Google GLTS football great Jason Nardella’s name and it immediately appears in two of Tribune reporter Mike Muldoon’s Sports Memory columns reminiscing about the 1991 season. The first mentions Nardella’s two touchdowns in a 24-16 win over North Andover, and the next his 157 yards of rushing to beat Ipswich 22-20.
Jason graduated from GLTS in 1992 with twelve varsity letters and was the all-time leader in rushing yards, that record has since been broken. He was an inaugural member in the GLTS Athletic Hall of Fame. The successes that Nardella enjoyed on the fields of GLTS were just the beginning.
The 1992 grad now lives in Naples, Florida where he is a financial planner for Ameriprise Financial Services and runs the Nardella Financial Group. Jason is an avid CrossFit athlete and now spends as much time as possible on his boat floating in the Gulf. It’s a long way from Lawrence.
Jason grew up in Lawrence, with his brother Anthony (class of ’96) and his mother Karen. By the time he was a sophomore in high school he had moved sixteen times throughout the City of Lawrence. “Mostly Prospect Hill, a little bit of Tower Hill and then in high school we settled into a small house over the line in Methuen.”
If there was one constant it was football. “I didn’t have a lot of stability, other than my mom and my grandfather, at the time, but I played football in the Lawrence Pop Warner program under Coach Bill Berard.” He remembers one practice where Coach Berard showed up in uniform. “He looked like a kid,” Nardella laughs. His brother, Steve Berard, who was a football coach at GLTS, was a giant to the Pop Warner players and a frequent visitor to their games and practices
When it came time to enroll in high school his two options were GLTS and Lawrence High. He chose GLTS. The team was going to their first Super Bowl and Nardella wanted to be part of the program. “I decided that I was going to play football for Rosie (Coach Rosmarino) at Greater Lawrence. There was something about Rosie that appealed to me. He seemed driven to win no matter the division or the roster.”
“My mother asked me to promise that I would go to college. I was just an eighth grader, but I said ‘sure, I’ll do that.’” Coach Berard assured Mrs. Nardella that GLTS could put him on the path to college.
Jason chose the electrical shop, not that he was interested in “wiring things, but because it had a lot of math and I figured that if I could do math I could probably get into a college somewhere.”
When asked about a favorite teacher Nardella hesitated. “There are just so many and I couldn’t single any one out without leaving people out of the mix.”
“There was Marybeth Sullivan, my English Lit teacher, she was the first person who made me read a book…and that made a really big difference. Mr. Shyer was my math teacher and even when I was a freshman in college struggling with math, I’d come back to GLTS and he’d sit down and work with me.”
“Mr. Silver and his enthusiasm was invaluable. He helped my with my SAT prep. He also provided valuable guidance as to my schedule at college and how to build a solid GPA at the university level.”
“The whole athletic department was wonderful. There were so many who encouraged me. They never limited my experience, they never said ‘You’re from Lawrence so you can’t’ they just told me to go do it.”
And then there was Coach Rosmarino. “Rosie was definitely a father figure, and not just to me, but everyone who played for him. In fact, I still have clothes in my closet that he gave me, a business jacket that I would wear to interviews or to visit colleges. I wore that jacket for years when I was starting out in my career.”
“He’d have me and other players to the house, and whether we were chopping wood or they were feeding us, he’d be teaching us lessons. He would never let us get too full of ourselves. And he taught us that the world will knock you down but you could always stand back up.”
Upon graduating, Northeastern University was the next stop for Nardella. “I’m not the biggest guy in the world so I was what you’d call a ‘recruited walk on’,” Nardella laughed. “Football opened the doors to the university and I had an opportunity to play and see different parts of the country and meet a lot of people who are still great friends.”
Jason graduated with a degree in finance and ended up taking a job with American Express Financial in 1997. One Monday, after spending the night before shoveling snow off his roof and not relishing the thought of thirty more years of such storms, he went into the office and inquired about professional options in Florida. He reconnected with Robert Harden, flew down to Naples on a Friday of Memorial Day weekend and by Labor Day he had relocated to Naples with his former wife, Stacey, and their two year old son, Dante, and has had no regrets.
Jason’s firm boasts a 99% client retention rate and a 98% client satisfaction rate. The firm ranks in the top 5% of company advisors – but Nardella is still not satisfied. “It’s challenging, it’s competitive, it’s humbling and you know Tuesday doesn’t care about Monday’s success and I feed off of that in a lot of ways. I did back in Lawrence and I do now.”
Life threw the Nardella family quite a curve ball a year ago when his son’s teacher was concerned about Dante’s daydreaming. They ended up seeing a neurosurgeon who asked a few questions and then announced that it wasn’t medication that he needed, but surgery. Dante was diagnosed with Hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid on the teenager’s brain wasn’t draining and was putting pressure on his frontal lobe.
A series of six surgeries followed and were complicated by various medical setbacks like vertigo and a subdural hematoma. A year later Dante is thriving and Nardella is quick to acknowledge the teacher’s role in the medical nightmare. “This woman has been around kids for 35 years – she knows stuff – and we’re forever grateful that she had the courage to say something – and you know it’s changed his life. He’s a junior in high school and just got the best grades he’d ever had, he no longer hates going to school. He’s almost a completely different boy.”
Nardella’s business brings him back to the Merrimack Valley a few times a year where he has just enough time to see the city, feel the neighborhoods and stop in at Thwaites when time allows. He stays connected with his hometown through Facebook. “There’s quite a lot of Reggies out there and we talk almost weekly on Facebook.”
When asked about the role GLTS played in his life, he answered thoughtfully. “It teaches you about the real world, it teaches you that if you come out with a trade or with a skill, you’ll always be able to support yourself. It’s as real as the world is, you don’t live in a world where everyone looks like you and thinks like you and acts like you. You need to be able to work with everybody and that skill as you move forward is incredible valuable.”