Not many high school football coaches get to celebrate five state championships.

Few college track and field instructors play an integral role in six national titles or work with 44 All-Americans.

The thought of one teacher owning all those distinctions is almost laughable. If you had the honor of performing under the tutelage of Joe Woodhead, however, you were part of a staggering punch line.

“His impact was so huge that I don’t think he even realized it,” said Erika Bristol, a Lewiston attorney and a 2000 Bates College graduate. “It’s literally generational now.”

Woodhead died of a heart attack Monday, leaving a legacy of championships and volumes of memories at both Bates and Lisbon High School.

His career was perhaps most remarkable for the fact that Woodhead coached nearly as long at Bates (25 years) after his so-called retirement as he did at Lisbon (27).

“I know he enjoyed Bates so much because he said ‘these kids all want to be here.’ He was lucky to be able to coach for as many years as he did and enjoy it,” said Dick Mynahan, who continues to coach the Lisbon High School football program that he took over from Woodhead in 1987.

Woodhead led Lisbon’s football program to state championships in 1960, 1961, 1968, 1971 and 1978, and a Mountain Valley Conference crown in 1981. He also coached track and field and wrestling and taught physical education at the school.

At Bates, where Woodhead joined the staff in 1985, trophies and plaques touting his athletes’ prowess in the hammer throw, weight throw and discus nearly cover a wall near the entrance to Merrill Gymnasium. Walk to the middle of that auditorium and you’ll find a throwing circle named after Woodhead.

Word of his passing spread rapidly through e-mail and social networking sites on Tuesday.

Fr. Spencer Potter, a priest now living in Florida, was an All-American in the weight throw in 1997.

“I was an uncoordinated man, but he was a great coach. There is no way I would have been an All-American without him. He could see people and he knew people,” Potter said. “He did have some great athletes, but I wasn’t one of them. He could take a great athlete and make them a thrower, but he could also take a mediocre athlete who wasn’t a thrower and make them a thrower.”

Head of the class

Closer to home, Woodhead’s impact is tangible every day in the halls and on the playing fields at Lisbon.

Longtime coaches Dean Hall (track and field), Mark Stevens (wrestling, field hockey) and Randy Ridley (baseball) all played under Woodhead. Mynahan was one of Woodhead’s football assistants for 17 seasons before ascending to the top job.

Gray-New Gloucester co-curricular coordinator Jeff Ramich played his four years of high school football for Woodhead.

“You talk about a coaching tree like Bill Walsh. That was Coach Woodhead’s impact at Lisbon,” said Ramich, who also was Lisbon’s athletic director for nine years. “He was the exact same guy at football practice as he was in phys ed class. He always had that gleam in his eye. He loved to be around kids.”

Hall, a 1970 Lisbon graduate, remembered Woodhead as the proverbial gentle giant.

“He was a big, lovable bear. There were things none of us ever knew about him like that he was an All-American guard. You dreaded the moment in practice when he got down in a three-point stance and took you on,” Hall said. “And you never moved him. He was built like a rock.”

Just as left field in Fenway Park was the exclusive domain of Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice for five decades, Lisbon has known only two football coaches — Woodhead and Mynahan — in the last half century.

Tim Mynahan, Dick’s brother, also was an assistant to Woodhead for 20 years.

“He mentioned to me one time that the years we coached together, Lisbon averaged a championship about every three years,” Tim Mynahan said. “He would see what he had for material and then build the team around that. To build a program like that, you need that discipline and that continuity. He’s left a mark everywhere he’s been. He knew how to build champions, and he did it.”

“We’re a town,” added Ramich. “We’re not Topsham, Brunswick, Lewiston or Auburn. We’re a lot more close-knit. Everybody knows everybody. It’s a huge loss.”

Worth the weight

After moving on to Bates, Woodhead enjoyed more success in his golden years than most professionals do in the prime of their careers.

From the late Peter Goodrich in 1989 to Rich McNeil and Vantiel Elizabeth Duncan in 2010, Woodhead put not only Bates but New England track and field on the map at the national level.

“He had a determination to see people succeed. That’s what brought him here from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day,” said Bates men’s track coach Al Fereshetian. “He could give a pat on the back or a kick in the butt depending on what a kid needed.”

Billy McEvila, Jamie Sawler and Noah Gauthier won individual NCAA Division III titles for the Bates men under Woodhead’s direction.

After Liz Wanless became Bates’ first women’s national champion in the indoor shot put in 2004, Keelin Godsey was a two-time outdoor champ in the hammer throw.

“I never would have been throwing if it weren’t for him,” Godsey said. “I don’t know what I would have been doing, but it wouldn’t have been that. I owe all my success to him. He taught me not just about throwing but about life.”

“He definitely was one of the most influential people in my life, not just as an athlete but in my career and my personal life,” Sawler said. “Great role model, great coach, great person. I really think the world of him.”

Loved to laugh

Former colleagues and athletes from both schools fondly remembered both Woodhead’s gruff exterior and his hearty sense of humor.

Hall recalled that one of the coach’s catch phrases at Lisbon was “hubba hubba.”

Years later, Potter was one of the fortunate few to hear the translation.

“He had this saying, ‘Hubba, hubba, scooby, scooby.’ We’d ask what that meant and he’d say, ‘I’m your coach, and I love you and I’m never going to swear at you, but that means you’re slacking and move your ass,’ ” Potter recalled.

Woodhead didn’t reserve the levity for championship moments.

Lisbon had an unusually tough football season when Ramich was a senior. Woodhead gathered the team for its usual Monday meeting after a one-sided loss at Madison.

“He walked in and said, ‘You guys are a great bunch of kids. You’re not that great of football players.’ We all laughed because we all knew it was kind of true,” Ramich said.

Although he became a nationally known figure in his own discipline and his own right, Woodhead enjoyed an earlier brush with fame. He was writer Stephen King’s high school gym teacher.

King graduated from Lisbon in 1966. Fifteen years later, he returned to give the keynote address at graduation.

“Steve greeted the faculty in the cafeteria before the ceremony and said to Joe, ‘I hope you don’t make me do pull-ups again,’ ” Hall said.

Sprinting to the finish

Woodhead had recently recovered from a freak accident that knocked him out of coaching for nearly a year. He was bowled over by a runner while crossing the track at an indoor meet last winter, resulting in broken bones and hospitalization.

But Bates colleagues saw plenty of him in recent weeks.

“We had our preseason meeting on Friday,” Fereshetian said. “He was at the (Bates-Wesleyan) football game Saturday. He talked with Rich McNeil, shook (athletic director) Kevin McHugh’s hand. He was excited about what he was doing right up until the very end.”

Bristol joined the Bates staff as a volunteer coach after returning to the area. She did so almost exclusively, she said, for the chance to work with Woodhead again.

She noted that his rapport with athletes was stronger than ever, even as with each passing year those competitors became young enough to be his great-grandchildren.

“I went to nationals my senior year and finished seventh (missing All-American by one spot). I really wanted to finish in the top six, so I was disappointed, and not for myself but because I wanted it for him,” Bristol said. “He still talked about that. He brought that out in athletes. You wanted to do the best you could to be part of that Bates throwing legacy he created.”

Former students felt Woodhead’s impact in their personal lives every day. Bristol noted that he played matchmaker for several Bates couples that are now married with children.

And if you think a specialized, part-time coach at a small liberal arts school in Maine can’t be known nationwide, think again.

“Last year I ran into the coach from LSU at a meet at the University of Miami,” Potter said. “He had the best thrower in the country. We’re talking Division I. And even he was talking about how great Coach Woodhead is. So that tells you something.”

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Bates weight thrower Keelin Godsey talks about technique with Bates throwing coach Joe Woodhead.