Bob Marshall doesn’t get to as many ConVal football games as he’d like to these days. Marshall, the original Cougar coach back in 1992, when the program first took the field, has a grandson playing at Souhegan, and those games take precedence most Friday nights. But, through a bit of serendipitous scheduling, he was in attendance in mid-September, when ConVal hosted Kingswood. Marshall looked around at the raucous crowd of over 1,000 packing the bleachers, the full moon rising over the mountains and the ConVal team lighting up the scoreboard on the way to a 54-12 victory, and he smiled.
“It was incredible,” Marshall said in an interview at his Greenfield home a few weeks later. “It was everything we said it would be.”
Marshall was one of the group who pushed to get a football program at ConVal, and to see the team as it is today — full of character, supported by community, and winning — is to see that vision realized. But it wasn’t an easy road to where it is today, 25 years later.
In fact, the journey to a ConVal football program had its beginnings in the late ‘70s, when coach Dennis Macri and a few other town notables started the Peterborough Lions youth football team, playing their games at Adams Playground. As local interest in football grew, it seemed logical that the high school — about a decade after the ConVal district was created, uniting the nine towns — would get a football team.
In 1977, Marshall, a former football player and coach, moved to the area to start teaching at ConVal. It was quickly apparent to him that there was something missing.
“I’d never been in a high school without a football team before,” Marshall said.
Marshall, Roland Patten, Beaver Jutras and a handful of others formulated a plan to bring a proposal to the school district meeting. Between 1983 and 1991, Patten and Marshall proposed a petition for a football six different times, and all six were shot down. The game’s too violent, some parents said, and, the board argued, it would cost too much.
“They had their firmly held beliefs,” Marshall said, “but myself and the others who were involved felt that the positives far outweighed the negatives, and as a result, we could bring something here that would be a benefit to the entire community here.”
In late 1991, in the dead of winter and the midst of a recession, parent Cheri McDaniel brought a proposal to the school board yet again — we’ll start a football team, privately funded, that won’t cost the district a dime. Perhaps thinking that there was no way the boosters could raise the money — $30,000 — by the March 1 deadline, the board agreed.
Incredibly, the group was successful. Marshall and the boys went to every corner of every town in the district raise the money.
“The whole community made donations in one form or another,” Marshall said. “It brought all the towns together for one purpose.”
The team approved, the community continued their supportive efforts. American Steel donated the goalposts, Patten and Marshall drove up to Durham in Patten’s old wrecker to pick up the UNH scoreboard, soon putting a ConVal science class to work to test the hundreds of light bulbs.
“Field of Dreams” was a blockbuster in 1992, and assistant coach John Reitnauer applied that mantra to the football stadium.
“Rit printed out in big bold Apple II-E script: “Build It and They Will Come,” and we all had it on our lockers for years.” Marshall said.
It was in the back of his mind when the team took the field for the first time, in September of 1992 at Souhegan, with hundreds of screaming fans in attendance.
“I’ll never forget that,” Marshall said.
And it was there the next week, for ConVal’s first home game, against Pelham, which also launched its program in 1992. Fans packed the ConVal sidelines for that one, though at the time, the field did not have any bleachers — the superintendent had vetoed the idea, citing liability issues if a fan fell off the seats.
The milestones kept piling up. The first varsity win was a long time coming, but the Cougars finally pulled it off.
“It took us a year and a half to get there, and it was special,” Marshall said. “Every one of those coaches had tears in their eyes.”
Wins were one thing, but they were far from Marshall’s main objective: to build fine young men and send them out into the community.
“We weren’t about winning football games,” Marshall said. “We were here about building character, providing opportunities for kids that didn’t have any.”
Marshall recalled one particular player, Steve Roper from Temple, who made a particular impact.
“[He] could not run a lap around the football field,” Marshal said. “He weighed 300 pounds. What a hell of a kid he was. And that kid would have never been able to play soccer, or cross-country. He had no opportunities in the fall. We knew there were a lot of kids like that out there…this was an opportunity for them to participate.”
Roper would go on to be recruited by UNH to play football and play in the prestigious Shrine Game.
The program would continue, but Marshall bowed out relatively early, giving way to coach Steve Bartsch initially. But he remained as a teacher at ConVal and remained involved, following along as ConVal made their first playoff appearance in 2007, setting the school’s high-water mark for wins in a season at six under coach Greg Leonard. And he remains a part of the program to this day, serving on the selection committee which picked Paul Landau to lead the Cougars into this new era.
The program’s history is not lost on Landau.
“You look back at what the program has stood for,” Landau said, “the amount of care and passion that went into getting this thing off the ground in the first place, the amount of work that they had to do to get a football team here. That spoke volumes about how much this team meant to the high school and how much the community got behind it and supported it. That type of tradition, and really focusing on family first and character first was a big part of stepping in.”
As ConVal’s football program moves into the future, a lot has changed and nearly all of it for the better. The biggest obstacle to the team’s inauguration — player safety — has taken huge steps forward. The game is taught differently, safer, and concussions are down, Landau said. And, while the family first, character-building attitude that’s been there since day one still prevails, the Cougars have begun a new tradition — winning.
A win at Friday’s homecoming game, a 7 p.m. tilt with, fittingly enough, Pelham, would give the Cougars a 6-1 record and tie them for the best record in school history. A win the following week at St. Thomas would mean this team is the best ConVal’s ever fielded, in terms of record. And a win in the season finale against currently undefeated Windham? That would put ConVal at the top of the heap.
Even one win out of those three games should be enough to put ConVal into the playoffs for the first time since 2009 and the third time ever, though Landau said the goal is to host a playoff game — and win one.
“We’re trying to put ConVal on the map by winning a playoff game and having some postseason success,” Landau said. “We embrace all that history and we’re trying to make some of own here.”