COURTESY PHOTO FROM GATELY FUNERAL HOME
Fenwick swim coach Cara Linehan Buckwell died last week at the age of 34.
By STEVE KRAUSE
Dave Woods remembers when Cara Linehan Buckwell received Coach of the Year honors from the Boston Globe.
“She was so humbled,” said Woods, the athletic director at Bishop Fenwick High School in Peabody. “We gathered the team around, and we made the announcement in front of everyone. She was embarrassed. Her face got all red. She was so shocked.”
The fact that his swimming coach was stunned at being recognized was no shock to Woods, however. As far as he was concerned, she was everything a coach ought to be — and that all athletic directors hope they can get.
“She’d do things that a lot of people don’t notice,” said Woods. “Swimming’s kind of a tough sport to coach, because we don’t have a pool. So now you have to go out and schedule pool times. They’d practice at 5:30 in the morning. Cara took care of all of that. From an AD’s point of view, she was something you’d want in every coach.”
Woods said that beyond her expertise as a coach in general, and in swimming in particular, “she was just a great person.
“She cared about the kids,” Woods said. “And that’s something you can’t teach coaches. Either they have it or they don’t, and she definitely had it.”
Woods remembers one time when Buckwell came up to him, worried about one of her swimmers.
“She told me that the girl hadn’t been herself at practice, and that she was worried,” Woods said. “She said she was going to talk to the girl’s guidance counselor, but in the meantime, asked if I’d watch out for her.”
Woods said Buckwell hadn’t been feeling well as the winter sports season came to an end. A coach at the school since Woods became athletic director a decade ago, Buckwell had her first child 10 months ago, and therefore decided to sit the year out as a coach, even though she helped out and was still around the program.
“She wasn’t feeling well sometime around March,” said Woods, “and I think originally, they thought she had pneumonia, and she was being treated for it.”
However, it wasn’t pneumonia. It was lung cancer. Even though she’d been an athlete, swimmer, marathon runner who took care of her body, she was diagnosed with cancer.
“A lot of people didn’t know she was sick, including me,” Woods said. “When I heard, I was literally speechless.
“When she had cancer, I don’t think that was ever made public, except for people who were really close with her,” Woods said.
Buckwell died a week ago Tuesday at the age of 34. She was the second sibling in her family to die, as her younger sister, Laura Linehan, who died at age 20 from liver disease. She ran the Boston Marathon to help raise awareness of the plight of patients waiting for liver transplants.
“Not one bit of this makes sense to me,” said Woods, whose own daughter, Cassidy, was diagnosed with leukemia when she was a small child. Cassidy is now 18 and a graduate of Bishop Fenwick. She will be going to college in the fall to major in pediatric oncology.
“People say there’s a plan, or whatever, but I don’t understand it,” Woods said. “I don’t see it.”