BRATTLEBORO — Anyone who has been a coach and a teacher for four decades has had an opportunity to touch a lot of lives.
But that only scratches the surface of the long life and career of Darrell Sawyer, who died on Dec. 28 at age 87.
Add his many years as a basketball referee and softball umpire, involvement in countless civic and volunteer organizations, and an infectious enthusiasm for life, and one can see why St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church was filled on Saturday for Sawyer's memorial service.
Sawyer's colleagues from Brattleboro Union High School, his coaching rivals from around Vermont, his fellow softball and basketball officials, and his former players and their children all turned out to honor him.
Bill Holiday, who played halfback and linebacker for Sawyer at BUHS and later succeeded him as football coach, delivered the eulogy.
Holiday remembered Sawyer's first day as football coach in August 1966.
Sawyer was replacing the legendary Andy Natowich, who had just retired after winning the state championship the previous season. Natowich was a tough, stern, taskmaster of a coach, and Holiday said he and his teammates had no idea what to expect as they waited for their new coach to arrive.
“And into the parking lot, at a high rate of speed, came this white Chevy Impala convertible with a red interior. It was the coach. It was Darrell.
“We wondered if we were going to be all right. We were. He put us through our paces and, by the end of practice, it started to pour and his car was out there with the top down. Even after two hours of practice, we all ran out to his car and we helped put the top up.
“We didn't play for Darrell because he was the coach. We played for him because we enjoyed him. We played for him because we knew he enjoyed it. His players played for him because they knew he enjoyed them.”
That ability to know when to push players to do better, and when to let up and just enjoy the experience of being on the playing field, is what made Sawyer a successful coach during a long high school career that began at the old Bennington High School in the early 1950s and continued in Norwich, Conn., in the early 1960s before he came to Brattleboro.
Sawyer would be a BUHS legend if football was the only sport he coached. His teams won 70 percent of their games, and were perennial contenders.
But Sawyer was even better as a girls' softball coach.
From the 1970s, when he helped to create the program, until his retirement in 1989, his teams won five state championships and were runners-up seven times.
The softball field at BUHS is named Sawyer Field in recognition of the legacy of success that he built, a legacy that continues today in Brattleboro.
Passing it on
After he graduated from BUHS in 1968, Holiday's relationship with Sawyer continued.
Holiday said he scouted for Sawyer while he was in college. Sawyer put him on the football coaching staff when Holiday began his teaching career at BUHS in the early 1970s.
When Sawyer stepped down from the head coaching job in 1981, after the Colonels rose to state champions in 1973 and runners-up in 1979, he recommended Holiday to replace him.
“I asked him, 'Darrell, why are you doing this?' He said, 'I shouldn't coach my own kids.'”
At Holiday's insistence, Sawyer stayed on as an assistant coach.
Chris Sawyer - now the athletic director and boys' lacrosse coach as BUHS - did play football for his father in Brattleboro.
Later, his father returned the favor and served as an assistant on his son's coaching staff at Vermont Academy and Northfield Mount Hermon.
In remarks read by his wife Christine, Chris Sawyer descibed a moment two weeks ago, when he was in his father's room at the nursing home.
“He looked at me and said, 'I should've played more ball with you when you were a kid. I wish we played more ball.'
“I didn't know what to say, or whether to laugh or cry. But I do know I was ashamed that it took me until his 87th year to tell him that he was the best father any kid could have. He was never too busy to be a dad.”
Christine Sawyer said her father-in-law was someone “who always appreciated, in sports or in life, someone who gave their best effort,” and who rarely missed any event involving his children and grandchildren.
“He had incredible energy, and that energy and spirit will remain withall of us here today, as we reflect upon the life of a man who made each of our lives better,” she said.
Even beyond his time at BUHS as a teacher, athletic director and coach, Sawyer is fondly remembered as someone who was a friend to everyone who ever knew him, and had friends in every corner of the state.
“Darrell was the kind of guy who could walk into a room and change the atmosphere,” said Holiday. “He was a diminutive character, a small guy, but he had a heart that was 10 times the size of that little man.”
“His impact on this little community will go on long past this ceremony today,” Holiday said.