Former Bates coach and AD Bob Hatch will be inducted into the Maine Sports Hall of Fame.
By Justin Pelletier
Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Bob Hatch wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary in his mailbox earlier this month. The 79-year-old Lewiston resident of nearly 55 years brought back a peculiar envelope from the mailbox and tore it open.

“I certainly wasn’t expecting to see it,” Hatch said. “It was very much a surprise.”

Hatch, employed as a coach and Athletic Director at Bates College for parts of 42 years, received confirmation last week that he would be inducted into the Maine Sports Hall of Fame in June.

“This is the fourth hall of fame for me,” Hatch said, “but this one is different. This one is for an entire state, and it’s not just for football. I suppose they must have been running out of candidates if they got down to me.”

Hatch is already a member of the Auburn-Lewiston Sports Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 1990. In Massachusetts, Hatch is enshrined in the Melrose High School Hall of Fame and in the Boston University Hall of Fame. He graduated from Melrose in 1942, and captained the Boston University football team during the 1948 campaign.

“A lot of schools don’t have halls like this,” Hatch said. “It gets too political, and sometimes its hard to figure out if a person should be there strictly for sporting achievement, or if character is part of it, too.”

Hatch has both.

After graduating from BU in 1948, he was drafted by the New York Yankees of the American Football League, and very nearly took that job.

“I even had my train tickets and was ready to go,” Hatch said. “It was in August when Bates College called me up to offer me a job. I was married already, and it was definite for at least a year, whereas the Yankees, I could have been cut even after the bonus they gave me.”

He ascended to the rank of head football coach in 1952, a position he held for 20 years. During his tenure as a coach, things changed dramatically.

“The schedules were different then,” Hatch said. “And the idea of platoon football evolved.”

While at Bates, Hatch coached his teams against teams from the University of Maine, Northeastern, Hofstra, and the University of Massachusetts, all current Division 1-AA programs.

“I was always in favor of the current Division III attitude about academics,” Hatch said. “There was no Division III back then, but I knew it was a waste of time to recruit an athlete that wouldn’t be able to make it on an academic level here at Bates.”

The other change, Hatch noticed, was in the way the athletes played.

“It’s almost all platoon football now,” Hatch said. “Back when I coached, players would almost always play two ways. In the 60s, it seemed, the NCAA changed substitution rules so often, almost every year. By the end of that time, you needed a mathematician on your staff just to figure out who was eligible to play on certain downs. From there, I think, more assistants came in, and now you see no players at all playing both ways.”

In 1972, after 20 years on the job as the head coach, Hatch took a one-year sabbatical. In 1974, he assumed the role of Athletic Director, again at Bates College, where he ran right into the newest challenge to collegiate athletics, Title IX.

“Women in sports,” Hatch said. “That’s the biggest difference, I think, in college sports no from when I began. The steps that women have made in just the 25 to 30 years since then have been amazing. That changed everything at the time, too, from recruiting to the physical layout of a campus. Everything was really set up for men, even though we were a co-ed campus.”

Part of the changes Bates eventually made under Hatch was the addition of the Merrill Gymnasium in the early 1980s.

Finally, in 1991, after another one-year break, Hatch officially retired, ending a career that spanned 42 years and included time in six different decades.

“I was 65 or 66 at the time,” Hatch said. “I had planned to retire at that point. I miss the personal associations, for sure, but I don’t miss a lot of the headaches.”

And Hatch still doesn’t miss many games, even to this day.

“I see every home game unless I am out of town or sick,” Hatch said. “The games at Bowdoin and Colby, too. I still live in the same house, been here almost 50 years now, and I don’t plan on going anywhere.”

As for his accolades, Hatch has a unique take on the plaques and trophies.

“I have them in my back entry,” Hatch said. “There’s a lot of stuff hanging out there, but nobody really uses that entrance but the dogs. I don’t tuck them away, though, because I figure that if people thought enough of you to give you something, you should at least find room for it. I just put them in a spot that’s not so obvious.”

jpelletier@sunjournal.com

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