Hello and welcome parents, teachers, fans, coaches, and student athletes to the Official Webpage of the Vinal-Coginchaug Hawks Football Team sponsored by the Gridiron Club. This webpage is your all access passport to the Vinal-Coginchaug Hawks.
In 1999 the Vinal-Coginchaug Hawks Football Team had its first ever season thanks to Head Coach Bob McNamara and many greatly appreciated volunteers from both Vinal Technical High School and Coginchaug Regional High School. This group would become what is now known as the Vinal-Coginchaug Hawks Gridiron Club.
Each year since then the Gridiron Club meets and helps support both the Vinal-Coginchaug Hawk Cheerleaders and Football Players by hosting fund raisers such as Durham Fair Parking, Cheese Cake sales, Ad sales, and Apparel sales.
The profits from these fund raisers are used to purchase helmets, jerseys and equipment, pre game meals, the Home Coming Dance, End of the season banquet, awards, scrimmage game picnic, and gifts for the graduating seniors — Cheerleaders and Football Players.
One of the most known items that the Gridiron Club offers to it’s fans is the Annual Football Program which is sold at every game. This program includes full color pages with the coaches names, schedules, rosters, cheerleaders and as well each player has a picture of them with there personal stats including there height, weight, position, number and nickname.
"Best Program: One thing is indisputable: the published football program produced by the Vinal-Coginchaug Gridiron Club is the best high school program around. It's 68 pages long and full color player photos, bios, cheerleaders pictures, messages from the school officals and the like. Great Program." — Jim Bransfield, Sports Writer for Middletown Press. Featured in the Monday, October 15th, 2007 issue
This past Fall, the Vinal Tech/Cocinchaug Football team was looking for someone to develop their official Website to keep players, parents, and fans informed. When members of the booster organization, The VC Hawks Gridiron Club, heard that one of the players was in the Information Systems Technology (IST) program at Vinal they thought they had found someone who could take on the task. Junior Travis Newell took on the challenge and created a great site filled with several pages of news and information along with multi-media capabilities. IST Department Head Joan Leitao said she was thrilled and proud of the work done by Travis. "He excelled from the moment he began to learn HTML. Travis has done a fantastic job of developing for the first time." Travis said that the project is a work in progress and that he plans to add much more to the site. Asked what he likes most about working on the project, he said, "I really like getting a task and then trying to find out what is the best way to design it." — Mark.Koncewicz, Webmaster Vinal Technical High School. Featured on Vinal Technical High School's Website on Friday, March 14th, 2008
Click the link to view article Information Systems Tech Junior Builds Website for Football Team
Another event that the Vinal-Coginchaug Hawk Gridiron is most known for is the famous end of the season banquet. Parents, teachers, coaches, friends, family, and athletes are gathered together to give out awards and reflect on the season and its outcome. The banquet includes a buffet dinner and speeches given by members of the Gridiron Club, Coaches, both Vinal and Coginchaug’s principals, and athletic directors.