LYNN — Matt Durgin had a special relationship with his father.
Hal Durgin was still alive when his son became the head football coach at Lynn Classical in 1997. Every time Classical played, the son would drive to the bright red house on Cedar Street and go over the game with his father, play by play.
Durgin took over a program that was in transition, and the first year was a challenge. But as the years progressed, so did the team — until it became one of the premier programs in the area, and Durgin’s star was clearly on the rise.
Hal Durgin was only 66 when he died in 2001, only two years into his son’s stint at the school they both loved so much. He was a member of the Classical Hall of Fame, having been a teacher and a coach.
Saturday night at the Nahant Country Club, the son will take his place next to his late father and be inducted into the Hall of Fame along with 15 others.
“This is special,” Matt Durgin said. “My name and his name will be there together. This was a place he loved, and it’s a place I love. He went to this school, taught here, played here.”
Durgin graduated from Classical in 1984, playing his football for Bill Wise for three years and Dick Cerone during his final season. He played in a transformative era, having seen the end of Wise’s highly successful tenure with the Rams (two Super Bowl titles and a third appearance), yet was a junior at the outset of a second era — that of Tim Frager, the electrifying running back who burst on the scene as a ninth-grader (in the days when Classical was a three-year school) and scored five touchdowns against Lynn English on Thanksgiving.
“I have to give credit to Billy,” Durgin said. “I was a ballboy from the time I was 10 years old. The guys on that team that won in 1976 were like the Green Bay Packers to me.”
Durgin grew up in a sports-oriented family. His oldest brother Michael played football at St. John’s Prep and Harvard, Matt went to the University of Rhode Island, his brother Mark was an athlete, and both Maura (Scully) and Marcy (Cronin) played soccer and then coached the sport. Only his late sister Michele never took to it, and used to tell everyone she was forced to learn it just so she could understand it when she went to see Matt’s teams play (“three plays, 10 yards,” she’d say).
He began accompanying his father to Classical football games when he was still a boy, and values the lessons the game taught him later on.
“I enjoyed playing for Coach Wise,” he said. “He left a great impression on me. He was intense, but he was also a good teacher.”
After he cycled out of the game, he chose coaching for a simple reason: “the next-best thing to playing football is to be a part of it,” he said.
As a coach, Durgin developed the reputation of being able to take players, fit them into positions where they could excel, and teach them what to do. It worked. The only thing preventing Classical from going to at least two more Super Bowls was Gloucester. In those years, especially in 2007 (when Gloucester rallied from a three-touchdown deficit at spanking-new Manning Field to win the game), the Fishermen were just a play or two better. Later, as coach at St. Mary’s, the Spartans advanced to high school Super Bowls in 2012 and 2016.
He certainly appreciates those accomplishments. But he said they never drove him as a coach, and he doesn’t measure his success by them now.
“If I see Bill Wise today, it’s always ‘Coach Wise,'” Durgin said. “It isn’t anything else. And that’s what I love. I love hearing them call me ‘coach.’
“When I see a kid who is successful, and happy, and a good man, that makes me most happy,” Durgin said. “One of my former players (Brendan Crighton, who will also be inducted Saturday) is a state senator. That makes me happy.”
Finally, Durgin understands and appreciates the help he’s had along the way.
“For me, whenever anything good has ever happened, it’s always been because I had help. I’ve had great assistants, and most of all great kids. Nothing would have happened without them.”
