Courtesy photo Husband and wife coacing duo Paul and Christine Rousseau guided their respective teams to state titles this past winter, Christine with boys swimming and Paul with wrestling.

NASHUA – It’s the middle of February, and Bishop Guertin High School wrestling coach Paul Rousseau was completely focused on his Cardinals who were in a quad meet at Exeter that Saturday morning into the afternoon.

Thus he wasn’t going to constantly text his wife Christine, who was coaching the Cardinals boys and girls swim teams ironically about 25 minutes away in the Division I state championship meet just that morning at the University of New Hampshire. The Cardinal boys captured their third straight state crown.

“When I got home I kept track,” Rousseau joked. “I don’t make phone calls. I’m coaching wrestling, so I’ll find out tonight. But I was happy they won, but I’m not calling every five minutes.”

And, of course, Christine Rousseau knew that, so she called her husband of 39 years on her team’s way back to Nashua on the bus. “He was very happy for me,” she said, but there was also a chuckle.”

A week later, it was Paul’s turn, as his Cardinals won their first outright Division II state title – Guertin shared a state crown with White Mountains in 1982. It was a big moment,but Christine wasn’t able to get there (the meet was at Goffstown) but their daughter kept her updated.

“The previous years I’m usually there at the end watching,” she said. “I’m usually a nervous wreck, because I want the kids to do so well. It’s like a parent in the stands, you know? And I want to see him (do well) because of all the work he puts into it, and I want to see he praise the kids give him. They just love him.”

Thus you had husband and wife, not only coaching their teams for the same school to state titles in their respective sports but both deservedly as Coach of the Year.

It was local sports history, and each have their own style and path to success. And after the season, the Rousseaus avoided tragedy, when Paul had a heart episode in early March that rendered him unconcious during a class at BG, his life likely saved by quick actions by the students and staff. Just a few days later, he went back into school after a brief hospital stay to emotionally thank everyone who saved his life.

As you can see, it was quite a few weeks prior to the pandemic shutodown for the Rousseaus.

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What is daily life like for the championship couple during the season, both of which begin in mid-November with tryouts and go to mid to late February with title meets, etc.

“It’s funny, our kids are grown and gone,” Paul Rousseau said. “I come home from wrestling practice, 5:30, quarter-to-6, and she’s heading out the door, because she has practice from 6 to 8:30. Then she comes home, I’m usually sleeping because I have to get up and go to work the next morning. Bye.

Then we start it all over again.”

And then on the weekends, Paul’s wrestling squad would have a Saturday meet and Christine’s swimmers would have one as well.

“It would be, ‘Good luck, see you tonight sometime,'” he said, or, as Christine said, “Let’s see who will be home first.”

Paul teaches math at Bishop Guertin, and has been there for nearly 20 years, and has been part of the wrestling program for some 23 consecutive seasons. Rousseau began coaching wrestling at BG his senior year in college – he was a Division II national qualifier at what was then the University of Lowell, but then worked under the legendary Paul Bellavance at Nashua High School for 17 years.

Then he went back to BG to help out then head coach Mark Phillips – at the time Rousseau owned a grocery store – and then took over the program in 2000-01. But he was a pioneer in the sport, on Nashua’s first westling team in 1975, the year he graduated.

Christine,meanwhile, was a scholarship swimmer at Ohio State out of Nashua, when she was the former Christine Hogan from the well-known athletic family in town (her brother is former Nashua and Nashua South girls hoop coach Dave Hogan, and her niece, Kelsey was just named interim head women’s basketball coach at UNH). She chose Ohio State over Boston University because BU hadn’t sent her the letter of intent.

Her freshman year Christine won the Big Ten 200 butterfly. But her father David, a former minor league baseball player and coach of the Nashua Dodgers, passed away later that year, and when she returned to OSU the following fall, it didn’t feel the same emotionally. So she returned home – against Paul’s advice.

You see, the two met because Paul was Dave Hogan’s best friend. “And I ended up dating his kid sister,” Paul said as Christine laughed in the background. “He didn’t want her to go out with me.”

As for coaching,she learned, as so many have, under another local legend, swimming coach Greg Derderian for YMCA and club swimming and at Nashua High School. While her kids were in high school, Rousseau stepped away but then four years ago Guertin athletic director Peter Paladino approached her about taking the BG job.

“I liked that idea because it was better than coaching a whole year,” Christine said. And the result has been three straight titles, something she didn’t envision.

“No, but with the quality kids we have, it just comes down to numbers,” she said. “Everything has to fall into place. They’re all working hard. You envision it but you don’t know until that last minute.”

“You know you kind of take it for granted,” Paul said. “I was very proud to get what I got, and I was even more proud of my wife for getting it.

“It was nice we finally both won. Wrestling should have won it the last couple of years, but we found ways to lose. Of course, she holds it over my head all the time. It’s just fun. But I was really proud of our family to tell you the truth.”

Christine Rousseau said really both were happy for their athletes.

“We’re really proud of the kids,” Rousseau said. “Both sets of kids were just a great bunch, and that made us feel really, really good.”

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How are their coaching styles comparable?

“Christine’s kind,” Paul said, which drew laughter from his wife. “She coaches the kids like she would coach her own childeren. I on the other hand, coached 17 years with Paul Bellevance, who would rather put a chair through a wall than politely tell you to do something.

“I come across pretty nice but when it counts, I can be a bit of a bear, a bit grouchy.”

In other words, old school.

Christine Rousseau tries to be a communicator, constantly emailing her athletes words of encouragement.

“I’m like the grandmother,” she said. “Getting them there, getting them to practice, you need to be working on this this week. So I’ve got paperwork, and (Paul) is saying, ‘They know what they need to do.'”

As Paul Rousseau said, “I don’t hold their hand, simple as that.”

The two sports the couple coach are so different, but there are some common qualities.

“You have to be mentally tough,” Paul said, and both acknowledged their both art forms because there’s so much technique involved. “All sports are fundamentals. At every level.”

“Dealing with pressure,” Christine said. “That’s the key thing, how do you deal with pressure.”

Both admit they need patience to teach their sports to kids who are novices. “You need a lot of patience,” Paul said. “As I get older, it gets tougher. You spend so much time with the kids that have been around, and help them get better, it’s tough to stop everything and teach a kid how to walk. We try to tell the new kids, just survive the first year. It’s no fun. You’re gonna get yelled out, get beat up. But next year is going to be your turn.”

But most of Christine Rousseau’s swimmers have come up through the club and recreation team ranks. But she, unlike, Paul, enjoys “working with the kids who are inexperienced, teaching them the strokes, want to just learn it. They can get better individual wise. Like Paul says, their personal best.”

The pair do run things by each other in terms of coaching.

“We run things by each other,” Paul said. “Mostly about patience, dealing with parents, troubled kids. It’s ‘What would you do if’. Just looking for advice.”

But Paul was a great help for Christine when she began coaching at Guertin, helping her navigate through school protocol, etc.

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Fast forward to the end of the seasons for both. What happened at Guertin for Paul Rousseau on March 9, the Monday after the New England Regionals, was both a jolt but also another event in a memorable winter for the Rousseaus.

“It was not a heart attack, I don’t like that,” Paul was adamant in saying. “I had a blockage. The doctors said you have three main arteries on top of your heart, the middle one, which they call ‘The Widow Maker’, was blocked. I was at my desk (in class) and I just passed out. I didn’t feel it coming on, I had no idea what was happening, 8 o’clock in the morning and I woke up in the hospital.”

His doctor told him how fortunate he was, that 97 percent of those with that type of blockage don’t survive.

“The kids in my class responded so good,” he said. “The school nurse, Kerri Turner gave me a heart massage, and then they used an AED (automated external defibrillator), blasted me and that brought me back.

“It’s crazy. The doctor said I had no heart damage, just the blockage.”

By Tuesday Rousseau was in his own room, and by Thursday he was home for lunch. And that Friday, “I stopped by school to say hello, say thank you,” he said. “It was kind of emotional, to be honest. … I feel great, to tell you the truth.”

The incident hasn’t slowed Rousseau down one bit. In fact, he did not want to teach the remote on-line learning used now during the COVID pandemic, from home and instead goes to his classroom at BG and conducts his virtual class.

“The school has allowed me,” Rousseau said. “My books are all there. I’m not a computer person. But I set up the computer up so I can teach math on my white board. Everybody’s been real supportive. I don’t like it, the kids don’t really like it, but everybody’s doing the best they can with what we have.”

Christine doesn’t teach, but rather spends her days watching the couple’s granchildren.

Both Rousseaus are set to return to coach their teams next season; Paul’s health care hasn’t steered him away. “I’m not giving it a second thought,” he said.

Both think it’s possible they repeat their championships with what they have returning for next year. Most of Christine’s top swimmers will be seniors next year and Paul has a “decent group coming back and we may have a couple of good freshmen coming in, too.”

It’s never set up this way by the NHIAA, but what if their respective championship meets were on the same day?

“(Christine) wouldn’t be able to coach,” Paul said with a chuckle. “She’d have to come watch us wrestle.”

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