach {Terry} Henigan did, I might go and help a program out and be a position coach and not have to deal with all the time commitment and management,” Ricci said.

Ricci said he was proud of what was accomplished at Irvine.

“One of top memories at Irvine was our 10-0 season,” he said.

In that year, the Vaqueros finished 10-1 after losing to St. Francis in the opening round of the CIF Division 4 playoffs in 2021. The Vaqueros also went 3-0 to win the Pacific Hills championship. It came after the abbreviated spring season the COVID year.

“It was a great season to have, our season that we went 6-1 was a great season as well, the season before that when we beat Dana Hills on a last second play to win that game, that was during COVID,” Ricci said.

“Even playing St. Francis in Division 4 after we went 10-0 was a great memory, we got thrown to the wolves, but our guys battled and it was a cool experience to watch them play up like they did.”

Ricci said this year’s team, which finished 2-3 in the Foxtrot League, battled until the end in Friday’s playoff opener against Fillmore.

“I feel if we stayed healthy, things may have been different, we lost Seamus {top running back Hoffman} in the first half of that game. We were up 13-0 and then he got injured and we struggled a little but we did battled, we had freshmen playing in that game toward the end and we were still kind of hanging in there,” he said.

Ricci told his players after the game about his decision.

“It was a lot of tears,” Ricci said. “It’s hard to even put into words, I got broken up a couple times. I let them know I’m not leaving to go anywhere else, I’m just kind of finished up my career as a football coach. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done for as long as I can remember.

“People always talk about how successful I’ve been at Irvine. And the success comes with a couple different things that are not me. I’ve been lucky to have a great staff every year. We’ve always had great cohesion. I always hired guys who were knowledgeable about football and we always gelled well together.

“To me that’s what always made us good each year was the staff. Our teams are kind of a homegrown team. We don’t typically get transfers, we bring in kids who are at our school and we made them better. That’s always been our goal, we’re going to take the guys and we’re going to make them better.

“Even at Savanna, I had great staffs and a handful of those guys followed me over to Irvine. It’s been great having those guys year in and year out, watching them develop our young guys.”

No replacement has been made yet for Ricci.

“I’ve been lucky in Irvine and blessed with such great families, they take care of our kids and take care of our program and I know even with me gone, they’re going to continue to do that and Irvine will be a solid program moving forward,” Ricci said.

—Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone; timburt@ocsportszone.com