Retired Tomales coach Leon Feliciano headed to Marin Athletic Hall

Any career counselor worth their salt will tell you a résumé should fit onto one page.

But try squishing former Tomales High football coach Leon Feliciano’s accomplishments onto one page: Three North Coast Section championships, four NCS runner-up finishes, six North Central League II titles, 16 playoff appearances, a 37-game undefeated streak in the NCLII and an NCS Honor Coach of the Year award.

And what about the stuff that doesn’t fit onto a résumé? Those things that don’t fit under the headings of “education,” “accomplishments” or “experience” but which most certainly fit the definition of all three? The speeches given at former players’ weddings, the eulogies given at funerals, the come-to-Jesus conversations just when a grown man who still calls you “Coach” needs it.

For the wins, for the championships, but also for the connections he made with players and families along the way, Feliciano is being inducted into the Marin Athletic Foundation Hall of Fame Nov. 5 - only the fourth Tomales High inductee and the first coach since the award started in 1988.

“He’s the real deal,” said Chris Ludlow, a star running back in Feliciano’s vaunted Double Wing offense in the late 1990s. “I have never met anyone who doesn’t just think the world of him when they meet him.”

Feliciano, a big-city guy who’d played college ball at San Francisco State, had a patchwork coaching résumé when he arrived in Tomales in 1996 to take over a team filled with tough farm kids that had just won a championship.

Feliciano knew football but hadn’t yet found his coaching groove.

“I was struggling at Lincoln (High School),” Feliciano said of the gig he had before Tomales. So he called on his old college coach to teach him the finer points of the Double Wing - a run-heavy offense that prioritizes physicality over finesse.

“I fell in love with it. I thought I could coach it,” he said. “Even more importantly, the kids liked it. They were physical kids. The rest was history.”

Feliciano led his teams to a 137-69-3 record before retiring from coaching after the 2014 season.

“He shows you how special it is to be able to play football and how lucky you are,” Ludlow said. “He makes you great at it. He makes average players better and he gives you the opportunity to be great. His system, and the way he makes you work - he makes you work for what you get, and what you get is success.”

Feliciano, a teacher on campus, walked the halls every fall looking for potential players. He was a tireless pitchman - not just for football, but for Tomales High and being a part of something bigger than yourself.

“I had highlight tapes, I would sell it, man,” he said, laughing. “I’d think, ‘If this highlight tape doesn’t get you fired up for football, then don’t play.’ ”

“Some kids we got would never have thought about it if they hadn’t been approached,” he said. “You want to enjoy high school. Believe me, those four years go fast.”

He had boys walk onto his field who had never played organized football. He was constantly teaching because he wanted to find a coaching home at Tomales.

“I was just starting my family. I wasn’t going to submit them to moving around,” he said. “I always looked up to coaches that stayed in one spot and really made a mark in the long haul.”

So Feliciano dug in.

His teams lined up against great squads over the years, like Gary Galloway’s St. Vincent teams and Bill Foltmer’s squads in Middletown - games that would draw entire towns into the stands.

“Every single small school had a good run and a good legacy,” he said. “You go to little, small towns and the place was packed and they are good. It was awesome.”

“There is nothing like it when the town, literally the whole town, shows up to the game and it’s Friday night and you play another little town and their grandfather went to school there. God, it was special,” he said. “There’s something about a small town. Everyone knows each other. It just makes it more unique, or, I’m trying to search for the word...”

Then he finds it: “Family.”

Feliciano credits his wife Nicolle with supporting him through the hours and the agony that can come with coaching.

“Her relationships with kids and other parents, she deserves as much credit as I do,” he said. “A lot of times people would go to her before they’d go to me. It was a great partnership.”

And it was a family affair. Two of the Felicianos’ sons played for Tomales. They also have a younger son and daughter.

You wouldn’t have thought it would work. Big City Feliciano in small-town Tomales.

“When I met him, he’s this big, muscular guy with this kind of Italian, San Francisco thing going, and he came out to little cow-town Tomales,” Ludlow said.

But the connections he made were both immediate and lasting.

Morgan Wilson’s father died the year before Feliciano came to town. The first words Coach said to Wilson weren’t about weights or training or the offseason program.

“Before he even started coaching, he pulled me aside, gave me his card and said, ‘I know what you are going through, I’ve been down the same road,’ ” Wilson said. “It was pretty impressive to me even at that age. Not knowing what kind of kid I was or anything. It was genuine.”

Feliciano credits those boys - Ludlow, Wilson, quarterback Kevin Ballatore and others - with setting the tone for what Tomales football could be in those early years.

“I was lucky because I had great role models,” he said of the leaders from those early teams.

Feliciano instituted a more rigorous weight training program, and soon Braves were wearing shirts around campus announcing their feats of strength. He was regimented, he was fiery.

“When we started slacking, he would lay it down,” Wilson said.

“But he would never really get down. If we lost a game, it was most of the time that we weren’t focused or we weren’t working hard enough,” he said.

But they did lose - every once in a while.

And that can be magnified in a small town. I asked if that was hard, bumping into people at the corner store after a loss or seeing a mom whose kid doesn’t get a lot of playing time.

Feliciano said it was rarely like that.

He told me about a time he was sitting in a local restaurant the morning after a tough loss. He was with Nicolle and the kids.

The father of the starting quarterback was there, too. The dad bought breakfast for the whole Feliciano family.

A big-city guy could get used to those small-town kindnesses.

Ludlow, who has endured some ups and downs in his life after football, said Feliciano has been a constant presence.

“I’m 36. He’s called me once a month since I was 16 years old. That’s 20 years,” he said. “He’s truly one of my favorite people on the whole planet.”

And not just because of football. Not just because of the section championships or league pennants or 137 wins, more than any other coach in the history of Tomales High - all the things that earned him a spot in the Marin Athletic Hall of Fame. Ludlow will show up to the dinner next month to honor not his coach, but his mentor.

“He’s somebody I hope I’m like someday. It chokes me up,” he said. “He’s a 100-percent good man.”

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield. Podcasting on iTunes “Overtime with Kerry Benefield.”