DeFelice had a ball for 49 years

By Maureen Mullen

Item Sports Editor

SWAMPSCOTT — Order up a high school or college coach from central casting and chances are Frank DeFelice is what you would get. From the brim of the baseball hat that covers his close-cropped hair to the tip of his athletic shoes, DeFelice looks every bit the part. His frame lean and wiry, his face craggy and ruddy from decades spent stalking the sidelines.

He has coached football, basketball, baseball and track. He’s coached at Merrimack College, Bentley University, Endicott College and Boston College. He’s coached at Swampscott High, Lynnfield High, Hamilton-Wenham and Xaverian.

In 35 years coaching baseball at Swampscott his teams won 465 games. He was inducted into the Massachusetts Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2002. His first coaching job came was when he was in the service. A low-level enlisted man at the helm of a flag football team, he was “in charge of sergeants, colonels and first lieutenants,” he said, laughing.

Among the other athletes he’s coached are former NFL head coach Dick Jauron, Channel 5 sports anchor Mike Lynch, Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie and former NFL players Bill Adams, Stephen Boyd and Bill Romanowski. Ask him where he coached when, and he doesn’t answer with years. He lists names:

“Well, I was at BC for Flutie … I had Mike Lynch in high school…I had Dick Jauron when he was in high school.”

It all adds up to a lifetime of coaching.

But for the first time in 50 years, DeFelice, who is 74 -- “74 ½ as they say at the greyhound track,” he amends – was not on a sideline this fall. Instead, he was watching from the stands like so many of his contemporaries. He swears he doesn’t miss coaching.

“I enjoy watching games now,” he said. “I stay as long as I want. I went to an Endicott practice. But I had a dinner date with my wife, so I left. I have a little more freedom now.

“I discovered the fall – August, September, October, November. I’m not thinking about coaching. I told my wife I don’t want anyone to ask.”

Can we believe this from a man who insisted his wife make a prenuptial agreement?

“Yeah, I told her I’m going to be a football coach for the rest of my life. I hope,” he said, with a laugh. “And if she told me I couldn’t, it would be a deal breaker.”

It didn’t break the deal.

“And I was kind of thankful for that,” said Susan DeFelice, his wife of 46 years, about the agreement. “It’s worked out very well for us. And even him not coaching has worked out better than I thought.

“After 50 years of coaching, I said, ‘Oh, what am I going to do with him in the fall?’ But it has worked out pretty good.”

They were able to take a couple of trips this fall, take in a couple of BC games. Things they would not have been able to do in years past. And with a large extended family, including three grown children – Jimmy, who lives in Lynn, Paul, in Colorado, and Mary, who is in Wenham – they have more time for visiting now.

But it doesn’t diminish his decades of work.

Dick Lynch, Mike Lynch’s father, was a longtime baseball, football and basketball coach at Swampscott High, where he worked with DeFelice, and athletic director at Danvers High for 15 years. He’s seen his share of coaches.

“I’ve always felt that good coaching is three very important points,” said Dick Lynch. “One is discipline; two is enthusiasm; and three is knowledge. And he had all those things.

“If Frank said sit, they didn’t look for a chair. He was tough, but he was smart-tough. He knew when to be tough and when to pat them on the back.

“He just loved coaching and he still does. I told him he was going to die on the 50-yard line.”

Baseball was DeFelice’s initial passion. A Winthrop native, he earned a tryout with the Red Sox out of high school. But the scout watching knew DeFelice had a scholarship to Boston College to play football. His advice? Take the scholarship, kid.

“It broke my heart,” DeFelice said. But, he took the advice and the scholarship.

The academics didn’t agree with him at first. “I flunked out of BC and went into the service,” DeFelice said, which led to that first coaching job.

After two years in the service, he was back at BC, where he became a three-year starter in baseball and football. Graduating in 1965, he got his first high school coaching job but a substitute job in 1966 brought him to Swampscott, where he has been a fixture ever since.

“He’ll always be ‘The Coach,’” Jauron said.“When I had him he was really young in his coaching career. But he’s always been very, very committed to young people, very committed to helping them set a course that he believes in, that he believes is right, and that will help them through sports, after sports, and in anything else they do.”

Jauron, who had DeFelice as a coach in three sports at Swampscott, took many of those lessons into his own coaching career.

“He was a disciplinarian, certainly, a teacher, a good teacher and a man that clearly liked working with people, liked helping people, and likes sports, really likes sports,” Jauron said.

“I’m a firm believer that all of my experiences have taken something from him, and certainly I took a lot from playing for coach DeFelice.”

The coach could be intimidating to his young athletes. But that evolved – and mellowed – over the years.

“You respected him and you were a little bit afraid,” said Mike Lynch. “(But) some of the people that he was the hardest on are his best friends today. And those guys all get together with him every Saturday morning at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Vinnin Square. And now they give him the needle.

“He made an impact on a lot of peoples’ lives that is everlasting, and I’m in that category. I’m very thankful for the discipline he taught me and I’m very grateful for his leadership. He didn’t allow you to cut corners and take the easy way out. Every teenager would love to get out of wind sprints and he didn’t allow that. And as we go along later in life, you learn that there aren’t any shortcuts to success.”

No shortcuts, but the coach has now learned to look for different things in life. He replaced football with fall baseball this year. The Endicott baseball program is “an eyelash away from going to the nationals,” he said. He and Susan go to the Jewish Community Center in Marblehead to work out most mornings. And he has free time now that he never had before.

He’s enjoying this new phase of life.

“Definitely,” he said. “I’m very fortunate I have a good life and good wife.”

But he’s still The Coach.

“It’s a privilege to coach kids,” he said. “It really is. When people call me ‘Coach’ sometimes it’s because they forgot my name. But it makes me feel special to hear it.”

Maureen Mullen is the Item sports editor. She can be reached at mmullen@itemlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MaureenAMullen.

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