In the busy San Rafael High School hallways, he is a familiar face, fist-bumping and starting conversations with as many students as he can. Jose De La Rosa, current P.E and AVID teacher, is the reason many students in his community are attending college and playing sports there.
De La Rosa grew up in the Canal neighborhood and attended San Pedro Elementary School, Davidson Middle School, and graduated from San Rafael High School in 2012. He then attended San Francisco State University, and graduated in 4 years with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, with a focus on Management.
After college, he took on a job in the training department at Nugget Market. However, in 2017, when his little brother, Erick De La Rosa, was a senior, he and coach Johnny Vara took over the boy’s varsity soccer team. The former coach was stepping down, and seeing the team’s condition, De La Rosa knew he had to step in and help his community.
Helping his community is his overall biggest goal and achievement. Jeremie Brunet, a fellow AVID teacher, says, “he really cares about the community he grew up in.”
That year, he and coach Johnny would lead the boys to win an MCAL (Marin County Athletics League) championship. The boy’s varsity soccer team has not won an MCAL pennant since.
Although without pennants in the last couple of years, the boy’s varsity soccer team has been very successful in both MCAL and NCS, and De La Rosa has been a big part of that success.
After his second year as a coach of the varsity team, he was offered a job as the athletic director at SR. De La Rosa loved the position, as he was able “to build a lot of relationships with student-athletes and help [them].” Plus, he was able to grow the athletics department significantly, along with Jeremie Brunet, the assistant athletic director at the time.
Although he loved doing all the background things involving sports, he enjoys working with students at the micro level, rather than the macro level, as he did in his role as the AD. At the time, the AD job was also part-time, with full-time work, and a significantly lower wage.
So, during the pandemic, he got his teaching credential online through Sonoma State. He is now an AVID 11, P.E. Bridge, P.E 1, and Sophomore P.E teacher.
When asked if he ever pictured himself as a teacher, he says, “no, but as I got more involved here in sports and in the community, more and more I saw myself doing it from a mentorship role.” He says he doesn’t know if he would continue teaching if it weren’t at SR.
He especially enjoys the P.E Bridge program because he gets to be a part of the development of newcomers into this country. However, he says, “I wouldn’t call it my favorite class, because then my AVID kids would get mad.”
He loves his AVID class. Overall, in AVID you have the same class for 4 years, so you build a strong connection with them. “They become your kiddos,” he says.
“He cares about them deeply, but he also lets them know who’s boss,” says current AVID 12 teacher, Erica Smith. He pushes them significantly, to be able to attend a 4-year university after high school.
Moreover, he loves every class he teaches, and the students love him back. Crystal Santos had De La Rosa for weight training and says, “Mr. De La Rosa as a teacher was honestly the best thing. He makes sure we are making the right decisions, he is always willing to help us out, and he never fails to make us smile or laugh.” She adds that although sometimes students don’t feel like trying in P.E., he would push everyone and not let them fail. He made it fun to exercise.
What makes him such a good teacher is that he truly cares. “Mr. De La Rosa is different from the other teachers I had because he would always ask us how we were doing and if we were okay when he had the chance,” says Santos.
De La Rosa is especially an integral part of the SR community where there is a very small number of teachers of color, let alone male teachers. “It’s really important especially for young Latino boys to see a strong, successful professional as a model for what they aspire to be,” says Smith.
Since he grew up in Canal and attended all schools in the San Rafael school district, he understands the system. He has seen first hand how underserved students struggle to even finish high school and be able to attend college. For this reason, as a teacher, he has become an advocate for students who are growing up like him. He wants to stop the pattern of Latino students not furthering their education after high school.
He makes sure that these students understand their potential and helps them meet their academic, athletic, and even personal goals. “He helped me improve in many ways, not just as a player but as a person as well. He has always wanted to help me in the aspect of soccer and also in school,” says Hidalgo.
Since 2017 De La Rosa has been a coach for the boys varsity soccer team. However, apart from recently becoming a teacher, last year he was given the opportunity to become the JVB boy’s soccer head coach. He really enjoyed coaching this team because, “at that level, you go down to the basics,” he says. He references his former Marin FC coaches, Tom Ryan and Josh Kalkstein, as inspiration for drills and how to lead the team, based on how big they were on building personal relationships with their athletes.
For this reason, De La Rosa is very big on relationships himself. As a coach and teacher, he gets very involved in the lives of his students and athletes. The reason is that he wants everyone to succeed in whatever they picture themselves doing.
The personal relationship he builds with students and athletes is also the reason he is known as “tio” around campus, which translates to “uncle” in English. “[It’s] not because he’s going to tell them what they want to hear but because he tells them what they need to hear,” says Brunet.
This hard-love personality of his is the reason why students and athletes are attending college and playing sports there. Although he’ll never sugarcoat anything for his students, he is never mean.
“He would help me instead of getting mad, he would give me advice on how to improve,” says Angel Hidalgo, a 2024 graduate, who played varsity soccer under De La Rosa.
He is very proud of all of the student-athletes who have come through SR’s athletic program. Last year De La Rosa did a presentation to the Educator Academy class at SR, of which I am a part. When he spoke about being a soccer coach, he included a recent commitment picture of Jeffery Grijalva, a 2022 SR graduate, who also played under De La Rosa on the varsity soccer team. He had recently committed to play Division 3 soccer at the University of Laverne.
De La Rosa was tearing up when talking about his commitment. He expressed his happiness for Grijalva in a way that I’ve never seen any other coach do for a player. This isn’t my only experience of seeing him this happy, for a player’s commitment to play a collegiate-level sport.
When these student-athletes go on to college he continues to stay in touch and makes sure to continue watching them play. “I love seeing our students we used to have, play and see how they’ve developed from being high schoolers to now,” he says.
You will see him at several, if not all of the Dominican University men’s and women’s soccer games, watching players like Jackie Lancaster, Norman Tellez, and Chris Barrios, all SR alums who have played or are playing Division 2 soccer at Dominican University. This October, he and his wife flew all the way out to Hawaii to watch them play.
In the near future, he says, “I want to find a way to keep helping students from underserved communities go straight to a 4 year college. Like a mentorship program, foundation, or non-profit, with an emphasis on sports and all its benefits.”
