Helen Antzoulides, Rutherford, is named 2025-26 North Jersey Coach of the Year
Greg Tartaglia
Rutherford coach Helen Antzoulides developed several trademarks throughout her career.
Winning naturally tops the list. Her final season guiding a group of Bulldogs ended with the first sectional bowling championship in school history.
With her retirement from teaching and coaching at the end of the 2025-26 school year, Antzoulides goes out with sectional titles in each of her sports: Softball (2008), girls volleyball (2019) and bowling. The latter came with a coed squad in the North 2, Group 1 boys tournament this past February.
Antzoulides will be honored as the North Jersey Coach of the Year at the 2026 North Jersey High School Sports Awards, presented by HSS. The show begins at 7 p.m. on Friday, June 26 at Passaic County Technical Institute.
She’s also been known to introduce softball reporters to certain Greek sweet treats (ask Darren Cooper). And just about everyone with whom she interacts is familiar with her somewhat sarcastic sense of wit.
Perhaps, then, one of the great ironies of her career is fitting.
“I stopped to take a look at what was really my first high school coaching gig, and that was cheerleading,” Antzoulides said with a chuckle. “Listen, am I a cheerleader? Absolutely not. But you’re a young teacher, and they say, ‘Hey, we need a cheerleading coach.’ So I said, ‘All right, let’s go.’ And that was at David Brearley [in Kenilworth].”
Antzoulides grew up in Union County and played varsity softball at Elizabeth in the early ’80s. That was the first spring sport she coached upon arriving at Paterson Catholic in 1985-86. That September, she became the Cougars’ volleyball assistant and eventually took over for program founder Beth Schoonmaker.
Paterson Catholic, which closed in 2010, still counts Antzoulides as its all-time winningest coach with 122 victories from 1991-2002. She added 469 victories at Rutherford from 2004-25 – plus the 2019 NJIC Tournament title and 2024 Bergen Invitational crown – to finish 591-314 (.653 win percentage). That currently ranks No. 4 in North Jersey history.
Antzoulides’ final season in the gym included an NJIC Meadowlands title (14-0 in division) led by a player with 1,000-plus career kills (Mackenzie Vellis) and another with 1,000-plus career assists (Cate Finan). That team gave her a surprise sendoff one mid-June Thursday afternoon.
“I’m in the gym, and it’s after school, and they said, ‘One of your colleagues wants you to cross the hall’,” Antzoulides said. “So I go across the hall, and who do I see? I see 10 volleyball players, past and present, that are there congratulating me for my retirement.”
Among them was 2007 North Jersey Girls Volleyball Player of the Year Angelika Kopacz, who went on to play at Lehigh.
“Then you had Jenna Rogers, who I hadn’t seen in probably a year and a half,” Antzoulides said, “and her sister, Jessica Rogers, who just recently moved back from Hawaii. … And if somebody couldn’t be there, they sent a card.”
Her greatest softball feat goes beyond helping Paterson Catholic end an 89-game losing streak in May 1988. Despite the fact that the Cougars won only four games in her six seasons, she still finished above .500 in the sport (308-241) thanks to a .727 winning percentage at Rutherford (2005-21).
Bowling became Antzoulides’ swan song as a result of succeeding the retired Dave Padilla in 2021. A former league bowler herself, she started with a team that won two league matches during a COVID-altered campaign and led it to a 37-8 mark the past two winters.
“The first couple years, there wasn’t a lot of interest” in the program, Antzoulides said. “There was a young man named Blake Smith – he got a lot of people going. From there, once one kid gets a friend, who gets a friend, who gets a friend… before you know it, you have a pretty solid group of bowlers.”
This season, that included Boys Bowler of the Year nominee Brandon Fedarick (221 average) and fellow senior Thomas Barnes (191), who led the Bulldogs to the sectional title.
“They’d play a match, they’d go home, they’d get their cars, and they’d come back to the bowling lanes, and they’d bowl,” Antzoulides said. “So, you have that passion, you have the work ethic.”
Those may be the two most important trademarks of “Coach A” that helped send her out as a winner.
