SPORTS

All in the family

EMHS football coach’s son to play Division I football

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Chris Mascia says that when her husband, Vin, and their 17-year-old son, Matt, leave their East Meadow home together to go to work and school every morning, they’re talking about football. When they come back 10 hours later, they’re still talking about the game, and specifically the East Meadow High School Jets — the varsity team that Vin has coached for nearly two decades and that Matt, now a senior, was part of for three years.

“They’re just going morning, noon and night,” Chris said, “but it’s great to watch them. It’s something really special.”

The relationship that Vin and Matt have had for years is something both will no doubt miss when Matt heads to the University of New Hampshire in the fall. But when he signed a letter of intent to play for the Wildcats last week, Vin said he was only proud and excited about his son’s future.

Vin, who has been the Jets’ head coach for 18 years, has deep ties to East Meadow: He played linebacker for the team before graduating from the high school, and Chris was a member of the class of 1982. His job prevented him from volunteering with Matt’s youth football teams, but the pair would develop their working relationship a few years later.

Matt started playing football for East Meadow youth and PAL leagues when he was 9. Because of his size, his father noted, he had to play with older children. “He always had to play up … so he wasn’t much of a player at that point,” Vin recalled. “But as a junior [at EMHS], you started to see that he could really be a special player.”

Matt’s play began to improve when he joined Woodland Middle School’s squad in eighth grade, after leaving Holy Family School in Hicksville. By the time he was a sophomore at EMHS, he was a varsity center.

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