Earlier this year – just 25 days apart – Swampscott said goodbye to two sports giants.
Legendary coach Frank DeFelice, who won nearly 65% of his baseball games at Swampscott High, died Jan. 14 at age 84. Dick Jauron, a three-sport letterman (football, basketball, baseball) for the Big Blue, Yale standout, NFL All-Pro, and NFL coach for 28 seasons, died Feb. 8 at age 74.
When it comes to DeFelice, the numbers are impressive – 465 wins, a state championship in 1993, three sectional titles, and a .692 winning percentage in postseason play – but that won’t be his ultimate legacy. Instead, it will be the legion of men, such as former Channel 5 sportscaster Mike Lynch and Jauron, who went on to achieve an elite level of professional success and attributed at least some of it to their high school coach.
“You had to do things the right way or do it over until you got it right,” Lynch said.
Todd Kline, a member of the 1993 state championship baseball team who is President, Commercial for the storied Chelsea Football Club in England and has worked in professional sports for more than 20 years, said playing for DeFelice was “the first true meritocracy I experienced.
“He didn’t care about where you came from or your pedigree,” Kline said. “All he cared about was how hard you worked. You got what you earned and you were not allowed to be a bad teammate. I didn’t realize until I got older how valuable that was.”
Swampscott’s current varsity baseball coach, Joe Caponigro, may have put it best when he said Big Blue Nation – and the sport in general – lost a legend.
“Coach was one of a kind and told it like he saw it. My appreciation for him did not peak until I was in his shoes as a high school baseball coach,” Caponigro said. “When I was young and playing for him, I did not understand the magnitude of the impact that he had made on me.”
Arguably a top-five athlete in school history was Peter Woodfork (Class of ’95), who played college baseball at Harvard and is Major League Baseball’s Senior Vice President of Minor League Operations. Woodfork also spent three years with the Boston Red Sox (2003-2005) as Director of Baseball Operations.
“Coach’s demand for excellence in all matters brought out the best in me,” Woodfork said. “He taught me invaluable life lessons on resiliency, discipline and maturity. His approach instilled in me the effort that was needed for life success.”
As for Jauron, Lynch nearly ran out of adjectives to describe his high school football teammate.
“Every mother in Swampscott wanted their son to grow up like Dick Jauron, including my mom,” he said. “After every home football game, you’d want to rush to the parking lot because the cheerleaders would clap for you and say your name. Dick would be inside helping Vinny Estabrooks clean up the locker room – the tape, the mud in the locker room, and picking up the towels.”
Bill Adams, a Swampscott teammate of Jauron and lineman who suited up in 46 games for the Buffalo Bills, remembers how hard Jauron used to work.
“I remember when we were in high school, walking by his house, and he’s working out with sandbags in his backyard. Back then, there wasn’t much weightlifting or anything,” Adams said. “I ended up joining in with him, but those were his sandbags and his yard. I just joined in once or twice to do it with him.”
Clearly, it worked. Star running back Jauron averaged 121 yards rushing per game, scored 140 points during his senior season, holds the school record for touchdowns scored, and captured a Class Bstate championship in 1968 before taking his talents to Yale, where he was widely considered one of the greatest running backs in Ivy League history. He was drafted by the Detroit Lions, who moved him to defensive back. He made the Pro Bowl in 1974 and played eight years in the league.
Another gridiron teammate of Jauron’s, Randy Werner, watched football at his house nearly every Sunday and heard from him at least twice a week.
“He is the finest human being I’ve ever met,” Werner said. “Dick was such a wonderful husband, father, and brother.”
When Emmy-winning broadcaster Andrea Kremer was hired by Amazon in 2018 as part of the first all-female NFL broadcast booth, with Hannah Storm, one of the first calls she made was to her friend Jauron.
“He was so excited for me,” she said.
Tom Coughlin, who won two Super Bowls as head coach of the New York Giants and was head coach at Boston College from 1991-93, hired Jauron as his defensive coordinator when he coached Jacksonville in its inaugural 1995 season.
“Dick was probably the finest human being I’ve ever met,” Coughlin said.
