SWAMPSCOTT — Frank DeFelice will spend his 80th birthday today waiting for his wife, Susan, to come home from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she had heart surgery.
He will then deal with the task of taking care of her while she recovers at their Franklin Street home. He’s ready.
“I have people betting I won’t be able to do it,” he said. “I’ll have to summon up all my strength to take care of her, but I will.”
Bet on that. Frank DeFelice has been plowing ahead with a blatant disregard for the torpedoes all his life.
“With Frank, what you see is what you get,” said Channel 5 sports personality Mike Lynch, who was a quarterback at Swampscott High while DeFelice was an assistant coach for the Big Blue. “There is nothing phony about him.”
But that directness always got results. He was an assistant under the legendary Stan Bondelevitch for only six years (1966-71), but those were six years for the books. The Big Blue were perennial powers, and at one point they ran off a 32-game unbeaten streak. The athletes who came through the program during that period included Bill Adams, Dick Jauron, Sandy Tennant, Peter Beatrice, and Lynch.
“It was so lucky to run behind his offensive line (at Swampscott),” said Jauron, who played at Yale, in the NFL, was an all-pro, and was the 2001 NFL Coach of the Year with the Chicago Bears. “He coached them. They were tough, they were disciplined, talented, and relentless.
“He coached them hard,” said Jauron. “But he loved them as much as anyone could love them.”
“I never had to have my uniform cleaned after a game,” joked Lynch. “That line was so good nobody touched me.”
Even DeFelice knows that his methods were a little tough for some people to handle. But, he says, there’s a caveat to that.
“There were kids I coached who didn’t see eye to eye with me,” he said, “but I’d meet them a few years later, and they’d all tell me that I taught them a lot. That makes you feel good.”
“That’s the key to coaching,” says Lynch. “They don’t have to like you, but they have to respect you. You learn from them.”
DeFelice is one of a handful of North Shore coaches who seem ageless, says his longtime friend Paul Halloran, who was his assistant for the Big Blue baseball team, and of whom DeFelice reserves special praise.
“He rebuilt that Swampscott American Legion team, and they were one game, in 1995, from going to legion world series,” DeFelice said. “He did a tremendous job.”
DeFelice is not shy about giving credit where credit is due — as long as he’s giving it to someone else. There’s Bondelevitch, Lynch’s father (the late Dick Lynch), his brother Bobby (two years his junior, always smaller growing up, and “maybe the most mentally tough guy I know”), and the host of coaches at Boston College, where he was an unpaid assistant during that school’s glory years of the 1980s (he was on the sidelines when Doug Flutie threw his “Hail-Mary” pass to beat Miami in 1984).
Though it may seem like he’s been around forever, he came to Swampscott in 1966, one year after assisting his brother, Bob, at Christopher Columbus High. And though he only coached under Bondelevitch for six years (leaving for Xaverian, where he was head coach for four years), he was head baseball coach from ’66 to ’71, and then again from 1977 through 2005.
During that time, DeFelice’s teams went 465-257 (.644), won a state title (1993), three other North Sectional championships, made the sectional final six times and qualified for the state tournament 20 times.
“He had a pure, youthful love of being at the ballpark,” said Jauron. “He loved baseball. I had the good fortune of playing for him in high school and with him in the Intercity League.
“It was an unbelievable pleasure,” Jauron said. “He was all in, playing and coaching. He gave everything he had.”
It wasn’t always easy, either.
“He had to learn that coaching baseball’s not like coaching football,” Lynch said. “You can’t block anybody. You can’t hit anybody.
“It’s a more subtle game,” Lynch said. “But he got it. He was a good coach. And I love seeing him today when I do.”
Some of his favorite moments come in his role as unpaid assistant, which has included Merrimack and Endicott Colleges. Not these days though.
“I’m pretty much under lock and key,” he says, noting that at his age, and with his medical issues, has had to steer clear of any possibility of catching the coronavirus. “Whatever you have to do to survive, you do,” he says. “But before this, I’d come and go as I wanted, which I like a lot.”
He thought long and hard when asked what meant the most to him as a coach. And his answer? Just that.
“I love it when I meet someone and it’s ‘hi, coach.'” I have a carpenter at my house and it’s, ‘how are you doing, coach?'”
Many of his players have gone on to play important roles in their fields. Peter Woodfork is a special assistant to Joe Torre in the Major League Baseball offices. Todd McShay is an ESPN college football analyst. Todd Kline has worked as an executive for several NFL franches. Matt O’Neill is a restaurateur. He’s proud of them all.
“But,” he says, “I love it just as much when I see kids I coached become policemen and firemen. That always means a lot.
“I feel very lucky. There’s no question about that,” he said.