Hollis Brookline's Patrick Gendron is an example of a coach who comes into an entirely new world from the outside. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

Editor’s Note: The 2025 High School Football Preview Special Section is in this weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, delivered to subcribers but available to all on newstands in the Greater Nashua area.

Patrick Gendron was stuck one day recently while his Hollis Brookline High School players were prepping for practice.

Where the heck was the outdoor water spicket at the school?

“I had to fill up water,” he said. “Things you don’t even think of. I meant to text you that I’d be a few minutes late because I had to find that spicket.”

Welcome to the little hurdles a new football coach has to encounter, especially if he’s completely new to the school.

Gendron is one of three new head football coaches in the area, the others being Josh Porter at Nashua South and Justin Hufft at Alvirne. There’s really three categories: One, someone like Gendron, coming from the complete outside, as he had been a head and assistant in Massachusetts. Two, someone from outside the program but has coached in the division and around the state and knows the territory. Then there’s three, the assistant coach that has been bumped up.

Gendron said the first thing on his agenda was “Create relationships.”

He met just about everyone he could meet in the high school, “whether it could be the custodial staff, assistant athletic director, asssistant principal, principal, teachers in the building, and just meeting those people and getting my lay of the land.”

Gendron said basically he took the approach “I don’t know what I don’t know” and gathered as much info as possible.

“This is the best time because I know what I’m doing between these lines,” he said while up on the turf field practice. “At least I think I do. … But it’s all about building trust, espcially with the kids. They don’t know me, I don’t know them. Building trust, knowing I’m going to have their back, knowing we’re going to build something here.”

The first meeting this past winter it was a small group. So Gendron went to wrestling meets, basketball games, learning names, seeing a few athletes he could try to convince to play football.

“A lot of the answers at first was ‘No’, and I don’t blame them, given what the record was the past couple of years,” he said.

Bishop Guertin’s Anthony Nalen, entering his third season with the Cards, was one of those who came in from the outside, from Massachusetts. He did have one year coaching in New Hampshire at Epping, but that wasn’t Division I. He was coming to a new school in BG, complete foreign territory.

“You’ve got to find your core guys, first of all,” Nalen said. “It’s kids like Aaron Chmielecki and Sam Fayad. First you watch film and see where they’re at. Then you see them in the weight room, see how they handle 7-on-7s, see how they interact with other kids in the school, making sure they are the guy you as a new coach want to hitch your wagon to.”

Sometimes you guess wrong. “You really have to weed through that and find out who your core leaders are,” Nalen said. “It develops over time.”

For example, his first year in 2023, he had senior QB Mike MacDough, who is very soft spoken. Nalen was thinking, “Is this really the guy?”

“But,” he said, “as you watch him start to develop you realize what he means to the team and the program. It definitely takes a lot.

“Whereas a guy (coach) who’s already in the system already knows the guys. He knows the nucleus, and who the guys are he can depend on.”

South’s Porter is of the other category – the assistant promoted to the head job. Scott Knight was Purple football for the better part of two-plus decades, so he had to quickly put his label on the team.

“Establish your own identity and culture of the team is No. 1,” he said. “Get the team to understand your philosophy on things. Coach Knight was fantastic, big shoes to fill here. However he might like some things a little bit differently than I do and vice-versa.That’s OK, everybody has his own style.”

Porter has put his own stamp on things, from the weight room to how the kids behave in the hallways.

“I’m a big believer in culture,” he said. “Everybody is, right? But what does that actually mean? What I say to kids all the time is we can’t be elite on the field and not elite in other areas of life.”

And for example, the weight room sessions four days a week were at 6 a.m. “They were used to coming in a little bit later,” Porter said. “That was a little change for them.” And it was because Porter doesn’t have the summers off, and gave them a choice between early morning or at night. They chose mornings, and about 40 kids lifted regularly.

How long did it take Porter to get his stamp established? He got hired in January, so that gave him tons of time. And the response, he said, was “very good.”

What helped Porter is he’s coached every position in the five years he’s been with the program.

He divided the team into six mini teams for competitions with a leader, and had regular meetings with them.

“Let’s compete,” Porter tells his players, “in everything we’re doing.”

Hufft is a special case, falling into the outside but knows the territory category. But he is also the Broncos athletic director, so that gives him knowledge of all the athletes in the school. The thing was, he couldn’t get the football program up and running because he was under contract to Pelham as that school’s AD.

“That was a challenge, and it put us a little behind this summer,” Hufft said.

He coached at Goffstown in Division I, and last year took over the Pelham program just before the season started in an emergency situation.

But the weight room work didn’t get going until May. Meanwhile, the main thing Hufft said he needed to do was build a staff, and he began contacting people immediately the night he was hired. And he brought in 11 assistant coaches, a few like Joe Batista and Nick Hammond have been head coaches.

“You need to build a staff,” he said, “and I’m really pleased with what we’ve built here. I’ve been able to meet a lot of people over the years in coaching.”

At Pelham, because he had only been at the school a month during that summer, the first game he didn’t even know a lot of the players’ names.

At Alvirne, he’s happy what’s been going on and wants to make up for lost time and put the call out for kids to come out for football.

Milford coach Max Morelli had to take over for a Spartan legend of 20-plus years, Keith Jones.But, like Porter, he was on staff and was ready to set his own path, keeping some things and instilling his own, as most former assistants will do.

“I thought we had some troubles in the year before I took over,” he said, feeling the players’ overalll demeanor and effort wasn’t the best it could be.

“I thought we did a good job of (reversing that) last year,” he said. “That was always the first priority. We were never giving up …

“Everyone’s got a different way of doing things. I knew the kids. That obviously helped. There’s so many ways to do things, you just want to spend time making sure you get things the way you want to do them.”

Longtime Merrimack coach Kip Jackson, a former assistant at Nashua South, was an outsider but very familiar with Merrimack since he coached against the Tomahawks and also met reguarly for advice after he took the job with the coach he replaced, Dante Laurendi, who had moved to North. He had an immediate goal.

“I think it was important to create a relationship with the school community, that was important for somebody who didn’t work in the school,” Jackson said, adding he also obviously had to forge a relationship with the kids. “So much football is trust and relationships.”

It was workouts and community service work, and a decade ago Jackson was nimble enough to do some of the workouts with the players. But he felt he had a group of kids who were starving to win thanks to the work of the coaches before him.

“I think we could have told them to run across the highway if we told them that would have brought the program to another level,” Jackson said.

But again, for every new coach, there’s the simplest of things that have to be ironed out, that many take for granted. That’s why Jackson couldn’t find the right key to the weight room at 5 a.m.his first day on the job, and couldn’t get in the building.

Ahhh, those first day jitters. In that respect, coaching is like any other job when you’re new.