Donny Panapada resigned as Stamford High School’s head football coach during the first half of Friday night’s game at Fairfield Warde, a sudden move that left Stamford to finish the contest without its head coach on the sideline. He told his players and Athletic Director Chris Passamano before staying on-site for the second half, though he did not coach again.
The change matters now because Stamford’s coaching setup for the rest of the 2026 season has been set immediately, with no interim coach to step in. The current staff will share head coaching duties after the Black Knights lost 42-14 and fell to 3-3, a result that came after they trailed 30-0 at halftime on Oct. 23.
SHS Principal Matthew Forker said Panapada had exchanges with student athletes in the first half and showed poor judgment. Forker also said Passamano met with Panapada, select players and the coaching staff the day after the game to understand what happened. After those conversations, Forker said there was no viable path for Panapada to rescind his resignation and return as head coach.
Forker said Panapada later acknowledged that he had shown poor judgment and expressed remorse during a conversation on Monday. He also said confrontational exchanges with student athletes during a game, followed by an in-game resignation and a decision not to resume coaching duties, did not match the standards expected of those leading student athletes. At the same time, Forker said Panapada had support from families who believed he had been a positive influence, and said his contributions to Stamford High School football were not erased by the circumstances of his exit.
Panapada had been named head football coach at SHS in 2022, and his teams have gone 16-31 since then. Stamford reached the 2023 CIAC Class LL playoffs as the No. 7 seed, ending a 28-year playoff drought before losing to No. 2 Greenwich 47-21 in the quarterfinals and finishing 7-4. But the program also went through back-to-back 1-9 seasons before this fall, which made the abrupt coaching change especially consequential for a team still trying to steady itself.
Stamford’s next test comes Oct. 31 at home against St. Joseph, and the Black Knights will do it with the same staff now dividing the head-coaching load. What remains unresolved is not whether Panapada is gone from the role — Forker made clear he is — but what exactly was said in the exchanges that pushed a game-night resignation into the center of Stamford’s season.
