Waynedale High School has chosen a familiar face to lead their football program into the future.
Ray Vitallo, a 2009 graduate, will be Waynedale’s next head football coach.
The Waynedale Local School Board approved and made the hire official on Monday, Feb. 11. This will be Vitallo’s first head football coaching position on the high school level.
Former Waynedale head coach Jesse Kanter resigned after the 2025 season.
“I feel like I’m fully prepared,” Vitallo said. “Obviously there are things I’ll deal with that I’ve never dealt with before and I’ll have to adjust on the fly as a first-year head coach, but it’s nothing I don’t feel like I won’t be able to adjust to.”
Said Waynedale Athletic Director Rick Geiser, “Jay is an outstanding hire to lead our football program. He shows great passion to develop relationships with the players and will be a great leader for our football program on and off the field. He is an educator first, very organized and brings knowledge of our community as an alumni of Waynedale. We are really excited to have Jay as our head coach and can’t wait to see him and his staff develop our student-athletes as players and young men.”
Vitallo, 35, spent the last five years coaching football at Wooster High School.
“First year at Wooster, I was a special teams coordinator and after that I was on the offensive side of the ball for two years,” added Vitallo, who played outside linebacker and running back through his varsity years at Waynedale. “I was on the defensive side for a year, then offensive coordinator last year.”
During Vitallo’s five years at Wooster, he expressed how much he benefited from working under current Wooster head coach Ray Leek, and former Wooster head coach and current College of Wooster head coach Austin Holter.
“I had the privilege to work under two head coaches in Coach Leek and Coach Holter,” Vitallo said. “Just taking the time to learn from them. Obviously, everybody runs a program differently and that’s something you can take from them on how to do things. Each year, I’ve definitely picked up something different that I can apply at Waynedale.”
For a Waynedale football program that was 2-8 during the 2025 season, has had four consecutive losing seasons and hasn’t produced a winning season since going 7-4 in 2015, Vitallo says his biggest challenge will be trying to increase the number of players on the football team, which has been an issue in the past few years for the football program.
“The biggest challenge will be trying to get kids back in the program,” Vitallo said. “When I went to school, every boy at Waynedale played football. After football season, some of us would do basketball and some would do wrestling. That’s the biggest thing I need to focus on. Just getting the numbers back up on the football team. I do feel like the football team has a ton of talent but just really young. We have some bright spots we can build on.”
In terms of a team identity he wants to instill in his first season, Vitallo says “playing physical and playing free.”
“We’re have mixed personnel groupings,” he said. “I would say we will have 10, 11 and 20 personnel. Maybe in short-yardage we’ll have 21. It all depends on when we get to camp to see what our kids are good at. I want us to be known as playing physical and playing free. So hopefully when teams play us they’ll say, ‘Those kids are aggressive and they’re playing with their ears pinned back.'”
jamessimpson@gannett.com
Twitter/X: @JamesSimpsonII
This article originally appeared on The Daily Record: Jay Vitallo set to lead Waynedale as new football head coach
Reporting by James Simpson II, Wooster Daily Record / The Daily Record
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
