Jay Darrah is a Pittsfield Panther at heart. He grew up and went to school in Pittsfield, he’s coached teams there for over 20 years and he’s the high school athletic director.
Before Pittsfield girls’ soccer kicked off its game on homecoming weekend in early October, Darrah painted the lines on the field himself; he made sure the goalposts were securely fashioned; he personally walked through the restrooms to make sure they were clean.
Later in October, Doug Cheney, the girls’ soccer coach, missed practice because he was sick. Who filled in? Darrah. Oh, and after running the girls’ soccer practice, he refereed the middle school soccer match because of a referee shortage.
Such is life for an athletic director at a small school in Division IV. At least, that’s how Darrah sees it.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say that some of the responsibilities I have as an AD here are any different than the responsibilities other ADs have because I know that some of the other smaller schools, especially in D-IV, a lot of us have the same responsibilities,” he said.
Pittsfield, like many small high schools around the state, has fewer offerings for its student athletes. In the fall, the school fields two teams – boys’ and girls’ soccer. In the winter it’s boys’ and girls’ basketball, and in the spring, athletics move to the diamond for baseball and softball. Unlike larger schools with multiple team and individual sports, there’s no track or cross country, no cold weather sports like skiing or hockey, no tennis, no golf, no swimming, no football.
Despite the limited options, Darrah, Cheney and Derek Hamilton – the principal of Pittsfield Middle High School – work around the clock to maximize the opportunities for students, just like their teachers and coaches did for them when they were all students at Pittsfield.
“I loved playing sports in high school,” Darrah said. “It’s the best memories you’ve ever had. The coaches are a big reason for that. The experience that they provided me when I was in school with my friends, I wanted to provide to the kids coming up. I’ve had opportunities to go other places to coach, and it just wouldn’t mean the same going someplace else. I want to give the kids at Pittsfield the same experience that I had. That’s why I stay, that’s why most of our coaches are here.”
With fall soccer seasons coming to an end, Darrah’s gearing up for his other job at Pittsfield: boys’ basketball coach for a program he guided to a D-IV championship in 2018. In past years, he’s also coached varsity and middle school soccer and middle school baseball because there wasn’t anyone else to lead the teams.
Athletic director and coach aren’t even Darrah’s full-time jobs – he’s a K-9 officer for the state of New Hampshire and a part-time police officer in Pittsfield.
Yet, he’s constantly checking in to make sure that games have officials, that bus schedules are running according to plan and that the weather will cooperate for any upcoming games.
Jah Gordon, a 2021 graduate of Pittsfield, was one of Darrah’s student-athletes who worked hard to take advantage of what the school had to offer. He kept a diverse pallet of extracurriculars on his agenda, playing for the soccer and basketball teams, while also participating in the school’s National Honor Society among other clubs. Now, he plays soccer for Colby-Sawyer College.
Growing up in the community, he constantly heard the negative stereotypes about Pittsfield: Pittsfield’s a bad place, there’s nothing to do there, the kids are not the smartest.
But Gordon wanted to change that perception. Athletics provided that avenue.
“We were a way to showcase our town through our athletics, through our programs,” Gordon said. “It just made us want to prove that coming from Pittsfield isn’t a bad thing.
“I was a very active member of my community in Pittsfield. I ran tons of clubs, was part of a lot of organizations, and I just wanted to show people that anybody can do it coming out of Pittsfield.”
Pittsfield is not alone in being stretched thin.
Public schools around the state face inequities because of the reliance on property taxes for the majority of school funding. In short, communities with a wealthier tax base and higher property values have a lower tax rate than smaller, lower-income communities.
The effect of this system is seen inside the classroom and on the athletic fields.
Looking at Pittsfield, the district spent nearly $19,000 per student, almost exactly the state average, for the 2020-21 academic year. For comparison, Concord’s school district spent roughly the same. Yet, Concord – with a high school student body about 10 times the size of Pittsfield’s – has substantially more athletic offerings because of the larger tax base and student population.
“Just based on the state formula and the way that New Hampshire funds education, the burden of the funding falls on our taxpayers,” Hamilton said. “With a smaller tax base in Pittsfield compared to neighboring towns such as Concord, it increases the tax rate that property owners would have to pay, so it limits some of the programming that we can offer academically and athletically to our students.”
However, Hamilton noted he felt confident that if enough students were interested in adding an athletic program, there was a coach in place and there was a clear understanding of the cost, the school board and administrative office would be willing to support them.
“But inevitably,” he added, “that burden would come back to the taxpayer.”
For Andru Volinsky, a lawyer involved in a current case arguing that the state’s over-reliance on property taxes to raise revenue for public schools is unconstitutional, this is more than just a fight about taxes; it’s about understanding the value of education.
“Public education is not a fee-for-service commodity. It is the basis for our democracy,” he said. “The better education our citizens receive, the better able they are to participate in democracy. Even if you’ve already graduated, that doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to continue to support schools because it works to your benefit to have a better-educated, more enlightened citizenry. So if we start there, then we should understand that everyone should be contributing their fair share in an equitable way because it’s in all of our common interests.”
Jeff Collins, the executive director of the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA), added that athletics are an extension of the classroom.
“The learning that goes on on the practice field and on the courts is absolutely essential,” he said. “Hard work, determination, dedication – those are intangible skills that are absolutely marketable outside of high school, going on to college and out in the workforce.”
Looking at how this materializes in high school athletics, take facilities as an example. Cheney, the girls’ soccer coach, discussed one of the road games his team played in Hopkinton early in the season.
“My girls had a chance to play on a beautiful pitch,” he said. “You could sleep on it, you could eat off of it, it was beautiful. So, we can’t afford a nice quality field or complex like some of these big schools.”
The inequity isn’t lost on the student-athletes either. But they just do their best to make do with what they have.
“It was easy to notice how much better everybody else’s fields were, but I guess that was part of what I was proud of,” Jesse MacGlashing Jr., a 2021 Pittsfield graduate who now plays baseball at Colby-Sawyer, said. “I don’t want to toot my own horn at all, but I guess it proves that you don’t have to always have the best equipment or the nicest stuff to be successful.”
He continued: “Everybody in college looks at me sideways because I came from a school that graduated maybe 20 kids in my class. I guess it shows me that you can make something big out of something small.”
For the 2022 season, Cheney’s second year coaching the team, he had a roster of 16 girls; but that included two seventh graders. Because the school has such a small student population (around 150 students), Darrah will sometimes petition the NHIAA to allow them to add younger players to the roster so they can field a team.
The small population also creates an added importance on getting younger kids to stick with sports, so by the time they reach the varsity level, there are enough players to field a team. That all starts with strong youth programs.
And in addition to keeping youth athletes engaged in one sport growing up, the small size of Pittsfield lends itself to student-athletes who play two or three sports.
MacGlashing Jr. was one of those three-sport athletes who played soccer, basketball and baseball. His graduating class was especially small, so that added to the challenges of fielding teams.
“If some of the kids hadn’t played multiple sports, I don’t think we would’ve had the opportunity to actually have teams,” he said. “I know soccer was pretty popular, so we didn’t have as much trouble with that, but when it came to basketball and baseball, to find the numbers was definitely tricky.”
For the 2021-22 school year, Pittsfield had to cut about $1 million from an operating budget of about $10.5 million. That reverberated beyond just the athletic department, but it meant Darrah’s budget was reduced almost 30 percent. He and Hamilton sat down to figure out how to get creative.
“It wasn’t something that it was just, ‘Nope, cut this, this and this,’” Darrah said of his meeting with Hamilton. “He listened. He’s a great principal. He’s a great administrator. … I think it’s because we’re a close culture. We’re all alumni. It’s not a job to a lot of us as much as it is we’re doing it because we love Pittsfield, and we love our community.”
One of the options suggested to Hamilton was cutting the middle school athletic programs and offering athletics only for high schoolers. But that was a non-starter. The thought of not having athletic opportunities for students for three years would significantly damage their programs in the long term.
Instead, they focused on making reductions at the margins instead of full eliminations. That meant reducing the number of games JV teams played, varsity coaches also running JV teams, sharing buses to road games, buying new uniforms every six years instead of every four years, among other manipulations.
And as logical as that thinking is, that doesn’t remove the challenges Darrah sometimes faces from families of students who want to play sports Pittsfield doesn’t offer.
“We have kids who come and they want to play football, and the parents are concerned, ‘How come my kid can’t play football?’” he said. “We have lost some kids in the past who want to play a certain sport, and we don’t offer it, so they tuition over to Bishop Brady or they tuition over to Concord Christian Academy, and it’s happened quite a bit recently.”
The Panthers do have an athletic booster club to raise money for extra costs. MacGlashing Jr.’s dad, Jesse MacGlashing Sr. is the current president, even though he doesn’t have any kids in the school system anymore.
“It’s the pride,” he said of why he stays involved. “Having everybody in town come together to root for the student-athletes in Pittsfield. … I’m a proud sports dad, and I loved watching both of my kids. To have other people in town who have no kids in the school come and cheer your kids on, it’s just a very rewarding experience.”
The biggest priority of the booster club is providing four $300 scholarships for student-athletes who go to college. They’ll also raise money for postseason trophies each season and to try to help make up for any costs that the athletic department can’t cover.
Pittsfield has ended specific programs in the past, though. About four years ago, they decided to cut the volleyball team but not exclusively because of funding. It was more of a numbers game. With a small student population and a greater interest among athletes in playing soccer, sustaining a volleyball team wasn’t feasible.
“Generally speaking, our students’ interests have been in the three major sports: soccer, basketball and baseball and softball,” Hamilton said. “We’ve really tried to maximize those opportunities and those programs for our students.”
Like Darrah and Hamilton, Cheney is also a Pittsfield alum. He played soccer while he was in the U.S. Navy and coached U19 club soccer and high school varsity for five years. But he initially retired from coaching three years ago.
Then, he got a call from Darrah.
“‘You’re an alumni, man. Come on back and help us out,’” Cheney recalls Darrah telling him.
He wasn’t initially convinced, but he eventually decided to return to his old stomping grounds.
“To come back as a coach, it’s like I’m giving back to what they gave me, all those years of fun and competitiveness,” he said. “You see it with my young athletes, they’ve got that spark in their eye. They want to compete now. I’m passing the torch on.”
Making Pittsfield athletics a positive experience for its students has always been central to the ethos of Darrah, Hamilton and Cheney, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“Pittsfield has done some incredible things by creating a community around their student-athletes there and inviting the community in,” Collins, the NHIAA director, said. “That’s an important piece that the high school is the centerpiece of the community and inviting people to see what’s going on there. I know Jay’s worked hard at doing those things.”
It’s an exhausting job. But athletics in a small town like Pittsfield mean a lot.
“It’s a sense of pride, it’s a sense of community,” Hamilton said. “People in Pittsfield who’ve grown up in the area most likely went to Pittsfield High School, graduated from Pittsfield High School, they connected with or have developed a sense of community with the athletic program. Whether it was supporting their teammates, their friends in athletics growing up and then having connections to those programs and coming back to support them, [or] having kids of their own grow up in Pittsfield and go through those programs, I think people have in one way or another identified with the school and its athletics programs and used that as a rallying point to support kids, to support our school because it really is a community function to support the school and particularly its athletics.”
Added Cheney: “It’s almost like it’s ownership. You’ve got ownership in the community,” he said. “You’re from here. You’ve got blood, sweat and tears here.”