After a brief period as the interim head coach, TJ Yonkers has officially been named the next leader of the West Ranch High School football program.
A 2011 Canyon High School graduate, Yonkers takes over for Chris Varner, who stepped down following the 2024 season.
“It was a sense of relief a little bit, you know, the question marks I guess were kind of lifted,” Yonkers said in a recent phone interview. “But I had been kind of taking it business as usual anyway, just taking every day as if I was already official so that there wasn’t any real change of anything.”
Varner led the Wildcats for nine seasons after a stint as the head coach at Canyon. The Wildcats won their first and only Foothill League title in 2022 under Varner.
“He is ready to lead the program, and we are excited for the future of Wildcat football,” reads a statement from West Ranch co-athletic director Grant Livermont.
An all-league and all-CIF selection as a wide receiver during his senior year at Canyon, Yonkers was part of Varner’s coaching staff at West Ranch before moving on when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“It’s awesome. It feels a bit nostalgic,” Yonkers said. “Obviously, it’s hard not to reminisce over things. You know, you go to Canyon, it’s the field you played on. You look around, a lot of the coaches that I played against are still coaching now. You know, you got (Jason) Bornn over at Saugus and (Larry) Muir at Valencia and some other ones. Dan Kelly at Golden Valley, he’s been around for a while.”
Yonkers, currently working campus security at West Ranch, said he’s been watching the Foothill League “from a distance” and is excited to have the chance to give back to the game he grew up loving.
“I realized the love was still there for coaching, and I really wanted to get back and make sure I was giving back to the kids, and things kind of worked out in my favor,” Yonkers said.
Many of the same coaches who were with Varner are set to remain on Yonkers’ staff.
“All that stuff’s the same,” Yonkers said. “A couple new additions that I know from the outside, but trying to keep status quo … That’s a big pitch I made when I was trying to get the head coaching job, was that I’m really trying to keep everything together, keep the ship rolling. We’ve done good work for the past, you know, however many years, and no sense in ending now.”
West Ranch went 4-6 overall in 2024 and 2-4 in the Foothill League, missing out on the playoffs for the first time since the 2017 campaign.
Yonkers will have to find a way to rebuild an offense that has had a few different quarterbacks since the departure of 2022 Foothill League Player of the Year Ryan Staub, who just wrapped up his sophomore season at the University of Colorado.
Also gone is running back Luke DePerno, a first-team all-league selection in 2023 and 2024 and a second-team selection in 2022, who is set to graduate. He ran for 1,194 yards as a senior this past season and finished his career with 3,030 rushing yards and 41 touchdowns.
Yonkers said he views Aidan Lynch as someone who can help lead the team in the future after playing at receiver, running back and defensive back as a junior in 2024.
“He was a bit of a Swiss Army Knife for us,” Yonkers said. “So, we’re going to lean on him. We’ve got a couple younger guys that we’re going to try to spell him with. I think it’s going to be a little bit more of a of a group effort there. It’s obviously hard to replace Luke and his production. He can set the world on fire a lot of the times. He was keeping us in games most of the time. So, I think hopefully by using them a little bit more efficiently, we can, you know, avoid becoming sort of one-dimensional.”
But overall, Yonkers is hoping to lead a team that is typically comprised of, as he put it, “really high-academic kids” and try to turn that intellect into success on the field.
“I think if we fix some of the things that we can control and we do what we’re supposed to be doing, I think the rest will take care of itself,” Yonkers said. “Hopefully, the wins will follow. But just trying to, you know, instill a ‘show up to work every day and do your job’ mentality, and hopefully it pays off.”
