Adam Kunin is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Veritas Prep Academy for AZPreps365.com

Team, teammate, self. Those values, in descending order of importance, embody the culture first-year Veritas Prep head football coach Mike Sanfratello hopes to establish.

After spending three years as the middle school football coach at Veritas Prep, the Falcons named Sanfratello head coach of the varsity program before the 2024 season. Now, he hopes to take the program to new heights, as Veritas Preps enters an era of change with a new coach at the helm.

For Sanfratello, the opportunity to coach at Veritas was a no-brainer.

Despite having limited coaching experience at the varsity level, Sanfratello could not turn down the opportunity to coach at a place he calls home.

“I’ve been entrenched in the community for a long time and our kids have gone here since kindergarten,” Sanfratello said. “I’ve always wanted to be a coach and when the opportunity came up, I wasn’t looking for it, it sort of fell in my lap, but I said if there’s ever going to be a time now would be it.”

Athletic Director Chase Beebe shares a similar vision for the program with Sanfratello and consistently cites the importance of tying the community to the program.

“Veritas is a unique and very close community,” Beebe said. “It’s like a family.”

Taking the head-coaching position at Veritas also presented Sanfratello with another unique opportunity: the chance to coach his son Anthony Sanfratello.

Anthony, a junior linebacker for the Falcons, provides strong leadership and a consistent voice, as one of the captains on the Veritas Prep defense.

Similar to his dad, he enjoys the coaching aspect of the game and mirrors his father as a coach on the field for the Falcons.

“It’s one of my favorite things,” Anthony Sanfratello said. “I love being in there, but it’s almost just as good to see somebody that you’ve helped coach, you see in the classroom and then you see out there making plays.”

Even though the father-son duo shares a burning passion for football, they still manage to separate life at home from life on the field.

“I think we balance it well,” Sanfratello said. “I hope that I don’t treat him [Anthony] any different than all the other kids. I think [with] our relationship off the field we’ve been able to separate it.”

In his first season as coach of the Falcons, Sanfratello impressed. Losing critical contributors to injury early and having an overwhelmingly inexperienced roster led to Veritas facing some adversity in the middle of the season.

However, the Falcons still find themselves in the playoffs for the third straight season.

The team’s success can be attributed to a multitude of factors including Sanfratello’s wealth of experience, which he brings from playing four seasons at Northern Arizona University and two seasons with the San Francisco 49ers.

Sanfratello spent the regular season disseminating this knowledge to his young team, helping them work toward reaching their full potential.

“These are the easiest kids to coach in terms of effort and attitude,” Sanfratello said. “They’re an easy group to lead, so we’re right where I expected us to be, but we still have a lot of room for improvement.”

Despite already making the playoffs in his first year, Sanfratello aims to take the program to the next level and believes he has a young nucleus that will help elevate his squad to compete among the elite teams in the 2A division.

“I don’t think we’ve arrived,” Sanfratello said. “I still see space for improvement. But the next generation of kids I have, my sophomores and juniors, are going to reset the program for the future.”