Doug Velasquez has long been in the construction business, but not in the sense you might think.
A career educator and coach, Velasquez was recently approved as the new head football coach at Cardinal. Along with the coaching position, he has been named the dean of students at Cardinal. Velasquez, 54, is currently an intervention specialist at Columbiana schools. He has coached both football and wrestling over the years and is anxious to begin his career in Geauga County because — well — he’s in full construction mode.
“I miss the part of building something,” Velasquez said of coaching football for the first time since 2020. “I feel like I really want to get back in and make a difference in kids’ lives. I really miss building up kids and making a difference through accountability, teamwork, discipline — a lot of things that are missing in the world today.”
Though he hasn’t coached football in several years, Velasquez has deep roots in coaching multiple sports. He has coaching experience in a junior college in Arizona, at Beaver Local, Youngstown Ursuline, Salem and Struthers. Most recently, he was the head coach at Lowellville from 2015-2020, building the program back from a 1-9 record to a 6-4 mark in his final season.
He was also the head wrestling coach at Columbiana for a handful of years.
Now he’s going to be in charge of a Cardinal program that has struggled with numbers and with success over the past few years. The Huskies were 0-10 under first-year coach Keith Fife in 2025 and 1-9 in 2024 under first-year coach Rich Turner in 2024. Counting the last of Chris Perrotti’s three-year stint in 2023, Velasquez is Cardinal’s fourth coach in as many years.
“I’ve been through it before,” Velasquez said of building a program as he did at Lowellville. “(The challenge) is just the mentality. It starts in the weight room, working them to the brink and building up to that. Between wrestling and football, I’ve been doing this my whole life. You have to push them past the point of where they think they need to stop. Before they know it, they’re doing more than they ever thought they could.”
Velasquez doesn’t start his dean-of-student duties until Aug. 1. But he has already began workouts with his future football players and has been encouraged. He said there were 24 participants in a recent workout and said he hopes to have 32-to-34 players soon.
A week ago, he passed out T-shirts to players who en masse attended a basketball game together and then did workouts afterwards with pizza following.
“We’ve gotten off on the right track, I think,” he said.
When asked what he envisions the Huskies being under his watch, Velasquez said, “We’re going to be a hard-nosed team that competes and fights to the end. We’re going to play good defense and throw the ball around, but you’ve got to be able to run the football. I want every team to know at the end of the night they had to fight and compete when they played us.”
More than that, he wants to build up student-athletes both as students (as the dean of students) and athletes. In doing so, he hopes to build pride and confidence in the Middlefield community.
“Just seeing the parents and everybody working together here, I knew it was a good community,” he said. “What I want to do is pay the community back with home playoff games every year. That’s what I want us to do.”