Sun Journal, Lewiston, Maine, Randy Whitehouse column

Oct. 17–Mt. Blue head coach Gary Parlin’s announcement to his team last week that he planned on retiring from coaching at the end of the season, and teaching at the end of the school year, wasn’t a big surprise. Parlin has hinted in recent years that he was pondering calling it a career.

“Hinted” probably isn’t a good word. Gary Parlin rarely hints. If he has something on his mind, he usually makes it known plainly. He’ll often couch it in some home-spun humor, but the point always gets across.

Doing that for 21 years as a head coach, especially a head coach who is regularly covered by two newspapers, is bound to ruffle some feathers. Parlin hasn’t been worried about that as long as he felt the end result was the best for his players or, in many cases, for high school football.

Parlin strikes a delicate balance of making frank assessments of his team after a poor performance without singling out or embarrassing players. He’s more likely to call himself out for a bad play call or strategy and, in the instances when it didn’t backfire, credit one of his talented players for bailing him out.

And Parlin, for all of his skill in handling the media, always made his players the story. In good or bad times, he advocated for his Cougars, not just as football players, but as young men.

In our business, coaches are always telling us what great kids their players are, how hard they work on and off the field, how exemplary their conduct is, how good they are in school, how they lead their peers.

Parlin regularly went out of his way to let us know how well-rounded his players were as people. He was just as eager to tell us about a player’s hobbies as his practice habits. There have been countless examples of this through the years, but one most recent example sums it up, I think.

A standard post-game question about Zak Kendall’s role on last year’s state championship team as a game-changing defensive end, tight end and senior leader led Parlin to mention how Kendall is also a thoughtful young man and talented musician with a local gig.

I did a feature on Kendall focusing on his on- and off-field talents, and Mt. Blue fans and readers got an insight into someone they normally would have only thought of in a helmet and shoulder pads.

We eat that stuff up in the media, of course. Parlin has been as fun to cover as any coach I’ve encountered. The tendency in the media when a coach is fun to cover and gives us that kind of fodder is to prop him up (and tear down the ones who aren’t fun to cover, right Coach Belichick?). I know, the media has an agenda. Shocking stuff.

Parlin’s record needs no embellishment — 21 years as head coach, 129 wins, two state championship game appearances (one in Class A, one in Class B), and the Cougars’ first gold ball in 32 years. He’s coached several Fitzpatrick Trophy nominees and finalists (including son Cole), one winner (Dustin Ireland in 1996) and countless conference all-stars and all-state players.

We are blessed to have numerous coaches in this state with similarly impressive resumes. What sets Parlin apart, why he will be missed when he does hang up his headset, is that he’s never been afraid to take on the state’s high school football establishment or think outside the box.

When nearly everyone else was sticking with the tried-and-true three-yards-and-a-cloud of dust offenses of the 1970s, he was the first in the state to implement a spread offense, a decade before it started to catch on statewide. He was as one of the earliest and most vocal advocates for a four-class system. Last year, he railed against the Fitzpatrick Trophy committee that snubbed quarterback Jordan Whitney. And he didn’t just do it through the media, either. He called committee chairman Jack Dawson personally in search of an explanation.

He’s fiercely loyal to his players, his assistant coaches (two of whom, Craig Collins and Pete Franchetti, have been with him for nearly two decades), his school and his predecessor and mentor at Mt. Blue, the great Ray Caldwell. He espouses Mt. Blue football tradition without turning it into mythology, making players feel a part of it with a simple ritual like touching the Caldwell Field sign after a home game or a two-year-long logistics experiment.

When the Cougars had to take their recent sabbatical from Caldwell Field for the high school’s renovation and play their home games at Kemp Field, a youth sports complex in a cow pasture a couple of miles from the school, he went out of his way to credit volunteers for making it not just a suitable home field, but a unique venue the players and community could take pride in. Then he left it up to the players to follow through on the commitment the community had made.

Parlin wouldn’t allow the inconveniences — the daily bus trips for practices and games, the lack of an on-site locker room — to derail one of the most talented teams to ever come through Farmington. The Cougars only lost once at Kemp, to an equally-talented and well-coached Leavitt team. That had a lot to do with the talent, of course, but it was clear the players took pride in making their old rec field a place where champions were born. Taking their queue from their coach, they saw it as an opportunity, and they obviously made the most of it.

That was the one thing that’s always struck me watching Mt. Blue players over the 14 years I’ve covered them — their accountability. The coaches hold them accountable, the players hold each other accountable and, above all else, hold themselves accountable.

It hasn’t always translated into winning seasons, and it hasn’t always translated into teams that were full of model sportsmen. After all, we’re talking about teenagers.

But it is a big reason why, when they were in Class A playing schools with enrollments that dwarfed theirs, the Cougars were able to remain competitive and even win a regional title in 2005.

It has also made the Mt. Blue football program one of the standards by which other programs in the state measure themselves. And why shouldn’t they? Who wouldn’t want to have a football program that takes its obligation of representing its school and community seriously but also knows the whole point of high school football is for kids to have fun, play hard and learn some things about themselves and life along the way?

Parlin helped Caldwell cultivate that environment at Mt.Blue as an assistant coach for 15 years, then fostered it, with the help of his assistants, for the next 21.

Assuming the Cougars make the playoffs, that means Parlin will be around for at least three more weeks. Hopefully, the people of Farmington and RSD 9 give him more than just a hint of their gratitude.