CONCORD — It feels like everyone in Londonderry has a Tom Sawyer story.
It’s been nearly two decades since Sawyer coached his last football game for Londonderry High School, but he is still revered and respected in town.
Sawyer, 79, was honored with the Andy Mooradian Award for his outstanding contributions to football at the Grappone Center in Concord on Wednesday night. The Hampstead resident received the award from the Joe Yukica New Hampshire Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame at its 39th Annual Scholar-Athlete Awards banquet.
Jimmy Lauzon, Londonderry’s football coach since 2014 and current athletic director, gets stopped by Sawyer’s former players around town all the time.
“He walks on water in Londonderry,” Lauzon said.
Butch Psaledas was Sawyer’s teammate at UNH in the 1960s. Psaledas later joined Sawyer’s staff at Londonderry.
Sawyer was an intense, hardworking and smart player, Psaledas remembers. Yukica, then the Wildcats coach, nicknamed Sawyer, who played at 175 pounds, his “peanut linebacker.”
A lineman at UNH, Psaledas can think back and see Sawyer as the kind of guy he’d want to have coach his sons someday. Sawyer did go on to coach Psaledas’s sons and many of Lauzon’s players’ fathers over his 27-year tenure leading the Lancers.
Sawyer, who grew up in Watervliet, New York, became Londonderry’s first football coach in 1980 — two years after the school opened. The NHIAA Hall of Famer went 182-90 overall, winning four Division II titles (1985, 1986, 1988, 1994) and two NHIAA Division I championships (1996, 1998) before retiring after the 2007 season.
Pinkerton Academy coach Brian O’Reilly and Exeter coach Bill Ball both consider Sawyer to be one of the all-time greatest New Hampshire high school football coaches.
“He took that program from its embryonic stage Day 1 and built it into a power,” Ball said.
The Lancers’ success over his tenure was rooted in practice, Sawyer said. He made sure every minute of practice was accounted for and spent time working individually with every one of his players. The coach joked that he was like the “Tasmanian Devil,” zooming around the practice field and he was often exhausted after a session.
Everybody got coached, Sawyer said, and he taught his players through drilling.
“Repetition is the mother of learning in football,” Sawyer said.
Sawyer had a reputation for being hard on his players, but he also always had their backs, said Howard Sobolov, who served as an assistant coach under Sawyer. Plenty of Sawyer’s former players came back to see him inducted into the NHIAA Hall of Fame in 2023, and they came back again when Londonderry honored him before a football game a few years ago.
Lauzon said he never gets tired of hearing people’s Sawyer stories and appreciates Sawyer’s coaching style.
“I liked hard coaching and I liked a guy that could push you to levels in which you didn’t think you could reach,” said Lauzon, who played quarterback at Manchester West and went 1-1 against Sawyer’s Lancers during his career. “That’s unfortunately probably not as prominent now … and I think he probably made a lot of men out there through the game of football.”
In terms of Xs and Os, Sawyer was an innovator.
Like O’Reilly and Ball, Sawyer ran the Wing-T offense. Psaledas and Sawyer once traveled to the University of South Dakota to learn about option schemes the Coyotes ran out of the Wing-T.
When Lauzon tries new plays or scheme ideas, Londonderry alums often tell him that Sawyer tried them before.
Ball, who has coached Exeter for 33 seasons, said he believes that Sawyer was the first New Hampshire high school coach to run the jet sweep.
“Very difficult to prepare for,” Ball said of Sawyer. “Tremendous tactician.”
At the end of each season, Londonderry gives out the Sawyer Award to the toughest player on the team.
As a player and coach, Sawyer embodied blue-collar toughness.
And he turned Londonderry into a football town.
“They truly love him in Londonderry,” Lauzon said.
Other honorees
• Lebanon senior Oscar Gulledge was among the 38 scholar-athletes honored and won both scholarships awarded on Wednesday.
Gulledge received both the National Football Foundation Team of Distinction and Donald E. York Scholarship awards.
A linebacker/running back for the Raiders, he is a member of the National Honors and Spanish Honors societies. He also captains the Lebanon track team.
• Former Salem athletic director and current NHIAA executive director Dave Rozumek received the Joe Yukica Distinguished American Award.
• Edward Baroody and Julian Percorino of The Zoo Health Club received the James “Red” Hayes Award for community support of athletics for donating more than $100,000 worth of equipment to the Manchester West weight room.