George Kapner, who steered a slew of WHS sports programs to monumental successes during a mammoth career in which he surpassed coaching legends to become the winningest coach in WHS history, will retire after a 44-year WHS coaching career, athletic director Sandy Mamary told Hi’s Eye Sports.
Kapner, 72, coached his final boys tennis match on June 5, a narrow sectional final loss. The defeat ended a career that contained 1,257 wins, amassed across five different sports programs, beginning decades ago, in 1978. He decided to retire before this season started.
“I knew,” Kapner said, “that it was time.”
Mamary will proceed in typical fashion, she said, posting the job listing and waiting to see who applies. She has not earmarked anybody to replace Kapner as head boys tennis coach.
The sectional final defeat also halted Kapner’s career tennis win total at 699 wins, leaving him just one victory shy of breathing untouched air. No WHS coach has ever crossed the 700-win threshold for a single sport. There exist, despite the retirement, plans for Kapner to reach 700.
“I’m trying to figure out how we could get him to coach one more match to get him to that milestone of 700,” Mamary said.
Kapner, meanwhile, insisted repeatedly that “it’s just a number.”
“I just don’t want to step on the toes of whoever the next coach is,” he said, “because it’ll be his or her team. But if everybody’s amenable to it, then, you know.”
So he might reach 700. He might stall at 699. Crossing the barrier would simply layer another accomplishment on a decorated career.
Kapner helmed five sports programs at WHS: girls basketball, girls soccer, boys soccer, boys swimming, boys tennis. He captured 11 group state championships, 27 sectional championships, 42 Union County Tournament titles, 49 division titles. He coached 1,600 games and won 1,257 of them (75.7 percent). His teams earned the state’s final No. 1 ranking four times and the state’s No. 1 public school ranking 10 times.
In 2016, he was inducted into the New Jersey Scholastic Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
“When a coach can still be successful after all those decades, that is a special, special coach,” Mamary said. “You don’t see that often.”
A Legendary Career
How did all this happen? A student sports journalist wants to know. He asks Kapner, over the phone, as Kapner trundles along the road toward his beach house.
Kapner obliges. “Just a quick version of the story,” he begins.
Then he talks, uninterrupted, unchecked, for 14 minutes. About how he “stumbled into education.” About how a halfhearted offer to work as a substitute teacher turned into a 43-year teaching career. About how teaching dovetailed with coaching, and about how he pursued his passion for coaching soccer, and about how a series of “bizarre” events transformed a soccer fanatic into a prolific multi-sport coach.
Kapner pauses his recounting, at one point, as he reaches his beach house and exits his car. He pauses, at another point, to deactivate the house’s alarm. Yard work beckons. But Kapner persists in his retelling.
The story goes something like this.
It all started long ago, long before George Kapner ever encountered Westfield. Long before Westfield ever encountered George Kapner.
It was 1973.
Kapner still lived on Long Island.
“I had no idea what I wanted to do,” Kapner says. “None.” His father presented him with some choices. “The least objectionable to me, as a 22-year-old, was to go to graduate school.”
So Kapner lived in his parents’ house, attending Hofstra University, studying psychology. He approached his former high school principal, looking for work as a substitute teacher. “And he said, ‘you don’t want to be a substitute teacher.’”
One phone call later, Kapner was an assistant teacher. An assistant math teacher. He worked with kids who struggled with math. “Which is crazy, because I had no certification back then.” He taught them how to add, subtract, multiply, divide. Fractions, decimals, whole numbers.
“Everyone else,” Kapner says, “probably would think that’s the most boring thing in the world. I loved it.”
Hofstra lost a psychology major that year. Kapner switched his major to secondary education with a math minor.
Thirsting to return to soccer, which he’d played hungrily in high school, Kapner approached his former varsity soccer coach and offered to work as a volunteer assistant. Kapner had discovered soccer in ninth grade and devoted himself to the sport, playing incessantly, trekking into the city to find open leagues.
“I had an epiphany one day,” he says. “If I became a teacher—it seemed to be something I really loved—I could stay involved in soccer.”
Kapner scored a teaching job at Lawrence Junior High School, still in New York. He worked there for a year. Then came a stroke of luck. The varsity soccer job at Lawrence High School opened. Kapner applied for the job. He got it.
But an issue poked its thorny head into the situation. The junior high school ended 45 minutes after the high school, creating an undesirable buffer period, for the players, between school and practice. Administration refused to adjust Kapner’s schedule. The coaching job slipped away.
He was mad.
Out of that quagmire bloomed an unassuming opportunity.
There was this school. In New Jersey. Some place called Westfield.
It was 1976.
Kapner’s sister had just finished her PhD at Rutgers University, and, while her husband completed his PhD at Rutgers, she filled a sabbatical at Westfield. Put in an application, she said. “So I did, not thinking anything of it,” Kapner says.
Kapner got a phone call one day. WHS needed a math teacher. He drove out to New Jersey, interviewed, got the job.
Thus began a long teaching career. One that lasted all the way until 2016.
But back to Kapner’s early years in Westfield. Still fixated on coaching soccer, he worked for a year as a volunteer assistant with the boys varsity team. Then he flitted to another coaching position. Columbia University’s JV team. Searching for his preferred level.
Kapner left Columbia after a year. “I wanted to be at the high school level,” he says. “I loved the age group. It was perfect.”
But one day, during his spell at Columbia, Kapner watched Westfield play a state tournament game. He watched the game alongside the school principal, Albert Bobal. Westfield was leading by a goal when the Westfield coach “made a strategic maneuver,” Kapner says.
“My reaction, without even thinking, was, oh my god, no, don’t do that.”
The other team scored five minutes later.
Westfield lost.
“I didn’t think anything of it, very much.”
But later that year, Kapner received a summons to the principal’s office. Bobal wanted to know why other schools had been calling for information about this guy named George Kapner who’d been applying for soccer head coaching vacancies. Didn’t Kapner like Westfield? He did, he assured the principal. But he wanted to coach.
“He smiled and said, okay, thank you very much,” Kapner recounts.
The next day, another summons to the office. The principal had been impressed by Kapner’s reaction at the boys soccer game. Impressed by his prescience. The girls basketball job had opened. Did Kapner want it?
It was 1978.
Kapner took the job. He coached the team for six seasons, until 1985, then coached one more season from 1987-88.
All those accomplishments? The group titles, the sectional titles, the county titles, the division titles? Yeah. Girls basketball produced none of them. Zero. Kapner went 42-105 with the program.
“We were terrible,” Kapner says, “because I was not a very good coach. But they helped me learn how to coach.”
Bereft of meaningful basketball experience, Kapner struggled to produce the sparkling results that marked much of his career. But coaching girls basketball proved rewarding.
“I am closer to those girls still—one of them is a grandmother, that’s how far back this is—I am closer to them, I think, than to any other group of people I’ve ever coached,” Kapner says.
Kapner’s most indelible basketball moment, though, arrived long before he reached WHS. He was playing a game for his high school’s “terrible” team, and he received a pass at the top of the key. He squared to shoot. He released. “And a guy named Julius Erving took two steps and put my shot halfway up the stands,” Kapner says, laughing.
“This is a true story,” he affirms. “I would never lie to a reporter.”
True stories? Here’s another. About how Kapner sculpted a nascent soccer program into a powerhouse.
It was 1980.
Westfield was forming a girls soccer program. The job, if he wanted it, was Kapner’s. He could abandon his stint coaching the boys JV team, could pilot a new program into its inaugural season. He did, of course, take the job.
The team’s maiden starting 11 featured nine sophomores, one junior, one senior. The junior was a basketball player Kapner had tossed into goal. The senior had played some soccer growing up in California.
“The nine girls,” Kapner says, “were the very first girls coming out of the Westfield Soccer Association.”
The team made the state tournament in its first year. Eight years later, in 1988, it won the Group 4 championship and earned the state’s No. 1 ranking. The next year, in 1989, it tied for the Group 4 championship and earned the No. 2 ranking, behind only its co-champion.
After 11 seasons, the boys job suddenly opened.
It was 1990.
Kapner was offered the job. But he loved coaching the girls. He had, in effect, built the program. He had no reason to switch. He needed extra incentive. So he requested, despite having no official tennis experience, to also become the head boys tennis coach.
Wish granted. Kapner grabbed the wheels of both programs.
He did all right in the tennis job. Just okay. Passable. In 32 seasons, his teams won the division 31 times, the county tournament 25 times, the sectional tournament 16 times, the Group 4 championship 5 times, the Tournament of Champions 2 times.
Absurd numbers.
In boys soccer, Kapner seized the Group 4 title in 1991 and again in 1995. The 1991 team earned the state’s No. 1 ranking. The 1995 team stood at No. 2, behind only St. Benedict’s, a soccer factory that is, presently, the No. 1 high school soccer team in the United States.
Kapner’s soccer coaching career lasted 22 seasons. It ended in 2012, when he realized he’d lost the ceaseless vigor required to propel his players. His tennis coaching career, though, persisted, lasting 32 seasons.
Another coaching job, though, overlapped soccer and tennis: swimming.
It was 1994.
Kapner knew nothing about swimming. But the athletic department needed to fill a vacancy, and here was an enthusiastic guy who clearly was pretty good at this coaching thing.
The first time he met with the team, Kapner delivered a simple message:
“I told them, you’re gonna teach me about swimming. I’m gonna teach you how to win state championships.”
“Which is kind of outrageous,” he acknowledges, calling Westfield “a swimming town.”
Kapner spent three years leading the boys swim program, nabbing two Public A championships in the process. Then he retired to his oh-so-quiet life: teaching, coaching soccer, coaching tennis, teaching SAT classes, working odd jobs around the school. Oh, and somewhere in there, he trained karate for 10 years. Became a black belt.
Kapner’s greatest accomplishment, he says, was finding success across the high school sports spectrum.
“That’s what I’m most proud of,” he says. “State championships in completely diverse sports.”
Kapner’s most cherished milestone arrived a long time ago.
On some unassuming day years and years ago, in some gym or on some field or on some court or in some pool, Kapner notched career win No. 732. That pushed him over a colossal doorstep, nudged him past the legendary coach whose name adorns Westfield’s stadium.
Gary Kehler won 731 games. George Kapner had now won 732 games.
“It was surreal,” Kapner says.
“It meant a great deal to me,” he adds. “But never, at any point, ever, did I feel that made me a better coach, a more iconic coach, a more anything coach. Because he was Gary Kehler.”
Kehler was, indeed, Gary Kehler.
But Kapner is George Kapner.
“Someone’s not going to follow in his footsteps,” Mamary says. “But someone still has to continue with the expectation.”
The name George Kapner appeared on a job application some 45 years ago, submitted to some school in New Jersey. The name meant little then. A couple years later, some students peered at their schedules and saw George Kapner, and the name meant a little more. Then more, as that man transitioned into coaching life. Then more, as he piled up wins. Then more, as he stacked trophies. Then more, and more, and more.
And then George Kapner retired.
It was 2023.
An era faded, enshrined in banners hanging from gym walls, preserved in countless minds, blazed into record books.
1 comment
I know George since 1966 when we played Junior HS soccer together in Valley Stream NY and club team ball in Brooklyn.
He is one of a kind, the mold has been thrown out!