John Cochin: All-star on the field, in the classroom, and in the newsroom

Whenever I am caught fumbling through a math problem, I smile and say to whoever is witnessing the spectacle, “There’s a reason I make my living with words.” One of the things I’ve always liked and admired about John Cochin is that he made his living with both numbers and words.

John’s career as a chemistry teacher at Sanford High School called for an ease with numbers, as the subject often dabbles in such mathematic matters as exponents, notations, orders of operation, algebra, unit conversion, dimensional analysis, and other aspects I know are related because I asked Google.

John’s career as a sports editor and writer during the full 37-year run of the Sanford News called for the words — the right words, the ones that captured the excitement of nail-biting games, the thrill of victories, the heartbreak of hard losses, and the achievements, personalities and dreams of local athletes.

And he knew the most important words of all: the names of those athletes. In every sports article he wrote, he made sure to include as many names as possible of student-athletes as he could, knowing the pride and exhilaration they would feel seeing themselves in ink.

John knew that pride and exhilaration first-hand. He was a star when he played baseball, football and basketball as a youth making his way through the Sanford School System in the 1950s. And then, as a coach early in his teaching career, he led the Sanford High School baseball team to its first-ever state championship in 1978.

For all of these reasons – his own shining athletic career, his leadership as a coach, his dedication to his students in the classroom, and the decades he spent chronicling sports in his hometown newspaper – the Sanford Schools Legacy Foundation dedicated one of the baseball fields at Sanford High School to John during a memorable ceremony in July. On the same day, the foundation also named an SHS chemistry classroom after him too.

More: Beloved baseball coach John Cochin now has his own Field of Dreams at Sanford High School

A handful of people paid tribute to John during the ceremony, stepping up to the plate at the ball field and sharing memories of the honoree. I had hoped to speak too, but I took too long trying to wrangle a bit of public-speaking jitters – a rumbling of thunder in the distance moved the ceremony along, and John’s grandchildren were called out to the pitcher’s mound to unveil the sign dedicating the field to their grandfather.

So thank God I’ve got this column, as, like so many others, I welcome the opportunity to pay tribute to the man who showed me tremendous leeway and patience as I clowned my way through his chemistry class as a teenager and then who welcomed me aboard when I joined him on the staff at the Sanford News less than two decades later.

Yes, I clowned my way through John’s class. Growing up, if I understood or excelled at a subject at school, then I was a model student who kept quiet in class, handed in homework on time, studied hard, and did my best on projects, quizzes and exams.

But if I could not grasp a subject? Too often I became a class clown. Sometimes this resulted in after-school detentions. In John’s chemistry class, though, it never did.

“One day, when I’m an old man, I’ll be watching TV and bouncing my grandchild on my knee,” Cochin said to me and my classmates at some point during the 1988-1989 school year. “And Shawn will be on the screen, on the news, either leading a prison riot or doing something entertaining and worthwhile.”

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Well, I’m now north of 50 and have managed to avoid the prison riot. As for doing something worthwhile, John was correct: I had the honor of working alongside him at the Sanford News, a paper I delivered as a kid and for which I got to serve as news editor from 2006 through 2017.

I have no idea if he ever noticed, but it was a few years before I was able to call him John. I knew, as his coworker and as a guy in my 30s, I did not have to call him “Mr. Cochin.” But that did not mean I was comfortable with calling him “John.” Eventually, I did call him by his first name – but only when it felt natural to do so.

God bless John. He showed the same patience, faith and goodwill towards me as I grew into my role as editor and manager as he did when I was making my way through his chemistry course as a teenager.

When I saw John at the field dedication, it was the first time I had seen him in a few years. I liked hearing all the tributes to him — the stories about how he gave players a chance to shine, about how he always has been a good and loyal friend, about how he once gave a speech on civil rights as a teenager.

It all brought to mind the prison-riot joke he told about me to my classmates. He knew I struggled in his class, but he never wrote me off as simply a disruptive and completely unserious student. I could sense from him that he knew I would do just fine in the world, provided I stayed away from chemistry labs.

John always sees the whole person, is what I’m saying here.

I wrote movie reviews for the school paper during my senior year at Sanford High. I remember John approaching me one day as I stood in the lunch line, waiting to get my daily “Big H,” a double cheeseburger caked in grease. He told me had just seen “Field of Dreams,” the film where Kevin Costner hears voices in the sky telling him to build a baseball park over his cornfield. He said he loved the movie, and I told him I did too, and we chatted about it for a few moments – the first of quite a few movie chats we’d have over the years.

Like so many others, I’m glad John now has his own Field of Dreams at Sanford High School, a place he has loved and served so well throughout his own education and, ultimately, his long and distinguished career.

Shawn P. Sullivan is an award-winning columnist and a reporter for the York County Coast Star. He can be reached at ssullivan@seacoastonline.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: John Cochin: All-star on the field and in the classroom