COURTESY PHOTO
Former Lynn English star Brian Vaughan, left, has been named the new head football coach at Excel High School in South Boston.
By STEVE KRAUSE
Brian Vaughan is inheriting another project. This one is in South Boston, where he was named head coach of the football team earlier this week, and where the Knights were 0-11 last season.
The record doesn’t begin to tell the story. Southie, also known as Excel High School, was outscored last fall by a 323-20 margin. The Knights had to forfeit two games due to a lack of bodies.
This is just the kind of challenge Vaughan loves. He took over at Pope John in 2009, and during his four-year tenure at the Everett school had the Tigers within one game of the Division 3A Super Bowl.
“We lost to a Northeast Regional team that was loaded,” Vaughan notes.
Then, the former Lynn English star took on the challenge of turning around the Boston English program that had finished the 2012 season at 3-7. The following season, the Blue Eagles (a new name, as prior to that season, Boston English was also nicknamed Bulldogs) had beaten crosstown rival Boston Latin for the first time since 1997 and Vaughan was the named the New England Patriots coach of the week.
He knows what he’s up against in South Boston.
“The program has been down,” said Vaughan. “I look at it as an opportunity to turn it around. I like tough situations. It goes back to who I am and what I’ve been through.
“When I was at English, everybody said I was too small, and too slow,” he said. “That always motivated me, and it’s carried over into my coaching career.”
Vaughan and football go back a long way. As a senior running back at Lynn English, he led the Bulldogs to an unbeaten regular season and a berth in the Division 3 Super Bowl — the last one played under the old MIAA ratings system.
At Northeastern University, playing under Swampscott native Barry Gallup, Vaughan set a career rushing record of 2,663 yards, a mark that was since broken, first by L.J. McKanas of Saugus, and then Tim Gale of Masconomet.
Vaughan said he’s learned from every coach for whom he’s played.
“I would say that,” he said, “starting with Gary Molea. I go back to Lynn English with Gary. We went to the Super Bowl together. There are still things I learned from Gary that I take with me today.”
He said he enjoyed playing for Gallup as well.
“Thanks to him,” Vaughan said, “I got to play a little college ball. And I got to learn from guys like Tom Lamb and Joe Philbin (who later became head coach of the Miami Dolphins).”
As an assistant football coach at English, Vaughan said he learned a lot from Peter Holey, and then from Sean Driscoll in Winthrop, for whom he served as an assistant for a year.
“I tried to emulate all of them,” Vaughan said.
He likes coaching inner-city players because “I enjoy giving back, and passing on my experiences as an inner-city kid myself. A lot of the kids I’ve coached remind me of myself when I was that age.”
Two years into his stint at Boston English, Vaughan’s sister died of cancer, and his son, Brian Jr., had trouble dealing with it.
“For that and a lot of other reasons, I felt I needed to step back,” he said. “My daughter was a senior and was graduating from Everett High. She was captain of the cheerleading team. I wanted to be close to home for that.”
Home for the Vaughans has been Everett since he began coaching at Pope John.
He couldn’t step out of the football picture completely, however. He coached Pop Warner so he could be with his son, and also coached running backs at Everett High (among the players he coached was Marvens Fedna, who was stabbed and injured during a late-night fracas after he’d played a spectacular game in defeating St. John’s Prep in the playoffs last season).
Vaughan said the most important thing he’s learned as a coach is that “you have to build a relationship with your kids. Over the years, that’s probably been the best part. I have kids I coached 10-12 years ago that I still have a relationship with. They say I’m the reason they went to college. That’s the stuff that leaves you with a smile on your face.”