Ciarelli strong, sure

When she’s standing with Newport Harbor High’s strapping football coaches, Stephanie Ciarelli becomes a dwarf.

She’s the smallest one of the bunch, a petite redhead with close-cropped hair and a tattoo circling her left ankle.

But Ciarelli doesn’t have to cut an imposing figure to command the attention or respect of Newport Harbor’s football players.

There are titles — Coach, Your Highness, both of which she prefers over “ma’am” — to take care of that.

Monday morning, the strength and conditioning coach stood in the weight room surveying her latest charges: the freshman class of the Sailors’ football team, fresh-faced and barely removed from eighth grade.

“You guys look spiffy. Do you feel spiffy? Do you feel like a sailor,” Ciarelli asked as the boys filed past her in matching blue and grey Under Armour warmups.

They sat on the floor with their eyes locked on Ciarelli as she explained the training regimen.

Ciarelli, a regional coach for USA Weightlifting, is entering her third season as the strength and conditioning coach for the Newport Harbor football team. She’s accompanying three students to Springfield, Mo. for the school age national weightlifting championships, which start today and end Sunday.

Greg Gute, Chris Gute, and Zach Moghaddam all started training under Ciarelli using PVC pipe to learn the correct way to perform the snatch and the clean and jerk, the two methods used in Olympic-style weightlifting.

Before anyone ever picks up so much as an ounce of metal, Ciarelli uses the lightweight pipe to teach the highly technical nature of Olympic lifting.

Greg Gute and Moghaddam will be sophomores in the fall. Chris Gute, who will be a junior, finished fourth at last year’s national championship, the first one he’d ever been to.

“He’s been pretty determined,” Ciarelli said. “He’s got a really good shot of doing much better. He’s got a shot at winning this one, and if not, then medaling.”

Ciarelli is down-to-earth and pleasant. She joked with one of the freshmen who addressed her as “ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said, grinning. “It’s ‘Your Highness.’ ”

She’s serious about the upkeep of her sanctuary, the weight room, and she’s a football nut. Nothing about her says “former high school cheerleader,” but that’s what she is.

“When I graduated in 1972, they had GAA. They didn’t have women’s sports teams. They had Girls’ Athletic Assn.,” Ciarelli explained. “So it was all the athletic girls that went around and played intramural sports with all the other girls. There weren’t teams, like a basketball team. That happened a couple years after that. So cheerleading is what we did.”

Ciarelli started power lifting in 1974 for exercise, then switched to Olympic lifting at the urging of her husband Tony, the defensive coordinator at Newport Harbor. Ciarelli discovered she enjoyed coaching more than anything else.

“I’m a more patient coach than I am a competitor, and I’m probably more critical of myself,” Ciarelli said. “It was just more fun to coach and see people understand and get what I’m explaining and become better.”

Aside from the “Your Highness” joke, Ciarelli acknowledged the obvious difference between herself and her other coaching colleagues once.

“I know, I’m the girl in here. I’m a mother,” Ciarelli said. “But get your hair out of your face. Get it out of your eyes. No one wants gross helmet hair. Buzz your head. I think that looks cool.”

SORAYA NADIA McDONALD may be reached at (714) 966-4613 or [email protected].