Staff photo
David Di Piazza has been hired as the Vestavia Hills High School boys soccer coach. He has won 547 games in an illustrious career.
One of the top soccer coaches in Alabama history is making a move, much to the delight and benefit of Vestavia Hills High School.
The Vestavia Hills Board of Education approved Tuesday morning the hiring of David Di Piazza as the Rebels’ next boys soccer coach.
“I’m honored,” Di Piazza said. “Vestavia is an incredible school. It’s a place that has a ton of potential. I know there is potential there and I think I’m the guy that can get that out of them. It’s a fun, new challenge.”
He will be just the third coach in program history. Legendary coach Rick Grammer led the program he started for 35 years, winning 633 games, a state record that still stands. Leo Harlan has led the program for the last 10 years.
Di Piazza has established a reputation as one of the top coaches in the state over nearly 25 years, winning seven state championships and collecting 547 wins at the high school level.
“I grew up playing soccer in Birmingham and I thought this is a program that has an incredible amount of potential,” Di Piazza said. “It’s a great school academically and it’s a challenge that I’m excited about.”
Having won a state title as a player at John Carroll Catholic High School in 1994, Di Piazza eventually took the reins as head coach there in 2002. He won four state titles on the boys side (2008-10, 2012) and one on the girls (2014) before coaching Oak Mountain’s girls for two years, winning another state championship in 2015. He also had a stint as the Birmingham-Southern women’s soccer coach.
He returned to Oak Mountain in 2019 as the boys coach, and led the Eagles on an extraordinary run. The Eagles recently put together arguably the best two-year stretch of any team in Alabama high school history, winning 49 consecutive games and carrying an unbeaten streak of 60 games. Oak Mountain won the Class 7A championship in 2024 with a record of 29-0-1 and finished the 2025 campaign at 30-1, only dropping the state final to snap the streak.
Di Piazza expressed appreciation to Oak Mountain Prinicipal Andrew Gunn and Athletic Director Chris Blight for the opportunity to return in 2019. His wife still works at Oak Mountain, and said he “will always love” the people he’s worked with there. He is proud of the position the program is in as he moves forward.
With 16 seniors on this year’s Oak Mountain team, it felt like the proper ending to that chapter in his career. Now, he’s excited to take over a Vestavia program eager to experience some of that success Di Piazza has proven capable of producing. The Rebels have not won a state championship in the boys program since finishing off back-to-back titles in 2014.
He’s not shying away from his expectation of immediate success.
“My goal is to be in the final four next year,” he said.
A meet-and-greet will be held at Vestavia Hills High on Wednesday at 5 p.m., and Di Piazza said the work begins at that moment.
“The first thing is establishing what our culture is going to be like,” he said. “There’s a sense of community at Vestavia. That’s really appealing to me and something I’ll build into this program. We’re going to work incredibly hard and do things right.”
Di Piazza is thankful for the chance to prove himself to the Vestavia community. He was impressed by the commitment to excellence at Vestavia, and saw that from incoming Athletic Director Laura Casey and Principal Blair Inabinet in the hiring process.
“Coach Di Piazza has unmatched experience and a track record of building championship programs,” Casey said in a release. “He leads with integrity, expects excellence and deeply values the growth of student-athletes both on and off the field.”
“I want to be the best in my profession,” he said. “I’m not ready to stop competing for state championships, and that’s why I took this job.”
