When Paul Ronga was introduced as Cedar Ridge football coach last May, he held up a black t-shirt in front of his new players with one word on the back printed in white.
Believe.
As football has labored over the last decade across Hillsborough high schools, maintaining belief has been difficult. It’s been especially tough at Cedar Ridge since its peak of hosting the 2010 2-AA Eastern Regional Championship game against Elizabeth City Northeastern.
Since then, the Red Wolves have gone through coach after coach while participation levels have fallen, as it has with every high school in the Orange County and Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School Systems.
Ronga replaced Brent Bailey, who stepped down after three seasons last December. Bailey worked tirelessly to bring Cedar Ridge back to winning football and made major strides in player participation. After Bailey left last winter, some of his most faithful seniors graduated.
On top of that, Landon Walker, Cedar Ridge’s most highly-touted prospect since Trenton Gill, transferred over the summer to join the growing list of players at Cummings High School in Burlington.
Ronga is no stranger to taking on programs in transition. On MaxPreps, Cedar Ridge has 22 players set to start the season against East Chapel Hill inside Red Wolf Stadium next Friday.
With family in North and South Carolina, Ronga did his own research before taking the Cedar Ridge job.
“There are athletes here,” Ronga said. “Good athletes. The success that Cedar Ridge had during baseball season is something I noticed. There’s potential here. Speaking to the Athletic Director (Emily Parker), it was determined that having a guy that would commit to them, be there for them in a different manner is something they saw in me. It’s something that I’ve brought to different programs.”
One of the first things that Ronga did as head coach was change the helmet logo. The days of the interlocking “CR” are over. For the first time, there will be an actual Red Wolf animal insignia on the helmets.
Ronga is a classic football lifer. A native of the Bronx, New York, he arrives from Woodbridge, Virginia, where he was the head coach at Woodbridge High School for two years.
“It was a tough situation,” Ronga said. “It’s very similar to the situation I’m in now. It was basically a major rebuild. It was a program that was stripped down to the core, in terms of coaching and players. I was the program when I got there and just trying to build things up.”
Ronga was the head coach at Saunders High School in Yonkers, New York before budget cuts forced the shutdown of the program.
“There were constant budget issues,” Ronga said. “Yonkers was the third-largest district in the state of New York, but there were constant money issues. Constant restructuring and reshuffling.”
Then COVID-19 struck. Ronga reached out to old coaching friends out west, where he made the move to Wyoming. He coached as the head coach at Laramie High School starting in 2021. Less than one mile away was the University of Wyoming, where he worked with longtime Cowboys head coach Craig Bohl.
Ronga became friends with Frank Crum, currently an offensive tackle for the Denver Broncos who caught a touchdown pass on a tackle-eligible play against Buffalo in the AFC Divisional Playoffs last January. While he was playing at Wyoming, Crum did some presentations for Ronga’s players at Laramie High.
In one season, Ronga had the leading receiver in the state on his team.
“Good things were done,” Ronga said. “It was a great learning experience. That’s Josh Allen country. He’s still revered in Wyoming. It was a good place to be during the pandemic. Things were different there at that time than in the east.”
Family matters led to him returning back east in 2023, where he took the Woodbridge job. He took his players to a camp at Georgetown University, where Rob Spence serves as offensive coordinator. Spence, formerly an offensive coordinator with Clemson, Syracuse, Temples and Rutgers, was Ronga’s high school coach in New York.
Matthew Asay, a member of the varsity for the past four years, is set to return as the Red Wolf quarterback. Last year, Asay was the signal caller as Cedar Ridge defeated Graham to end a 29-game losing streak.
Zy’on Nicholson returns at wide receiver.
Ronga told his players that the Red Wolf was distinguished as an extinct animal in 1981. With Cedar Ridge football’s recent past, the similarities are obvious.
“That’s kind of like how people feel about our program,” Ronga said. “I’m here to rally around that and to get us to the next step, improve our acumen and improve our numbers.”
