WINTHROP – Sharon Coulton summed up Jeff DeBlois in four simple words.

“He is a Rambler,” said the long-time Winthrop field hockey coach.

DeBlois says he will remain a Rambler for the rest of his life. But after June 30, he will no longer be Winthrop’s athletic director and assistant principal at the high school. After 15 years, DeBlois is retiring.

“They’re both full-time jobs. I found myself spending more and more time doing the assistant principal’s job and it seemed like less and less time doing the athletic director’s job,” he said. “It’s hard to do justice to either job.”

“I never got tired of doing the AD job,” he added, “but the assistant principal’s job got a little old. There’s nothing about the athletic director’s job I didn’t like.”

A star athlete in the 1960s at Winthrop, DeBlois had a brief tenure as assistant principal at Monmouth Academy before he returned to Winthrop as AD and assistant principal in 1989. The Ramblers won state championships in field hockey and girls’ basketball that year and would go on to win a total of 18 state titles in his 15 years.

Besides filling the trophy case, the athletic department grew under his watch. Winthrop joined with Hall-Dale in the late 90s to form the first hockey co-op team in the state. The school also added girls’ soccer, a girls’ hockey club and reinstated golf, tennis and cheering as varsity sports.

Green and white

DeBlois bled Winthrop’s green and white colors through it all.

“Over the years, we started to have red trim in our field hockey uniforms,” said Coulton. “But that wasn’t traditional, so it was gone. That was one of his projects.”

DeBlois didn’t go for the red creeping into the field hockey uniforms, but Coulton and other coaches agreed that he didn’t deny them much else.

“He’s always been very supportive of his coaches,” said former football coach and current girls’ track coach Norm Thombs. “He let the coaches coach, but he was always there for us, too.”

Coulton recalls one fall ritual for DeBlois and the Winthrop field hockey program. She and her players would meet DeBlois on their field and try to determine where the corners were long after the chalk outline had faded from the previous year.

“He had a very complicated system where he would measure a certain distance from this tree and that tree and where they intersect was one corner, and where a couple of other trees intersected was another corner,” Coulton said.

DeBlois said he’ll remember other fall traditions, like standing at the Lions Club food wagon at the football field “and listening to all of the coaches” on the hill second-guess the actual coaches on the sidelines.

“Being a small school and having the whole community turn out and see people and talking to them, it really was almost like a reunion every home game,” he said.

Winthrop fans have a lot of great games to reminisce about at those “reunions”, many of which occurred in the last 15 years.

“I’ll remember the excitement generated by that group of young ladies (in field hockey and basketball) when I first came here,” DeBlois said. “I don’t think I could ever forget Jeff Love’s shot that beat Washington Academy in 1992 for the state championship, or the Boothbay game (the regional football final in 1999 when Winthrop beat Boothbay on a Lee St. Hilaire touchdown pass as time expired).”

Changing times

Besides his duties with the school, DeBlois served as a coach and official and was active in the Mountain Valley Conference’s development over the years. Perhaps his greatest achievement, though, was rounding up an all-volunteer labor force to rebuild and install lights at the football field, completing a $100,000 project without any cost to the taxpayers.

DeBlois said he was most appreciative of all of the support his department and teams received from parents over the years

“It’s gotten more difficult for the coaches, and I think the parental expectations have changed, and even the athletes’ expectations have changed,” he said. “There’s less team, and more me and more my kid and less what the team is doing.”

The school district is advertising for a replacement, but is considering separating the two positions that DeBlois filled.

As for DeBlois, who is 57, he said he doesn’t have anything lined up yet for his retirement.

“My wife (Susan) has a lot of projects planned for me,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I’m going to do something different.”

“I’ll still be at some games,” he added, “just not as many. You can’t get that out of your blood.”

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