To the Young Men Who Will Decide the Future of Lexington Football

An open letter from a former Lexington High School football player and volunteer coach

Dear Lexington Football Players and Future Players,

On Thanksgiving Day, November 26, the two towns I grew up in are scheduled to play football. I lived in Concord until the middle of ninth grade, then moved to Lexington and went to high school there. I played football in both towns. When I last checked, nobody had announced whether Lexington can field a varsity team for that game.

Last month Lexington forfeited its games against Winchester and Arlington because the number of varsity-eligible players had dropped into single digits. I live in Austin, Texas now, where Friday night football is still a community ritual. The news from home caught me off guard and took me back to 1978.

You can probably guess what usually comes next. An old player tells you how hard things were in his day and that you need to toughen up.

I'd rather tell you about the years I didn't play.

I was on a 2-8 team as a sophomore. My junior year, I chose not to play, and the team went 6-4 without me. I came back for my senior season in 1978. We finished 7-2-1 and closed the year against Burlington on Thanksgiving Day. In 1984, six seasons after my last game, Lexington played in the Division 1 Super Bowl. No single player turned that program around. I'm living proof, since it got better while I was gone.

The coach through all of it was Bill Tighe. He came to Lexington in 1975 and coached there until 2010, when he retired at 86. In our 1978 football program, he wrote about what the game asks of young men and tied it to being a good citizen. His last line was "Football builds these characteristics."

I didn't make it easy for him to be right about me. I was a wild child, and it caught up with me. I didn't graduate with my class at Lexington. I still wanted to play football badly enough to go to Bridgton Academy in Maine. Then the same recklessness showed up again. The summer before I got there, I broke my foot in a motorcycle accident.

Everyone at Bridgton that year was doing a postgraduate year. I was the only one there earning a high school diploma.

In the spring of 1981, more than two years after my last down for Coach Tighe, I took a call on the pay phone at Bridgton. It was a recruiter from West Point. He told me Coach Tighe had called me "the sleeper of the East." According to the recruiter, Coach Tighe pointed out something most people didn't know. I had skipped third grade, so as a senior I was the same age as a lot of the juniors on the team. I didn't put on pads again until I got to West Point.

Coach Tighe hadn't watched me play in more than two years, and he'd seen plenty of my mistakes. He still looked past my record and my bad decisions to the player I could become. Then he said so to someone who could do something about it.

In the early 1990s I came back to Lexington High and spent a couple of seasons as a volunteer assistant on his staff. From that side of the whistle, I finally saw how much time the adults gave away so we could play.

Since 1992 my work has been developing young people. Most of it happened on tennis courts, but tennis was the setting, not the point. What I actually do is help kids handle pressure and build a story about themselves that holds up when things go wrong. I still have that 1978 program. Years later, standing in front of a group of teenage tennis players, I opened my old football album and read Coach Tighe's words to them out loud. It was a tennis practice, and the words still fit.

I don't know what led to this season. I don't know how many players stepped away or got hurt, or what the coaches and athletic department have been up against. A few newspaper articles can't tell me that, and I won't pretend they can.

Lexington's athletic director, Naomi Martin, told the Boston Globe, "It's not about wins and losses. It's about providing the opportunity for them to play football." Nearly fifty years earlier, Coach Tighe had explained why he believed that opportunity mattered.

That's where you come in.

According to the Globe, about 20 freshmen and sophomores are still in the program. You've already done something worth respecting. You stayed with the team this fall when the scoreboard gave you nothing back. If you're lining up against players a year or two older, remember what Coach Tighe saw in me. A record shows where you are. It doesn't show where you're headed. If you're thinking about joining them, you'd be one of the first players on whatever Lexington football becomes next.

I've been on a 2-8 team and a 7-2-1 team. The gap between them was a lot bigger than five wins.

Football isn't the only place a young man learns discipline, courage or loyalty. I've spent my career helping kids build those things on a different surface. But I know what football can do when the adults running it care more about who you become than about your record.

You get to decide whether to put on a helmet. Those of us who got something from Lexington football have to decide whether we'll help build a program you'll want to join.

So here is my pledge. I'm committing my support to the rebuilding of Lexington High School football.

My first step is to listen to the people already doing the work and learn what they actually need. After that, I'll help where it counts. Maybe that's getting more kids to come out or raising money. Maybe it's bringing alumni back around the program or helping the coaches with player development. I live almost 1,700 miles away, but distance doesn't cancel experience or relationships. I'm not looking for a coaching job or a title, and I'm not here to tell anyone how to do theirs.

To my fellow Lexington football alumni, think about what the program gave you. You don't have to live in town or write a check to help. Some of us have know-how or connections the program could use. Others just have a story a fifteen-year-old needs to hear.

Coach Tighe believed football could prepare young men for the rest of their lives. I'm one of the young men he was writing about. I won't credit football for everything that's gone right or wrong for me since I left Lexington, but the game, and mostly the people who made it possible, helped shape the man I became. What he gave me, I passed on to the kids I've coached, and some of them are passing it on now. That chain started on a football field in Lexington.

Whatever happens on November 26, this program's story isn't finished. To the young men still wearing the uniform, and to those thinking about putting it on, give yourselves the chance to build something you'll be proud of.

And to the adults helping them do it, I'm ready to lend a hand. You can reach me at [email protected] or 469.955.DUEY (3839).

Duane "Duey" Evans
Former Lexington High School Football Player and Volunteer Assistant Coach
The Performance Architect
Austin, Texas
www.theperformancearchitect.com

Click the link to watch this video from Coach Tighe's 94 Birthday Celebration