GREENFIELD — Today, as he’s done for the past 56 autumns, Al Dean will leave home and drive to Veterans Field. He’ll meet with Greenfield High School football coach Mike Kuchieski and they will brainstorm over how to prepare for a game at Mahar.
“Al’s an immense help,” said Kuchieski. “He’s a guru on defense. He’s intelligent with the game plan, works a lot with film and has a plan for all the kids. He’s a huge reason we’ve been relatively successful over his time here.”
Dean was 23 years old and a stranger in town when he began coaching. Born in Norwood and raised in Westwood, he graduated from UMass in 1968. “My roommate at UMass landed an accounting job at Millers Falls Tool, and he told me Greenfield was looking for teachers.”
He applied, got the job and taught history at the middle school. It was a busy time in his personal life. He met a nursing student named Elaine West and they were wed in the spring of ’69, and he heard that Athletic Director Ralph Collins needed someone to coach the freshman baseball team.
“I asked Ralph if I could coach the team and he said yes, if I coached seventh and eighth grade football. I warned him I’d been a decent baseball player but a lousy football player,” he recalled.
Thus began a teaching and coaching career that’s lasted almost six decades. He retired from the classroom in 2021, but they’ll need a straitjacket to get him off the football field.
Not quite, but we’ll get to that later.
Greenfield was bustling in those days. Shopping malls were only a gleam in developers’ eyes and downtown businesses thrived. Cops were at every crosswalk at Christmastime, moviegoers had a choice of three theaters and on blustery Saturday afternoons in the fall football was king.
Student-athletes dreaming of varsity letters for mothers to sew on jackets had to survive a gauntlet from junior high school to freshman football, junior varsity and varsity. “Four teams, and now we have one,” said Dean. “But we graduated 300 seniors in 1969 and last year we graduated 79.”
A coaching trilogy
Dean joined the varsity coaching staff in 1981 alongside established and respected assistant coaches like Tom Suchanek, Rod Hochrein and Glenn Wilson.
His first head coach was Bill Budness, followed by Mike Duprey and Kuchieski.
“I was incredibly fortunate to have three great coaches. I learned more from Bill Budness in a week than anything I’d previously known or thought I knew,” he said. “The first time we scouted together he told me exactly what our opponent was going to do after watching three plays.”
A Chicopee native, Budness starred at Boston University and played linebacker for seven seasons with the Oakland Raiders. “He was about the nicest guy you could imagine,” Dean said of Budness, who died in 2018 at age 74.
“If Bill was a great football mind, then Mike was a great motivator,” Dean said. “In 1995 we had a game against the New London Whalers. Mike got a blowup Dolphin — he couldn’t find a whale — and he hung it up in the locker room. He got (track coach) Pete Conway to give him a javelin and he fired the javelin into the dolphin. The kids loved it and we won the game.”
Kuchieski has coached the Green Wave since 2004, a time when dwindling enrollments, student apathy and other factors have threatened the existence of school sports everywhere. “Times have changed,” he said. “Sports isn’t as important as it was when we lived for the game and played three-on-three and backyard wiffle ball. There’s not a lot of that anymore, but we coach them the same. We still hold kids accountable.”
Indeed, Dean sees Kuchieski as more than a coach or role model. “Mike’s wonderful working with kids. A lot of them are coming from hard situations. The city has changed and our population has changed and kids today need more support. Kuch (pronounced Kutch) tries to impress the things you need to learn about life that goes beyond football.”
“We’re mental health coaches as much as football coaches,” Kuchieski agreed. “I think that’s true for coaches in all sports. We’re there for them.”
Farewell to a rivalry
On Nov. 22, 2018, Greenfield beat Turners Falls High School, 40-38, in the annual Thanksgiving Day game. A few months later, Turners Falls announced it was suspending its football program, thus ending the 92-year rivalry.
“It’s a huge loss,” said Dean. “Having a turkey day game against a rival meant so much with crowds in the thousands. When you went on the field, you knew it was special.
“If we were having a bad year, we could always tell the kids you’ve gotta keep working, we’ve gotta keep getting better. Beating Turners Falls would save a losing season.”
Greenfield, like Turners Falls, has struggled to find players. “Every year it’s touch-and-go,” said Kuchieski. “We’ve got Greenfield, Mohawk, Turners Falls and Pioneer we’re drawing from and we only have 30 players.”
He also has the Greenfield Bulldogs who play at three age levels in the Suburban Amateur Football League. “The Bulldogs program is really going to help us,” Kuchieski said. “Jeff Bengston does a great job so I think we’ll be OK in a few years.”
Best of the best
Football is like a watch that relies on mainsprings and balance wheels to function, but while synchronicity is crucial, so said Dean is the esprit de corps. “When Dwight Eisenhower was asked who he wanted to lead on D-Day he said, ‘I want soldiers who played football at West Point. They know what to do when adversity strikes.’
“I’ve coached freshman baseball and girls basketball but baseball is an individual sport played as a team. Basketball you have a good point guard and a big kid and you know you’re going to be good. Football, the game is special. You can’t have one or two to be good.”
Asked to name the best GHS football player since 1969, Dean called it a tossup between Kenny Suhl and Peter Bergeron. “Kenny had a real knack for playing the game. He wasn’t imposing but he had a great football mind. He’d tell us what we were doing wrong. I’d say, ‘Mike, he’s gonna drive you crazy but if you give him a little rope, he’ll make you happy.”
Suhl played for Mark Whipple at the University of New Haven and in 2012 he was inducted into the Chargers’ Hall of Fame. Bergeron rushed for almost 3,000 yards his last two years but opted to play baseball and spent parts of five seasons with the Montreal Expos.
“He picked off a pass against New London and took it down the sideline. They had the state champion in the 100-yard dash and he couldn’t get close to Peter. The kid was like, what’s going on here?”
There were others. Josh Mason broke the rushing record at Amherst College and David Douvadjian set the state record for points scored. More recently Zach Bartak won the Dagenais Award as the best schoolboy football player in western Massachusetts.
Thanks for the memories
Whenever he has trouble falling asleep, Dean thinks back on moments like 1989 when the Wave needed a late touchdown to beat Northampton. “We’re both undefeated, they’d scored 288 points and given up 14. The coach’s son Jason Tudryn was at quarterback. Andy Pelis and Pablo Rodriguez were the running backs.
“The call in the huddle was a post corner, halfback slideout to Alex Siano, but Alex was covered and Keith “Pigeon” Poirier, who caught about one of every five passes in practice, caught it from Brody (Conant).
The Blue Devils got the ball back in the waning seconds and Tudryn handed off to Pelis. “Kyle Phelps stuffed him at the line of scrimmage. There was nothing better, what a great feeling.”
The 1979 Super Bowl team quarterbacked by Bill Decker “had maybe the best offensive line ever,” said Dean, referring to tackles Donald Day and Mike Grant, tight end Whitey Oles, center Doug Dobias and guards Kevin Washer and Alan Clapp.
“Doug ended up flying airplanes in the Navy. Bill Decker’s now the baseball coach at Harvard.”
Life’s fourth quarter
“Obviously it’s been a pleasure,” said Dean. “Coaching was a good way to balance what I did in the classroom. Few days go by I don’t run into someone in the grocery store who I knew when he was 5-11, 160 pounds who’s now 5-11, 260 with a beard.”
When the season ends, Al and Elaine will travel to Florida where they have a condo in Naples.
“Getting much pressure from the wife?” I asked. “Yes, I’m afraid so,” he replied. “She gave up many things she would have liked to do with me so that I could do something I loved.”
This isn’t his last season, at least he won’t say it and Mike Kuchieski hopes not. “Al’s deserving of a lot more than a story. He’s an amazing man and coaching with him has been an absolute joy.”