Having been a dad for nine years and a lucky stiff paid to cover games for nearly twice that long, I consider youth sports coaches the same way I weigh pop culture influences.

That is, I’m suspicious of new ones and slow to endorse them. Many prove themselves out for kids’ best interests. Others seem more enamored with the limelight and that stipend check, meager as it may be.

Most coaches meet or exceed those expectations and walk away with my ultimate seal of approval. Jim Hersom, for instance.

He is welcome to coach my son any day.

The high school coaching fraternity, beleaguered bunch that it is, can’t afford to lose many good men and women. Hersom, who stepped away from the ranks last week after 23 fabulous years at four area high schools, matches that understated superlative in every way. He is a good man, good coach, good husband, good father and good friend.

Good people get dealt bad hands in life, of course, and Hersom has been asked to work magic with a stack of threes and fours of mismatched suits while coaching football at Edward Little High School.

He’s been playing with house money since hearing a dreadful diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2004. Coaching, teaching and outwardly reflecting the picture of perfect health, Hersom worked with the motor of Ye Olde Rumor Mill humming wildly in his ear.

I won’t deal Hersom the added indignity of reliving all the ignorant whispering that I heard from my side of the velvet rope on frosty Friday nights at Walton Field. I’ll just say that if a fraction of it were true, I might have the dire assignment of penning an obituary today. So let us give thanks for asinine exaggeration.

Hersom acknowledges that he is retiring for health reasons, but I’m thrilled to report that they’re good ones.

His last laboratory results were stellar. He’s eating and exercising with Lance Armstrong-like wisdom and tenacity.

He is doing well. Too well to tax his mind with the stress of parents who think he should go for it on fourth down but couldn’t spell “punt” if you spotted them the consonants. Too well to push his body by working the 12-to-14 hours a day, seven days a week it takes to keep a mediocre program out of the Pine Tree Conference cellar. Too well to quench his spirit by sweating a few no-account seniors who would give him static about the simple task of signing an athletic contract.

Speaking hypothetically, of course.

I’m also speaking for myself, not Hersom, when I suspect that cancer or no cancer, he might still be coaching varsity football if he had stayed at Livermore Falls.

Surely aware that a prophet is without honor in his own neighborhood, Hersom nevertheless pursued the professional advancement of a return to his alma mater as a phys-ed teacher in 1999.

Three years later, he assumed the steering wheel of a program that produced a smattering of terrific athletes but hadn’t sniffed a championship since Hersom’s playing days a quarter-century earlier. All the Red Eddies did in Hersom’s first season was win the Eastern Class A title.

The next three autumns produced a total of four wins and a heaping helping of headaches as one of the state’s brightest football minds tried in vain to lead a program infected by too many self-appointed cooks stirring the stew.

Auburn is a fine city with fine people. Edward Little High School has a track record of successful, tenured coaches across the board in all sports. Dave Morin, Greg Perkins, Scott Annear, Mike Adams and Dan Campbell come to mind. The administration, particularly Jim Miller and Dan Deshaies, is stacked with supportive, quality educators.

Football is a different animal, though, and it’s hard to imagine why. Yes, the sport is hyper-analyzed more than anything this side of the high school basketball tournament, with 15-minute Friday night highlight shows on all three local, major news channels.

But I can think of a half-dozen schools off the top of my head that have enjoyed greater gridiron success than EL, yet they toe the paradoxical fine line of treating football as a borderline religion without making it an unhealthy obsession. (See Oxford Hills, Mt. Blue, Portland, Bonny Eagle, Lisbon and Boothbay for more details.)

Edward Little football is packed with potential, but somewhere between 8-year-olds learning to block and tackle and 18-year-olds hitting the sled during two-a-days, there is an alarming disconnect. If Jim Hersom couldn’t fix it, it’s hard for me to imagine who can. I’m not sure Bill Belichick could don an ill-fitting, maroon sweater and solve that riddle.

May God bless and keep you, Jim. My prayers are with your successor, too.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].