To Coach Grogan: A Memoriam

By Joe Pace

I was on my way to practice when I heard that Coach Grogan .

It doesn’t sound quite right, does it? To those of us who knew him and ran for his track teams in Exeter or Portsmouth, the idea of Coach doing anything as subtle or inconspicuous as “passing away” just doesn’t fit. “Stomped away” perhaps, grumbling about students jumping the fence at the PEA track, or having to give instructions more than once.  Grumbling, but with a smile that only that bristly white-and-black beard could hide.

Mike Grogan – no, Coach Grogan, even now – was many things during his time: a father, a farmer, a talented painter, and a loving husband. I smile to think of Ma Grogan waiting for him with a fresh batch of her homemade rolls.

But he was a Coach, our Coach, and that’s how so many of us will remember him.

And what memories. How many of us, on hearing this sad news, closed our eyes and immediately conjured the same image – a tall, burly man wearing a heavy brown full-length coat regardless of the April sun. Boots, of whatever size he declared them to be that afternoon, as he threatened to plant them in the behind of any lagging runners. Some abomination of a hat, one of the two types he preferred, either a trucker-style official’s hat from some long-forgotten track meet or an orange-brown thing looking like nothing so much as a crumpled traffic cone.

We all have our indelible memories. For me, the quintessential Coach Grogan manifests at midnight on a November Friday in either 1991 or 92, way up where the New Hampshire and Vermont border meets Canada.

The cross-country teams from Portsmouth and Exeter (with a football interloper or two) gets off a couple of buses, ready to set off on the 202-mile weekend relay to the beach. In the dark and cold, Coach strides purposefully into the middle of the street, cups hands to his mouth and lets loose with a strangled, ululating scream. He declares this to be his moose call. And we believe him.

We always believed him. When he told you to dip your shoulder around a curve or relax your arms, you believed him, because he was right. When he showed you how to high jump, or attack the hurdles, or pole vault, you believed him because he had seen it all before.

You even believed him when he told you his grandmother could run faster than you, even though she’d been buried for twenty years.  This fall, training for my first marathon, there was more than one occasion when I’d catch myself carrying my shoulders too tight, and I’d hear his voice, yelling at me to stop being “a little mechanical man."

Twenty years later, and he was still coaching me. He was a unique and outsized character, and we remember that with a laugh, but he was not a caricature. He was an outstanding teacher and coach, and that, more than any moose call or ancient green Buick was the heart of Coach Grogan, and that is why his passing (stomping) is so bittersweet for so many of us.

I was headed for practice when I heard, off to work with a 7th- and 8th-grade girls basketball team. Make that “grills” basketball team. I’m sure the idea of any of us as coaches would make him laugh – and make him proud. We’ll do the best we can, Coach.

After all, that’s what you taught us to do.

Joe Pace is a former Exeter selectman and former University of New Hampshire student body president.