Coach Michael Gibbons has jump-started a wave of success for the Hope High School football team.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

PROVIDENCE –– He was an All-State lineman on a couple of state championship high school football teams.

He played college football.

He has been a teacher in an inner-city school system for 15 years.

Michael Gibbons is a young man who knows how to control his emotions.

Yet there he was Saturday afternoon running out onto the Hope High football field, cheering like an excited teenager.

“That’s just the beginning,” Gibbons exuberantly proclaimed as he ran onto the field to congratulate the Hope football players after a second-quarter touchdown in a Division IV game against North Smithfield.

A Hope High football coach getting excited about his team’s success — it’s not your every weekend occurrence or at least it wasn’t until this year.

“It’s starting to seem like football,” Gibbons said later in the day after Hope had improved its Division IV record to 3-0 with a 44-14 victory.

He has been coaching football at Hope for 11 years now, the past seven as the Blue Wave’s head coach.

Coaching football at Hope has never been a job filled with a lot of championship memories.

The Blue Wave has won only one state title since the R.I. Interscholastic League instituted a football playoff system in 1972 and that was 23 years ago when Hope was playing in Division III.

For more than a decade, however, Hope has been playing in Division IV, the lowest-ranked of the Interscholastic League’s four football divisions and even then there hasn’t been too much success.

It’s all very logical why Hope isn’t a football powerhouse — even in Division IV.

It’s a public school in a city with a multicultural population. A lot of Hope students –– or at least their parents –– emigrated to the United States from countries where American football isn’t the game of choice.

And while there are some good youth football programs in the city of Providence, it’s no secret that many of the stars of those pee-wee gridiron programs end up playing their high school football at one of the Interscholastic League’s private schools.

So not only haven’t there been any championships, there have been several years over the past decade when there were only one or two victories a season.

But none of that has stopped Gibbons from wanting to coach football at Hope

He grew up in a football environment. His father, Charlie Gibbons, was an All-Stater at Rogers and a Little All-American at URI. He played at Rogers for legendary coach John Toppa on state championship teams in the late 1980s, then went to an outstanding collegiate career at Springfield (Mass.) College.

He knows football is a physical game; it’s a game that can be fun and exciting and maybe most importantly for teenagers from the city, it’s a game that demands you develop structure in your actions if you want to be successful.

It’s a game that demands commitment, a game that requires you to master the basics before you can think about spotlight; a game where the players who do things the average fan never notices often are the guys who decide the outcome of a game.

Eleven guys with 11 different assignments and if one guy doesn’t do his job, the team fails.

“You have to get everybody to buy in. Even if only one or two guys don’t buy in to the commitment, it doesn’t work,” said Gibbons.

So for years now he has preaching commitment, talking about doing the little things as well as the big things. That’s it’s just as important to make sure you’re wearing all your pads so the team doesn’t get a penalty as it is to make a crowd-pleasing tackle.

“So far, everybody seems to be buying into it,” Gibbons said of the Blue Wave’s early-season success.

He’s not kidding himself. He knows victories over three teams that only have combined for three victories in a combined total of nine Division IV games doesn’t make the Blue Wave a gridiron powerhouse.

He knows the teams that people were talking about as leading Division IV title contenders before the start of the seasons, teams such as Central Falls, Middletown and Exeter-West Greenwich are still ahead on the schedule.

But it’s the middle of October and the Hope football is 3-0 in League play. The people who know say it’s been a long time since that has happened.

“I think you would have to go back to the late ’80s for the last time we started the season 3-0,” said veteran Hope athletic director Al DiGregorio.

“We still have a long way to go before we can consider ourself a good team,” said Gibbons. “We’re on the road. I’m starting to see some exit signs, but we still have a long way to go.”

It could be an interesting trip.

jgillool@projo.com