It is only 6:45 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in April, but Josh Dean, the new head football coach at Coronado High School, is already blasting punk rock and moving through the school’s weight room. His players are preparing for games a full four months away, but Dean knows that building and maintaining team culture is a year-round process.
“I want to see you move something heavy,” he tells his players, before grabbing the handles of a trap bar and knocking out a few reps himself.
Only six players are present on this morning – most of his future team is in the middle of spring sports seasons – but they represent a core around which Dean will have to build as he prepares his new program for the season ahead. Over a lifetime built around the sport, Dean has never shied from the commitment to the daily tasks that success on the football field requires.
Dean, 34, could have walked away from football at several natural junctions as a player and later as a coach. Instead, at each crossroads, football was the driving force behind decisions that led him around the world. His latest move will see him lead the Coronado Islanders onto the field in fall 2026, his first time as head football coach.
Dean’s passion for football began when he was a high school student himself, but he could have walked away from the sport after his lone year as a starter at Dana Hills High School in Orange County. There were no major college offers.
“But football was something I wasn’t ready to give up,” he said. That realization became a theme for him.
Dean left California for Willamette University in Oregon, where he became a two-year starter. He said he briefly tried selling life insurance, before deciding that football needed to be more central to his life choices, even after his college career was over. Dean headed to Europe for four years to play during the American off-season, returning after the European season to coach at Willamette, his alma mater. That experience led to his next junction – deciding whether to pursue college coaching jobs and their notoriously insecure lifestyles.
Dean settled instead on teaching and coaching at the high school level, and found teaching to be more rewarding than he had imagined.
“Teaching is just the coolest way to make connections with kids and the community,” Dean said.
Credential in hand, Dean started out as a social science teacher in San Luis Obispo County. He landed at Atascadero High School, but the school already had a football staff in place, so for two years, Dean was out of coaching. Again, he decided he wasn’t ready to walk away from the sport. When the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools in 2020, Dean gave up his full-time teaching position to head down to San Diego and join a high school football staff, paying his dues as a long-term sub.
The risk paid off.
After short stints coaching at Torrey Pines High School and Christian High School, he moved to The Bishop’s School to serve as an offensive coordinator and work with the team’s quarterbacks. While coaching at Bishop’s, he also accepted a teaching job at Coronado High School.
When Coronado moved on from coach Kurt Hines at the conclusion of the 2025 football season, Dean was again asked to decide the degree to which football would guide his professional choices: compared to working as a coordinator, serving as a head coach requires significantly more investment in administrative tasks, such as building schedules and managing a staff. But by now, the pattern was clear. Football had driven his decisions to this point, and it would again.
“I’m ready to take on a new role, and challenge myself in that way,” he said.
He knows he has work to do.
The Islanders finished 6-4 in the 2025 season and were eliminated in the first round of the CIF-San Diego Section Division 4 playoffs. This year will see them face a City Conference slate that includes games against Patrick Henry High School and a resurgent Madison High School, both of which closed the 2025 season as Division 3 playoff seeds.
Dean said he’s building a program to meet that challenge.
On top of the weight room sessions, he’s entered his team into a spring passing league, and recently set expectations for a summer conditioning program to lead into the fall. He suspects he already knows his team has untapped potential.
“There might be another level they can take their work ethic to,” he said.
Back in the weight room, Dean’s group moves to bench press and push-ups, then a set of isometric exercises performed while holding bumper plates. Dean performs every exercise alongside the student-athletes he has been hired to lead.
“The positive attitude he brings to the program makes it fun,” said junior Luke Phillipi.
“We have a tough schedule, but I just think it’s going to be fun playing against better competition.”
“I’m excited to keep working with the young men we have here,” said assistant coach Jordy Harrison, who is in his fifth year with the Islanders. “We also have new personalities which bring new experiences. The combination of new and old – we are excited by those things.”
The players end their weight-lifting with a quick huddle. School won’t start for another hour; they’re done with a full workout before many of their peers are even awake.
It’s a sense of urgency Dean plans to maintain in his program. It’s his first year, but there is no time to waste.
