A Toast To Matt Gillis as He Retires

Publisher’s Note: Paul Lilla has worked for 24 years as Head Athletic Trainer at Westwood High School. For 13 of those years, Matt Gillis was the Director of Athletics. Paul shared his thoughts as Matt wrapped up his long-time career leading the Wolverines program.
 
When I started, Matt was the boys lacrosse coach and he was still working at the middle school. Then he took over as golf coach. I wasn’t involved in the AD search at the time when he got hired, so I knew he was in the running and I was rooting for him because I knew him, but I also didn’t know him that well because we didn’t spend much time together. I’m gonna knock on wood not to jinx this, but golf has never given the athletic training department a lot of business over the years. In fact, it’s given me none, so I never had to interact with him a lot, the way I do with the football coach or the soccer coaches.
 
That being said, once he came on as A.D., I just saw how similar we were from a personality standpoint, in terms of trying to do what’s best for the kids. It’s never about him. He’s incredibly selfless. He’s always looking to serve and be humble in that regard, and he takes what he does seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He and I just hit it off in terms of having a lot of those same qualities.
 
In some ways, he became my work spouse, and like any marriage, it’s not always perfect, but it’s built on trust, friendship, love, caring and doing the right thing. We’ve often talked, philosophically, about different things and how it’s so important as an athletic department for us to put on a good event. There are so many things he does that people don’t see him do. People show up when the game happens and they’re not thinking about the dozens of logistical things that had to happen for that game to go off as smoothly as it does, whether that’s buses, or officials, or equipment, or fields, or weather, or in the case of the bigger events, workers.
 
He was always coordinating with fellow athletic directors and coordinating with admin, with officials or me in terms of what might happen and what we should all expect.
 
There were accomplishments, for sure, including state championships and Tri-Valley League championships. All that stuff is, obviously, really great and he wanted so many people to be a part of it. I think the day-to-day of giving these kids opportunities to play sports and get the benefits of high school athletics is at his core. Matt believes in the importance of competition, teamwork and perseverance. He did an incredible job making it all run smoothly.
 
I don’t speak for him, but I think he’s incredibly proud of adding the Unified Sports program and giving our unified athletes a place to play, and he’s always taken great pride in those successes I mentioned above.
 
On a personal note, I can attest to the fact he has a hard job. My job is a hard job, too, with a lot of moving parts, so we were always in touch with each other, being able to sound off – probably more me to him than him to me, but being here for him if he needed to vent about something, just like a good friend or colleague should be. And that’s what he’s been, as good a work partner as I could ever imagine.
 
One of the things that we love about each other is the fact we can make each other laugh, and you need to be able to do that. Matt managed to be very successful during his tenure, while also maintaining the kind of principles we were looking for in terms of what high school athletics and what the high school athletic department at Westwood was supposed to be – competing for yourself, with your classmates, your town, and for the name on the front of the jersey.