Fairhaven Hall of Famer Dufour directed girls tennis to championship season in 1981
Editor's note: Spotlight is the theme for the latest installment in the Buddy’s Best series, which kicked off last year and continues this summer. Former athletes, coaches and pioneers are among the people who will be highlighted.
He spent his entire teaching career making sure the spotlight was trained solely on his students. In and out of the classroom that’s exactly where Donald Dufour felt the focus of attention should be. In his mind, school time was all about the student.
Dufour spent parts of four decades doing what was best for them, beginning with his first teaching assignment at DeMatha High School in Hyattsville, MD in 1950. He followed that theory until his retirement from Fairhaven High School following the 1989-90 school year. Only a three-year stint in the United States Army, where he served as a Vietnamese language specialist, interrupted a 40-consecutive year teaching career.
Following his discharge from the military, Dufour received teaching offers from Tabor Academy and the Fairhaven school system. When he chose the latter, he was assigned to the Rogers School, where he taught all subjects to seventh graders before being transferred to Fairhaven High School, where he eventually found himself in the foreign language department.
In 1962 Dufour was appointed head of the department and began a long association with the American Field Service’s foreign exchange program.
Over the next 28 years, he served as the high school’s AFC coordinator in which he organized summer field trips, giving students the opportunity to learn first hand about foreign languages and cultures. The initial trips began in 1970 when he took a group of students studying French to Europe.
Away from the classroom, Dufour spent much of his time at the high school’s various athletic venues rooting for his Fairhaven athletes.
Dufour was an outstanding tennis player during his school days at Assumption College and was captain and top performer for the 1950 team.
He was thrust back into the sports spotlight at Fairhaven High School prior to the 1981 tennis season when he was asked to take the reins of a losing girls program. Without hesitation Dufour accepted the challenge and quickly shifted the spotlight away from himself and on to his collection of hard-working female athletes who were more than willing to listen.
Over the course of eight weeks, Dufour turned the program from pretender to contender by winning the Div. 2 championship of the Southeastern Massachusetts Conference.
The team compiled an overall record of 7-5 but four of those losses were against strong non-conference teams Dartmouth and Seekonk (twice each).
Against SMC Div. 2 teams, Fairhaven was a glittering 7-1, the only loss coming at the hands of an Old Rochester team the Blue Devils thumped in a return match, 4-1. It was the only time a Fairhaven girls tennis team wore the crown of an SMC Div. 2 champion.
Instead of accepting plaudits for the effort, Dufour deflected the attention to the players citing, in particular, Chris Lauganis and Sue Nolette, the numbers one and two senior singles players, along with No. 3 singles player Debbie Rapoza. Joanne Reedy, Jennifer Young, Sue Jacobson, Cindy Mark, Lee Vaudry, Tammy Pereira, Anne Gonsalves, Carol O’Brien and anyone else who may have shared in the glory of that championship season. In Dufour’s mind, the coach was just along for the ride. And what a ride it was.
The retired coach and teacher was inducted into the Fairhaven High School Hall of Fame in 2019 and he and his wife, Muiriel, currently live in Florida where, as of this writing, Donald Dufour remains active both on and off the tennis court.
This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Donald Dufour taught and coached at Fairhaven in Hall of Fame career
