MARBLEHEAD — The central theme that was woven between the nostalgia and the camaraderie at Monday night’s Swampscott-Marblehead Gridiron Club Old-Timers Dinner at the Gerry 5 was a serious message.
Neither coach is crazy about the three-tiered Northeastern Conference. And neither is Dan Bauer, the former Beverly coach and present Marblehead principal, who was the main speaker.
“Let’s get back to the old Northeastern Conference,” said Swampscott’s Bobby Serino, whose Big Blue went 7-3 in one of its most successful seasons in a decade.
“Look at it this way. If Salem had beaten Lynn English last month, we could have had a three-way tie in a five-team league,” Serino said. “That’s not a league champion. English ended up winning the game (and was the sole champion in the league’s third tier), but still, let’s go back to the old league.”
Serino was just getting warmed up. He’s also not a fan of the current playoff system that has all-but eliminated Thanksgiving games as factors in the postseason picture.
“A lot of people say Thanksgiving doesn’t matter,” Serino said. “Well, ask any of our players if Thanksgiving matters. Ask any of Marblehead’s kids if Thanksgiving matters. It matters.”
Marblehead coach Jim Rudloff agrees with Serino.
“It’s a shame what they’ve done,” said Rudloff, whose Magicians are 9-1 coming into Thanksgiving and winners in their division of the NEC.
“You have three of everything. You can’t say ‘there’s our all-conference quarterback,’ or “there’s our coach of the year. There’s three of this, and three of that.
“I remember hearing, a few years ago, of a team in the league that was the champion of the Northeastern Conference. I said, ‘hey, wait a minute. We won the Northeastern Conference … oh, that was the other Northeastern Conference.”
Bauer described the circuitous route he took to get from his native Missouri to Marblehead, which included a college education at the University Pennsylvania (“no way would I get in today”), to coaching at Penn State, then Tennessee, then Tufts, and finally Beverly and Marblehead.
“That’s the short version,” said Bauer. “But what I learned is that football matters. Football is important. It changes lives, and it makes people better. Thanksgiving matters. If there’s one game up here that everyone wants to play in, it’s Thanksgiving.”
Yet, said Bauer, in a career of largely positive experiences during his 10-plus year tenure at Beverly, which involved two Super Bowl victories, “the two lowest moments were losses on Thanksgiving,” he said.
The Monsignor John P. Carroll Community Service Award, given in alternate years to a person from Swampscott and Marblehead, was presented to Todd Norman, a youth baseball and football coach in Marblehead.
“This gets me,” said Norman. “I got into coaching not for me kids, but because of my kids. I’m honored by this.”
Msgr. Carroll, who died in 1998, was the longtime pastor of St. John the Evangelist Church in Swampscott.
