Greetings LHS’77 classmates. I can’t believe it’s been 48 years since high school!  Whenever I get to reminisce with old friends and classmates it feels like stepping back to 1977.

It’s probably no surprise to many of you that sports played a big role in my life in high school, but it also informed many of my decisions after high school.  I accepted a lacrosse scholarship to the University of Connecticut and got my degree in education in 1980.  I had a great career playing at UConn and I was honored to be named to the ECAC all-conference team, played in the East-West College All-Star game and was invited to play in the North-South game. Unfortunately, I was injured in the East-West game and couldn’t participate in the N-S game. 

But by far, the best and most important thing that happened to me at UConn was meeting my future wife and life partner, Carol. Together, we raised three wonderful children who we are very proud of and who are now making a positive difference in their worlds. Our oldest daughter Erin and her husband Will live in San Francisco (where she was born), our middle son Kevin (also born in SF), and his wife Meg live in Boston and our youngest son Shawn (born in Massachusetts) is living in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

My post college life and work experiences might be more varied than most people I know.  I started out as a high school teacher and coach. My first teaching job was at Verona High School and I coached sophomore football back at LHS with Dave Patterson and varsity lacrosse with Jake at LHS.  I moved on from Verona to teach at Mount Olive High School in Flanders, New Jersey where for the next two years I coached football and ice hockey for the Marauders.  I was fortunate to have a great group of hockey players that took us to the New Jersey state semi-finals in 1982 before losing to Christian Brothers Academy in triple overtime.  What a game!  After the season, I was named the New Jersey High School “Ice Hockey Coach of the Year”! That year, I also was an assistant lacrosse coach at Drew University in Madison. I had to leave the LHS program but it was the natural move since my aspiration always was to be a college coach.  

Over the next several years I had some great coaching mentors and my career took me from New Jersey to Virginia to California. Carol and I were married in May of 1986 while I was coaching football and lacrosse at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), and moved to a little rental house in Lexington, Virginia. Carol really took a leap of faith with my selection of a place to live without her ever seeing it!  Fortunately, I made a good decision, and she loved it.  Moving to South Virginia was like moving into a time warp. It was a much slower paced lifestyle. The military college lifestyle was not what my college experience was like in any sense. At the time, VMI and Washington & Lee (W&L) were both in Lexington and both were all male universities.  I witnessed what I can only describe as a unique weekly migration of women’s college co-eds traveling into Lexington every weekend for W&L frat parties and southern ‘cotillions’.  It was quite a scene.  While at VMI,  I rappelled from a helicopter, shot M16’s, drove a tank and witnessed the most bizarre class ritual of my life when the freshman class, called “rats”, were put through a 24-hour period of intense workouts, no sleep, for a test of comradery called ‘break out’ where every single freshman cadet had to ultimately cross a mud filled 20 foot wide trench and reach the top of the hill to be elevated to a full-fledged member of VMI corp of cadets.  On the other side of the trench were every upper-class cadet trying to prevent them from making it to the top. It was a crazy sight to watch.   

I learned so much about what it takes to coach a team and about people and motivation from my mentors. I spent a week at University of Minnesota to learn the option offense from Lou Holtz, the legendary coach from Notre Dame, who was a pioneer of that offense, and his staff. Lou was also a great motivator and I carried those lessons with me throughout my life. I also learned a valuable life lesson from my coaching colleagues who from the start told me to save enough money to live on for one to two years because I would get fired at some point.  That was the stark reality of college sports.  Win or be gone.  As the smallest Division-1 college in the country at the time, we were playing on borrowed time against the likes of UNC, VA Tech, Marshall, Army, etc. Well, after three years it finally happened. We all got fired!  I was the only fortunate one on the staff in that I was also the head lacrosse coach and was retained in that role and was kind of forced onto the new football staff to keep me on as an assistant.  That year was the turning point for me and made me think about moving on from coaching. 

While coaching at VMI, I was honored to be inducted into the LHS Big L Club Hall of Fame. At my induction ceremony I reconnected with Beth Imgrund McKenna who told me her husband’s grandfather also coached at VMI!  What a small world.

Carol and I eventually made our way to the Bay Area of California where I finally ended my professional coaching career as the realization of what a coaches life meant to a family hit me – constant moves, crazy working hours and little earnings, and so I began my technology sales career.  

We lived in the Bay Area through all the California seasons: Rainy, Fire, Earthquake and Drought!  Yes, we were there during the earthquake of 1989, the fires in the Oakland hills, and drought season when we taught the kids that when going to the toilet just remember, “if its yellow, let it mellow, if its brown flush it down”!  I moved into a variety of sales roles with technology companies and have now been selling mostly electronic power solutions for military/aerospace, medical and industrial original equipment manufacturing customers for the past 25 years.  In these roles I was fortunate to have traveled to most of the world, made some great friends and saw sights I had never dreamed of seeing.  

My most enjoyable sales role was with a company that developed digital video editing systems for sports teams to conduct self and opponent scouting based on broadcast digital video production tools.  This combined my knowledge of coaching with my technical sales experience, so it was a great fit. My customer base was the NFL, NBA and NCAA.  Traditionally, coaches used film, then moved to VHS tapes to evaluate and grade games.  My job was to introduce and sell them on making the move to digital video married to a fiber networked database to give them a faster, easily accessible video capability.  I also played a lot of golf with coaches, watched hours of video with them, went to an NFL game most weeks, went to NCAA Men’s and Women’s basketball tournaments and NBA games and watched NHL games from the team bench.  Being right on top of the action was great fun.  I visited almost every NCAA division 1 university and drove a lot of miles to do it.

A lot of the coaches were larger than life characters and provided fodder for stories to be told around a fire pit with a bourbon late at night.  At the time many of these NFL coaches did not use computers.  Some had no idea how to use a mouse to drive and select the video clips the system prepared for them. For example, after I explained to Mike Ditka that he could call up video of any situation just by using the mouse to move his cursor to a video clip he wanted to watch. It was then priceless to see him with a 10” long cigar in his mouth and his huge-brimmed Panama hat holding a mouse in the air and wave it at the computer screen and when he didn’t get the cursor to move looked at me and scowled ‘now what tough guy’?  Or when during a system training session with the Patriots, we had to take a break because the mattresses for the coaches offices had arrived and needed to be set up!  Or, being woken up by my phone ringing at 4 AM to hear Pete Carroll screaming at me to come and get the system, in San Francisco by the way, because it never works when he needs it.  He broke the fiber optic cable to the video storage for the umpteenth time by rolling his chair over it again and again but he railed at me, nonetheless. We did find those few younger coaches like John Gruden, Andy Reid, Sean Payton who were very into the technology and became advocates helping us to penetrate the NFL ‘old guard’.  We eventually sold the company and technology and after a year of transition to the new company team, we were released from our no compete clauses and able to move on. 

I continued to stay involved with lacrosse in many local, regional and national roles over the years as the President of the non-profit New Hampshire Lacrosse Foundation, as a youth coach, youth and high school official and content creator and trainer for US Lacrosse’s national coaching educational program.  I played on club lacrosse circuit up until my early 50’s and felt like I still ‘had it’ even competing with much younger guys.  That is until my boys came to watch a game near the end of my career.  I got knocked down chasing a ground ball and fell ‘ass over tea-kettle’. When I got up, I saw them standing on the sideline laughing at me.  I asked if they thought it was funny to see me sprawled on the ground.  They said no, it was much funnier to see me try to get up!!  That was the end of my 35-year lacrosse playing experiment.

Today, Carol and I are living full-time in York Beach, Maine with our hound, Daisy.  Waking up to the view of the ‘famous’ Nubble Lighthouse, the sound of the ocean and having just a short walk to the beach is more than I could have ever asked for.   Carol is from a large family of nine kids and two of her sisters, one of her brothers and a cousin and their families all live in town too, so it makes for a lot of fun family gatherings at the beach and lots of happy hours.  

I love the fact that my boys are pretty local to us. We get to spend lots of time golfing, sitting on the beach, kayaking, going to sporting events, getting them to fix stuff for me😊, etc.  Despite the distance to San Francisco, Erin’s ability to work remotely allows her to spend six weeks with us every summer.  We also get to San Francisco three to four times a year to visit as well.

I still get to Livingston a few times a year. My sister Cathy and her family still live there. Her three kids all graduated from LHS, too.  Anyone who frequented the Landmark in our LHS days will remember Richie Winterberg bartending there.  Well, Richie is still bartending up in Kennebunkport, Maine and I’ll go up and see him for a pint and a sandwich and reminisce from time to time.

If anyone is going to be in South Maine, please look us up. We can tell an embellished story, or two, over a cocktail around the fire pit!  My email is john.stevenson1429@gmail