AUBURN – When a Maine high school football team misses the playoffs, as Edward Little High School did the last three years, the gridiron season is a short one.
The programs that missed last year’s Pine Tree Conference postseason played an eight-game schedule, with one bye week. If that sounds like a whirlwind tour, you don’t know the half of it, because it’s more time than EL will have to locate, hire and orient its next varsity football coach.
Jim Hersom’s resignation at the end of the school year prevented the Auburn School Department from launching its statewide search until Sunday, when it added the position to its weekly newspaper advertisement of job openings.
Football practice is scheduled to begin Monday, Aug. 14, now less than seven weeks away.
“Dan (Deshaies, EL athletic director) tells me he has already received three or four inquiries,” said Edward Little Principal James Miller, “so I think there will be substantial interest.”
Given the late job posting, the winner of the sweepstakes is likely to be a young, up-and-coming coach or a longtime assistant. Although there is a physical education teaching position currently available at EL, it is hard to imagine an established head coach jumping ship from another school at this stage of the preseason.
“I know of a couple of young assistant coaches who I think would be interested,” said Hersom, who didn’t divulge the names. “I’m going to stay out of (the process) completely.”
Despite its off-and-on tradition and strong resources, EL hasn’t been the most successful or stable Class A football program.
After directing the Red Eddies to a 7-5 season and Eastern Maine championship in his first season of 2002, Hersom and his teams stumbled to a combined 4-20 record the last three years. The on-field struggles were more reflective of a dip in talent and numbers than a by-product of Hersom’s health concerns (see related story).
From 1946 to 1980, Edward Little had only two head football coaches: Steve Grenda and Lawrence “Doc” Hersom, Jim’s father. The Red Eddies earned five trips to the state final, winning the Gold Ball four times.
Since then, any door to the EL football office has been a revolving one. Bob Fallon, John White, Mike Haley, Kevin Callagy, Gene Keene and Jim Hersom each took a turn, none of them leading the program for more than six years.
Hersom, who lives in Turner, believes the new coach would do himself a favor by having a home within Auburn city limits.
It might also help the new face to be, well, a new face. Hersom and Keene both came to the Edward Little job with a prominent name in Auburn youth sports. Keene survived a highly public split with one of his assistant coaches before becoming an administrator at Maranacook and Brunswick, and there were rumblings that Hersom’s staff would have looked dramatically different if he had stayed on for a fifth season.
An old-school coach with proven success coaching small-town kids, Hersom saw his Edward Little roster shrink to between 20 and 30 players for most of 2005.
“I won’t say it was tough. I enjoyed it,” Hersom said. “Not living in Auburn had its drawbacks. There are things I didn’t do and would like to have been able to do, simply because I didn’t live there.”
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