Cumberland County High School recently announced Howard Paras as the new head coach of the Dukes varsity football team.

Paras takes over a squad that has gone 0-11 in each of its past two seasons. Last year, Jamaal Artis served in his first year as head coach of the team.

This will be Paras’ first football head coaching opportunity at the varsity high school level, but it will come in a place with which he is most familiar.

“Coach Paras played for me, and he coached with me,” Cumberland Athletic Director Alfonso Bell said. “He graduated here.”

Paras was part of Cumberland’s Class of 1999.

“I started coaching right after graduation, actually,” Paras said. “I don’t even think that’s allowed anymore. I was 17 years old.”

Within the Cumberland County Public Schools system, he has coached at various levels of girls basketball for years, and he has served as an assistant coach for boys basketball.

“I coached a total of seven years of varsity track,” he said. “I was the head girls coach for two years.”

Football has been a constant, though, as he has served as an assistant football coach every year since 1999.

“He knows football well,” Bell said. “He knows the county well. He’s well-respected in the county by the kids and parents.”

Paras reflected on what this new coaching opportunity means to him.

“It’s a blessing,” he said. “It’s an amazing opportunity to have a chance to come back home and work with the program that I’ve put the last 20 years of my life into, to have a chance to develop the young men here in my home county.”

Offseason conditioning is underway for the Dukes, and Paras knows what he wants to do with their future.

“I want to build the program on the principles and the foundations that we built the same program on in the early-to-mid 2000s, which is character development, fundamentals, strengthening our fundamentals, (and) hard work — really, those three things,” he said. “We want to be really big on developing people, because I feel like if you develop as a person, then that will translate over to the football field or the basketball court or whatever else you do.”