SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO – Hardy Nickerson’s sports heroes when he was growing up, like the sports heroes for most people, were always older than him.
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Muhammad Ali and Reggie Jackson were at the top of his list. Jackie Robinson, who was well before Nickerson’s time, was one of his heroes too.
As Nickerson became a star in the NFL and a sports hero to others, he looked up to someone younger than himself: Kobe Bryant.
“That “Mamba Mentality,’ ” said Nickerson of the late-great Lakers star. “He was always working on getting one percent better.”
That’s what Nickerson wants to see in the JSerra football program he took charge of in December.
“Get one percent better, every day,” Nickerson said during a July interview on the JSerra campus. “Do that and everything else takes care of itself.”
Nickerson played 16 seasons in the NFL including five Pro Bowl seasons at Tampa Bay. He started in 200 NFL games.
He is one of two ex-NFL stars working as head coaches in the Trinity League. Carson Palmer, who played quarterback in the NFL for 14 seasons, guided Santa Margarita to CIF Southern Section and CIF State championships last year in his first season as a high school coach.
JSerra had a rough time last season. The Lions went winless in the Trinity League and finished 3-7 overall.
The school released Victor Santa Cruz as head coach one day after the season ended with a 41-14 loss to Santa Margarita.
Nickerson, 60, has experience as a high school coach. In 2025, Nickerson coached Bishop O’Dowd of Oakland to a victory over El Cajon Christian in the CIF State Division 5AA championship game.
He got his first look at south Orange County a couple of years ago.
“When I got out here I saw that this is a great area,” he said. “I lived in Compton but I was never in south Orange County. So when this job became available I thought, ‘hmmmm.’”
Another of Nickerson’s sports heroes was, and is, Lalo Mendoza, who was the coach at Verbum Dei High in Watts when Nickerson played there. Outstanding high school coaches often inspire their players to become high school coaches. Mendoza had that effect on Nickerson.
“The impact he had on me and my teammates was profound,” Nickerson said. “When I got to college and the pros, he was the guy I could always call and talk to. He always kept me straight.”
There also was his father, who is also named Hardy.
“He worked 40 some-odd years and didn’t miss a day,” Nickerson said of his father who was a cook in a juvenile detention center in Lancaster. The Nickersons lived in Compton, so his father was making a round trip of 170 miles for work.
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“I saw this man get up at 4, 4:30 in the morning to drive to Lancaster,” said Nickerson, with audible emotion. “He’d drive back to Watts to watch my football practices. When I first started playing he’d come back in time to drive me to football practice.”
Nickerson was O’Dowd’s head coach from 2010 through the 2013 season, leading the Dragons to two league championships. Nickerson went on coach linebackers for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the San Francisco 49ers before becoming defensive coordinator at the University of Illinois in 2016.
He left the position at Illinois because of health issues.
“I started having nosebleeds in the middle of the night and I was having heart palpitations,” Nickerson said. “One time, I thought I was having a stroke when I lost feeling on my left side.”
He was 6-3 and 230 pounds in most of his NFL seasons and looks to be about that now. After the health scare he adjusted his diet. Nickerson said 98 percent of his daily diet now is plant-based.
“I did have some brisket on the Fourth of July,” he said, smiling. “Beyond that, I’m doing pretty good.”
Nickerson is the first Black head coach in the Trinity League for football. That is important to him.
“It does mean a lot, being the first,” he said. “I want to establish a standard, and that’s what I’ve tried to do in every place I’ve been. My standard is to try to achieve excellence.”
Nickerson has assembled a coaching staff that includes many ex-NFL players.
Pat Harlow is JSerra’s offensive line coach. Harlow played eight years as an offensive lineman in the NFL and is also a former JSerra head coach. Former NFL quarterback Steve Beuerlein is working with the team’s QBs and ex-NFL receiver Austin Pettis is a holdover from the Lions’ previous staff as a receivers coach.
Nickerson’s son Hardy Nickerson, who played for five years in the NFL, is on the staff. (The three Hardy Nickersons have different middle names.) The youngest Hardy Nickerson is one of three children of the Nickersons. Hardy Nickerson’s wife of 36 years, Amy Nickerson, is a best-selling author, public speaker and educator.
Richard Rodgers Jr., like Nickerson a Cal alum, played nine years in the NFL, and John Allred played in the league for five. Another assistant, Mark Washington, who played at Long Beach Poly, has a few games of NFL experience.
Nickerson will lead this group into competition in the ultra-tough Trinity League with its roster of Mater Dei, Orange Lutheran, Santa Margarita, St. John Bosco and Servite. It’s often labeled the best football league in the nation.
“The biggest challenge in coaching is finding ways to motivate different people,” Nickerson said. “To get them to sit for 30 minutes to take in some information.”
If he can do that, Nickerson figures, he can do what his heroes and what his coaches, like Mendoza and Joe Kapp, his coach at Cal, and Chuck Noll, his coach with the Pittsburgh Steelers, did for him.
“As a high school coach you have the opportunity to really make an impact on young peoples’ lives across the board,” he said. “That’s what I’m in this for.”
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