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Swampscott High football great and former Lynnfield High coach Bill Adams is being inducted into the Mass. State Football Coaches Hall of Fame.
By ANNE MARIE TOBIN
By anyone’s definition, Bill Adams is among the best football players ever to come out of the town of Swampscott.
After a successful college career at Holy Cross, during which he won the Varsity Club’s Davitt Award as the team’s best offensive lineman as a senior, Adams went onto play seven seasons in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills, and one of his teammates there was O.J. Simpson.
When he was finished with the NFL, Adams came back to the area to begin a 30-year career as a coach, as well as an athletic director, in Lynnfield. Sunday, at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westborough, Adams will be honored for his lengthy and varied contributions to high school football when he is inducted into the Massachusetts High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame at its 30th annual awards banquet.
He said he is humbled that the MHSFBCA chose him as one of six inductees for his year’s Hall of Fame induction.
“When they called me to tell me, I was speechless,” Adams said. “I thought maybe it was a mistake as I had no idea how they got to me. There are so many people out there who are more deserving than I, that’s all I know.”
Adams’ first year as head football coach in 1985, Adams led the Pioneers to a 9-1 record and a runner-up finish in the Cape Ann League, losing out to North Andover. The following year the Pioneers won CAL title and played in the Super Bowl. After that, it would be 23 years, 2009, before the Pioneers under first-year coach Neal Weidman would win another league title and 26 years, 2012, before the Pioneers would play for another Super Bowl championship.
For the record, the Pioneers lost that 1986 Super Bowl to a loaded Lincoln-Sudbury team.
When asked if he remembered the score, Adams’ response indicated he will never forget.
“It was 19-0,” he said. “They had two kids who went to play at Nebraska and eventually played professionally and another kid, perhaps their best player, who played at Dartmouth.
“But it was a great experience,” he said “Mike Lynch of Channel 5, whose father was my basketball coach came and taped us so the kids were on the news a couple of times that week, so it was just a fantastic week but the game just didn’t go our way.”
Earlier in that same season, the Pioneers came back from a large deficit to defeat Hamilton-Wenham, and that’s a game that carries just as strong a memory for Adams.
“(It was) a must-win game, and we were down 19-0 after the first quarter, then it started pouring, and I mean buckets it was coming down so hard,” he said. “We roared back and scored 27 unanswered points to win the game. If we didn’t win, we would not have gone to the Super Bowl and it was beyond me how we managed to win the thing.
“After the game, every kid on the team did a mudslide,” Adams said. “After they finished they were all yelling and cheering, so I did my one and only mudslide.”
Adams said the win over the Generals was just as much of a highlight as the week that led up to the Super Bowl.
“That year was incredibly memorable,” he said.
In 1994, Adams moved out of the classroom and became a co-athletic director with Weidman at Lynnfield High. He retired as athletic director in 2010, then served as interim athletic director at Georgetown Senior/Junior High School for one year. Since then, Adams has worked in Georgetown as a para-professional.
Adams played in the golden era of Big Blue football, from 1964-1967, for legendary coach Stan Bondelevitch. The Blue were undefeated his senior year, and runners up for the state Class B title, which, back then, were determined by a ratings and point system. He also starred for the basketball team under Dick Lynch, who was also the football team’s offensive coordinator.
Adams career at Holy Cross got off to a slow start. He couldn’t play varsity as a freshman because NCAA rules prohibited first-year students from competing at that level. Then, his sophomore season, one week after being named the starting guard, “our season was cancelled due to an outbreak of hepatitis,” Adams said. “We only played two games that season, but then played a full schedule my last two years and I started every game.”
Adams was selected in the seventh round, the 161st overall pick, of the 1972 NFL draft by the Miami Dolphins, but ended up in Buffalo.
For the Adams family, football is a family tradition. Adam’s older son Billy played for him at Lynnfield and at Northeastern; and his younger son, David, just finished freshman year on the Catholic University team.
Anne Marie Tobin can be reached at [email protected].
