Former Classical grid coach Durgin to take reins of St. Mary’s program

LYNN – This goes into the books as a shorter retirement than Joe Torre’s.Matt Durgin, who stepped down as the football coach at Lynn Classical in April, will be back on the sidelines in September. Only it won’t be with the Rams. It’ll be with St. Mary’s – a school where he has many family connections, from uncles to cousins to siblings to offspring.Durgin, who coached his teams to a 77-41 (.652) record in 11 seasons (10 of them with Classical, one with Malden Catholic in 2004), retired because his two daughters were of junior high age, and he wanted to make sure he could spend quality time with them. And even though he was reticent about taking the St. Mary’s job – made vacant after Jeff Smith resigned to become the assistant principal at Malden Catholic – he had to admit, in the end, that the idea of coaching there fit in very well with his family.One daughter (Molly) will be an eighth grader this fall, while another (Mattie) is entering the seventh grade.More than that, though, he doesn’t have to look far to find family. His two sisters are there, Michele as dean of discipline, and Marcy as an English teacher. His uncle, Walter, is a volunteer; and the athletic director, Jeff Newhall, is his cousin, and a former assistant at Classical.”I am probably just as surprised as anyone that this happened at this point,” Durgin said. “I was certainly not looking for another job so soon. When Jeff spoke to me, my first reaction was, ‘I wouldn’t do it,’ but he convinced me to think it over.”He talked it over with his wife, Belinda, but was still reluctant. In the interim, he’d already turned down an offer to be an assistant coach.Then he thought about it some more. And the more he did, the more he realized that if he were to ever return to coaching, St. Mary’s would be the ideal situation for him. And he concluded that there was no time like the present.”This is a perfect situation for me,” he said. “The football coach really needs to spend a lot of time at the school in the off-season. I can do that, and watch my daughters’ games and practices at the same time. I feel extremely fortunate to have that opportunity, and I know I would have regretted not taking advantage of it.”Nobody could be happier about this development than Newhall, who was facing the prospect of being extremely under the gun to find a coach in time to get the players going during the summer. It did not promise to be an easy task.”Matt is an outstanding football coach,” Newhall said. “His teams are excellent fundamentally, and well-disciplined. Most importantly, he has helped countless players get into college. He is the total package.”There were similar sighs of relief up and down the St. Mary’s administration.”We are thrilled to have gotten a coach the caliber of Matt Durgin,” said Ray Bastarache, head of school, who had pushed to ask Durgin to take the job from the moment Smith announced his resignation.Bastarache is the former deputy superintendent of Lynn schools, and, he said, “I saw firsthand what a positive influence he had in the lives of his players at Classical and we know he will have the same impact at St. Mary’s.”Principal Carl DiMaiti is just grateful there was such familial pull for Durgin toward the school.”I don’t think we’d have been able to get him otherwise,” DiMaiti said.After years of struggling, first in the Catholic Central League and then in the Commonwealth Conference, St. Mary’s, under Mike Stellato, pulled the program together and won a Division 3A Super Bowl in 2005. Stellato left after that season, and the Spartans jumped from the smaller division of the CCL to the larger one ? and struggled under Smith for two seasons.In perhaps the final irony of Durgin’s hiring, his Spartans will face his old team, Classical, in the season’s opener Sept. 11 at Manning Field.