New Chabot men's soccer head coach Geoff Aguiar, who was hired a few weeks ago, is excited to be back where it all began. The Hayward area is part of his soccer DNA.
 And the Gladiators are sure glad he's here.
"He brings a great deal of community college experience and success as a head coach," Chabot Athletic Director Jeff Drouin said of his new hire. "He grew up in the area and has a history with Chabot College; his father, Larry Aguiar was hired as a full-time instructor at Chabot, before he transferred to Las Positas College.
"Our men's soccer program has struggled for a number of years, and I feel Geoff is the right person to bring it back to a competitive level," Drouin added.
Aguiar and Chabot seem like a marriage made in JUCO soccer heaven. He started out as an assistant at Las Positas in 2008, then became head coach at Merritt from 2016-19 and guided College of Marin from 2019-22, enjoying success at every turn. He also was an assistant at Dominican University, helping lead the the Penguins to their first Division 2 title last fall.
With an infectious personality, Aguiar has quickly hit the recruiting trail for the Glads and brought more visibility to the program. He proudly wears his Chabot sweatshirt at local high school games, and also wants to expand Chabot's social media footprint. He has started an Instagram account and is sprucing up the college soccer website.
Aguiar, a former Chabot and Las Positas student and Coast Conference Soccer Player of the Year at Las Positas, seems like the right man in the right spot. How has he succeeded in building successful programs at the community college level?
"I think it's just from the work, from doing the work," Aguiar said. "I've turned around a program in Oakland. I've turned around a program in Marin, and the same (opportunity) goes for the Hayward area. There's a lot of great kids, great players, great students, great people that kind of fall through the cracks. There needs to be somebody looking out for their interests and trying to help them navigate the system, that's the soccer system and the school system."
The Hayward area and the communities nearby offer a steady stream of quality players.
"I'm excited," Aguiar said. "It's an area I grew up in and it's been kind of struggling for a little while (at Chabot), and so hopefully we can get it going back in the right direction … I was a Chabot and Las Positas student, and I trained at Chabot for years growing up prior to that, and it helped me become the student-athlete that I was and helped me have the collegiate playing career that I had. It helped me get into coaching and become the coach that I am."
He added that he's always been "passionate about the area and the students and the players in the area, and it's been undervalued the last several years," he continued.
As an assistant at Las Positas under his father, Larry, Geoff helped lead the team to a 2013 conference title. At Merritt, he led the team from last place to a conference championship. He had a similar rebuild in Marin, with both men's and women's teams seeing immediate improvement. After starting out at Marin coaching the men, he added the women's team in 2020, guiding them to a successful season.
As a player he made All-Far West Region at Las Positas before continuing to play at Dominican. He then transferred to Cal State East Bay where he earned his Bachelor's Degree and Master's.
Now he's moving quickly forward to help bring the shine back to the Chabot program.