'Like a second father': Rod Wotton mourned by football community at Marshwood, STA, beyond

Rod Wotton would wrinkle his nose if you called him a coaching legend, but it was the truth. One of the most successful high school football coaches in New England, Wotton died Tuesday after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 82.

It’s easy to point to Wotton’s success. He won 21 state championships combined at Marshwood High School in South Berwick, Maine, and Saint Thomas Aquinas in Dover, New Hampshire. He compiled a career record of 342-81-3, which at the time of his retirement in 2010, was the most wins by a high school football coach in New England. His impact, however, went way beyond numbers.

“I made some great relationships coaching kids,” Wotton said last year after he was named the greatest high school football coach in Maine history by the Bangor Daily News. “We just happened to win a lot of football games through their dedication.”

2020 story: Maine paper recognizes Rod Wotton as state’s greatest football coach

There was lots of emotion from former players when talking about Wotton, who coached at South Berwick High School for five years, Marshwood for 27 years and then another 15 at St. Thomas.

Players, coaches talk about Wotton with reverence

“To me he was like a second father,” said Mike Zamarchi, who played for Wotton from 1982 to 1985 as a running back and linebacker. “He touched a lot of lives here in Eliot and South Berwick, from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, even into the early ‘90s.”

Seventeen of his 21 state titles were in Maine coaching Marshwood, where his record was 220-33-1 in 27 seasons.

“He was old school and he held you accountable,” said Zamarchi, who coached briefly with Wotton before going on to teach history at Marshwood (he’s now in his 29th year) and coached basketball for 25 years. “He made sure whether you’re on the field or in the classroom, you have to be a good person. That’s how he did it and he had a special way to do it. He was a great person to be around.”

“He made you selfless,” said Rich Clough, who got his first experience playing for Wotton as a freshman kicker in 1989 and went on to play at the University of New Hampshire on the defensive line. “It was like a family. Your teammates were your brothers. Gosh, we didn’t do anything fancy. But we did it so well.”

Wotton had a magnetism that drew kids to him.

“At the time, he had the knack of making young, hard-working kids want to play for him,” said 1983 Marshwood grad Chris Ouellette, who played for and coached with Wotton. “Wotton had a great gift of making all the kids feel like they were part of the team. The 50th kid who played two plays on the team felt those two plays were important. Wotton had a way of making them feel that way. … That was his best gift. He got kids to play hard, and he got kids to want to play for him. He was good at being your buddy when you needed it and good at (motivating you) when you needed it. Looking back, he was probably harder on you in practice, but afterwards he would build you back up.”

More: A look back at Rod Wotton's final game - 2010 N.H. Division IV state championship

Dover High School coach Eric Cumba was fresh out of the University of New Hampshire in 2008 when Wotton hired him as an assistant. “He trusted me from the get-go,” Cumba said. “He was a great mentor and always kind of understood what made the kids go and what he could do to help motivate them.”

Cumba considered himself very lucky to learn from a master what it takes to lay the foundation to run a successful program. “I was given the unique opportunity to be with someone who has done it forever,” he said.

“Guys just liked him,” said Bob Ham, who played for Wotton in the 1960s and then returned in the 1970s to serve as a statistician for 20-plus years. “He was tough but fair. He was No. 1 in my book.”

“I have so much respect for that man,” said Bill Ball, the longtime coach and athletics director at Exeter High School in New Hampshire. “What he did at Marshwood and then at St. Thomas was unparalleled. He served as a real role model for a lot of people, myself included.”

Butch Arthurs came to Marshwood in 1983 to teach math and, hopefully, to coach football. He went to Wotton’s house in Rochester, New Hampshire, to talk about coaching.

“Rod was on the lawn, sitting in his lawn chair, enjoying a nice summer beverage,” Arthurs recalled. “I walked up to him, introduced myself, and it was like I knew him my entire life. He was just that type of guy.”

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Arthurs has coached high school football for over 40 years. He spent seven years under Wotton at Marshwood (1983 to 1989). From there he went to Belfast, Maine, serving as head coach.

“We ran Rod’s offense there for 17 years, and then my son ended up coaching at Old Town and Brewer, and we ran (Rod’s) offense there. Everything I did after Marshwood was modeled after Rod Wotton.”

Wotton grew up in Rochester, where he was a three-sport star at Spaulding High School. He later attended and graduated from the University of New Hampshire, playing baseball. One of his teammates was a good friend, Dan Parr.

Parr went on to coach basketball, retiring in 2016 with a New Hampshire record 704 coaching wins. Parr died earlier this year.

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Nearly 50 winning years of coaching began in the 1960s

Wotton never considered coaching any other sport but football. He took a job at small South Berwick High School as an assistant in 1961. He became the head coach the following year and Marshwood, which serves South Berwick and Eliot students, was built in 1966.

When he took the South Berwick High School job, he knew there was a good chance to get the varsity position. “There weren’t many (coaching jobs) when I graduated (from UNH),” Wotton said in 2020. “You had to take what came along. Things turned out pretty well.”

Marshwood won Wotton’s first championship in 1966 in Class D, sharing the title with Leavitt and Orono. The school continued to win as it grew, going from Class D to Class C and, eventually, to Class B and then Class A.

In 1980, Maine instituted a playoff system so there was a championship game at the end of the season. Something more tangible to play for. Wotton’s teams were 7-0 in championship games in Maine.

From 1983 to 1987 the Hawks won 45 straight games, which at the time was the longest active streak in the nation.

In 1988, the Hawks captured the Class B championship, a 32-6 win over Bucksport. The following year Wotton wanted to petition up to Class A.

“Nobody thought I should,” he said in 2020. “They thought I was crazy. I was asked ‘Do I know what I’m getting into?’ With the kids I had that year I knew what I was getting into.”

Wotton, of course, was right. Marshwood went undefeated, beating Skowhegan for its only Class A championship, 26-14.

“We won in every division,” he said, the only Maine coach to do so. “It was kind of a crooked road getting there. We got there.”

Wotton coached until 1992 and taught at Marshwood until 1994. He started as a math teacher, later transitioning to physical education.

After a short, unsatisfying coaching experience as an assistant at UNH, Wotton got back into high school coaching in his native New Hampshire at St. Thomas Aquinas in 1996.

“We were terrible to begin with,” he recalled in 2020, referring to a 15-game losing streak.

But not for long. In 1997 and again in 1998 the Saints advanced to the Division IV championship game, losing both times. Then they got it right, winning three straight titles from 1999 to 2001, and another title in 2006. His last as it turned out, 40 years after his first. Wotton called it a day following the 2010 season, his 47th as a high school football coach. In his final game, the Saints lost in the Division V championship game to Kearsarge, 12-6.

“We were competitive,” Wotton said last year. “We went all over the state of New Hampshire. Places that were just dots on the map.”

One of those stops was Fall Mountain Regional High School in Langdon, where in 2007 he earned his 323rd career win to become the winningest coach in New England. “Oh God, what a trip that is,” said Wotton, who retired to York, Maine, with his wife, Norma. “That’s real punishment.”

'His trophy case is the relationships he built with the kids'

Wotton, rightly so, will be remembered for his impressive record and numerous state championships, but that is just part of the story. He was a coach that touched so many beyond the wins and state titles.

“His trophy case is the relationships he built with the kids,” said Clough, now a defensive coordinator for Dover High School, where Rod Wotton's son Peter is the longtime athletics director. "It’s not the gold balls. When he talks about winning, it wasn’t about winning and how many championships he won, it’s the influence he had on guys like me.”

There will be no memorial service due to COVID-19. A private family service is planned. A celebration of life will be held in the spring. A Rodney C. Wotton Scholarship Fund is being started at Marshwood High School. Checks may be made out to the Marshwood High School Athletic Department and sent to the school c/o Rich Buzzell, Athletic Director, Marshwood HS, 260 Dow Highway, South Berwick, ME 03908.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Rod Wotton dies: Football coach won titles with Marshwood, St. Thomas