Former high school math teacher Don Gordon, two weeks from his 68th birthday, is sort of enjoying retirement these days … if you want to call it retirement.
You see, Gordon, caught Tuesday morning out in his windy, upper Greenfield Meadows front yard blowing leaves with his backpack Echo blower — attired in a “Frontier Wrestling” sweatshirt and a “Redhawks” baseball lid — is, in fact, far from retired. Maybe, just maybe, he was out doing yard work just to kill the anxiety leading up to Friday night’s much-anticipated game.
What game, you ask?
Well, coming down the stretch of this, his fourth season as Frontier Regional School’s head football coach, he’s facing his biggest game yet Friday night in South Deerfield, where his Red Hawks (5-1 overall, 3-1 IL North) will host unbeaten Turners Falls High School (7-0, 4-0) in a game that could, if the host Hawks and Athol High School both win, throw the Intercounty League North race and the Western Massachusetts postseason picture into utter chaos on the final week of the regular season.
So, no, Don Gordon really isn’t locked into that relaxed, retired, chill mode this week, or most fall weeks, for that matter. He and his team are all keyed up for a visit from the Powertown Indians, hoping to knock them from the unbeaten ranks while wiping out the sting of the Red Hawks’ loss two weeks ago at Athol, when the Red Raiders scored 16 fourth-quarter points to pull out an improbable a 16-12 upset win that handed high-scoring Frontier its first and only loss.
“We had the ball inside the 20 three times in that game and came away without a point,” lamented Gordon, playing that crucial loss back in his head Tuesday. “I think in Friday’s game both teams will score points, but in the end, it’ll come down to defense. The team that makes the most stops will win.”
Oh, really? Hmmmmm? What else is new? Aren’t big football games at any level typically won by defenses?
But enough of that discussion about the game itself, which will be thoroughly dissected in Friday’s paper, previewing a clash that has both towns on the edge of their seats, chatting it up in coffee shops and taverns and wherever else folks congregate and blab. They call it pregame buzz, and there’s more than enough to go around in the towns of the Frontier Regional and Gill-Montague school districts. So today, let’s take a look at Gordon, at the man calling the shots for Frontier, and the long, winding circuitous path he took to his head-coaching job.
Some may have viewed Gordon as an unlikely successor to Scott Dredge, who left his head football coaching duties after the 2012 season to take over as Frontier’s assistant principal in 2013. Despite serving as an assistant football coach for many years at many schools — beginning in 1971, fresh out of Springfield College and toiling in its graduate program, under Lancers coach Stan Ursprung — Gordon was more widely recognized around South Deerfield as the founder and longtime coach of the successful Frontier wrestling program. That program was founded in 1974, Gordon’s first year at Frontier, following brief stops at Longmeadow, Springfield Commerce and Springfield Trade. Gordon, a 1966 graduate of Kearney (N.J.) High School, had wrestled and played football (offensive line) in high school before moving to Springfield College and wrestling for the Chiefs at 177 pounds.
So, yes, wrestling was indeed his focus fresh out of college, but he also had football in his blood, and in the fall of 1982 he jumped in as a Frontier assistant coach under the late Myron Rokoszak and his chief assistant Dick Howe after wandering off to Keane (N.H.) High School for the 1980-81 school year due to threatened proposition 2½ cuts at Frontier. When not on the sidelines as a Frontier varsity assistant, Gordon was coaching his junior high, then middle school teams on Monday afternoons, a trend that continued right through his years under Dredge, who, incidentally, played for him in middle school.
So, when Dredge bailed out to assume his conflicting assistant-principal duties, Gordon, by then a retired teacher, was Johnny on the spot, applying for the job and getting hired as the new Frontier football coach in 2013. Since then, except for yea one, his Red Hawks have been in the hunt annually, recently posting a 66-28 win that all longtime Frontier observers queried agreed unanimously is the single-game record for points scored by a Frontier football team.
“To be honest,” Gordon admitted Tuesday morning, “I never thought I’d be a head coach. But the kids that were playing varsity as well as others moving up to that level were all my middle-school kids. They were good kids, good players and I felt like we worked well together, so I applied.”
And at this point, there’s no end in sight on the immediate horizon. “I plan to stick around at least a couple more years,” he said. “I’ll keep going as long as it’s still fun. I have a great group of freshman, so the future’s bright.”
But for now, it’s all about Friday night in South Deerfield, where his Red Hawks will try to derail the three-time defending champs in a game that’s squarely in the crosshairs of football fans throughout Franklin County, if not the entire Happy Valley. A Turners Falls win will settle down the postseason scenario into a pretty simple formula, but a win by the host Hawks will muddy the picture considerably.
It should be an entertaining game between teams that have developed attitude for each other, and a Frontier coach who’s shown he doesn’t like to take his foot off the gas pedal.
“Hey, the kids practice all week and they want to play when the game arrives,” he said. “Can you blame them?”
And, of yeah, a little warning before we close. If you get talking to Gordon about his coaching career, don’t make the mistake of describing him as a wrestling coach dabbling in football coaching.
“Dabbling?” he’ll snap with fire in his competitive New Jersey eyes. “We’re not dabbling. We’re good.”
We’ll find out how good Friday night under the lights in South Deerfield.
With predictions and boasts flying around like windswept leaves in these days leading up to the game, it ought to draw a bang-up, boisterous crowd. Be there, or be square.