Bill Trauth, Jr.
(Bill Trauth, Jr. was my elementary schoool football and baseball coach. I wrote a profile of him in 2003, when I was just starting a career in journalism. Mr. Trauth died on November 17th, 2023. I’m reposting this today, the day of his memorial service at The Buckley School in New York City. -OHR)
An August day in Harmony, Maine, north of Skowhegan and west of Bangor, is a long, quiet thing. Bill Trauth, Jr. sits these afternoons, as he has for the last 31 years, on a sweeping, screened-in porch looking out over Great Moose Lake. But, for Trauth, this August is different, and he keeps telling people “Ask me after Labor Day.”
In the mornings, he may fix a hole in a window screen on one of his cabins, but he’s not watching game films from the previous season. He might snake a cable under the house so that his mother will be able to watch T.V. in the big camp kitchen, but he will not review his team’s running times in the 40 yard dash. And his copy of How to Run the West Coast Offense remains unopened on the shelf above the trophies.
For the first time in 31 Septembers, Bill Trauth, Jr. will not return to the Buckley School in New York City this fall, and, for the first time in 60 years, Buckley will be without a Trauth on its coaching staff.
Sports Illustrated noted Trauth’s impending retirement last January in its weekly “Faces in the Crowd” feature, and pointed to his 131 match winning streak in wrestling, and the 59 league championships in football, wrestling and baseball. But, of course, the tiny blurb and photo tucked between a Super Bowl cover story and the glossy spread on Yao Ming wasn’t able to provide further details.
And, for most, further details weren’t required. Buckley is a small, private elementary school on the upper east side of Manhattan, and the retirement of a Buckley coach is hardly an event of consequence. Except that, for some, Trauth’s retirement was.
Ask any informed observer, and they will tell you that sports at the junior high school level are largely driven by the vagaries of genetics and the fortuitous onset of puberty. One gifted athlete who happens to be in nature’s fast lane can dominate a league. Bill Trauth would tell you the same thing. But, then again, he might not believe it.
In 1997, the Allen Stevenson football team, Buckley’s chief rival, was stacked. They had Keith Williams, a 6’3 wide receiver who would go on to play Division I college basketball. They also had the Faherty twins, one of whom now plays football at Yale, and the other basketball at Washington and Lee. And they had other talent as well, and they knew it. Coming into their game against Buckley that year, they were undefeated in league play, and they were hungry, having not beaten Buckely in the previous 17 seasons.
It’s understandable, then, that David Trower, the Allen Stevenson headmaster, took the unusual step of hiring two additional buses to transport parents and alumni to what was to be the league championship game at their home field on Randalls Island. The losses had gone on long enough, and, unimportant as it all was, they had become embarrassing.
But Buckley had talent in 1997 as well. Nate Thorne, who was fullback, would wind up playing with Alex Faherty at Yale, and Jonathan Combs, the tailback, was over six feet and fast. And Peter Smith, the quarterback, would go on to play four years in high school.
That fall it was the Sacred Heart girls who waited each afternoon on the corner of 73rd and 3rd, like paparazzi, for the Buckley boys to come from practice. Someone at Allen Stevenson, the girls gossiped, had posted pictures of Thorne and Smith in their locker room. Whenever the “A.S.” team went to practice, it seems their players would punch the pictures on the way out. And so there was hype.
It was the sort of challenge that Trauth welcomed. By 1997, his 24th year as head coach, his football teams had won 21 league championships, including the previous 16 in a row. His 7th and 8th grade teams — Buckley’s league was split between schools that included a ninth grade and those that did not — had not lost a game since 1976. Thus, the ‘97 Buckley football players, like those that had come before, were quietly confident.
“I try to tell my friends, my girlfriend, about Mr. Trauth,” said Nate Thorne recently, “and they don’t get it.”
Brian Walsh was Buckley’s headmaster for most of the 1980s and ‘90s. He once got his hands on a copy of Trauth’s plan for a football practice and noticed that the afternoon was divided into segments with odd time intervals, 3 minutes here, 9 minutes there. When he asked about it, wondering why drill intervals weren’t simply rounded to the nearest five, ten or fifteen minutes, Trauth said simply, “Because that’s how long it takes.”
Virtually everyone who has played for or worked with Trauth talks about the extraordinary attention to detail and methodical preparation.
Take the balls. Every boy knows about “official, regulation size.” It’s the bottom line claim scrawled in script on every helmet, ball, bat, or stick ever manufactured by an American sporting goods company. Buckley used footballs that complied with high school regulations, of course, but Trauth had discovered that “regulation size” was actually a size range. So Buckley played with a rare brand of football that was at the bare minimum of the regulation size range, a difference of only millimeters.
The week of the Allen Stevenson game, Trauth gave his players the usual pre-game “packet,” with notes from the previous games as well as a scouting report. Scouting, of course, was something that none of the other couches in the league bothered to do. Among other things, Trauth had learned which plays were run to Williams as well as the fact that Williams wore the number “1.” Naturally, the first order of business, was to outfit one of his own players with a No. 1 jersey, and to give this boy the assignment of running Williams’ routes for the rest of the week.
With the defense focused on stopping No. 1, the offense ran through its own plays. They drilled the bread-and-butter stuff: simple runs up the middle or around the end, done over and over in every possible formation. But they also went over the mis-direction plays with complex blocking assignments, and trick plays, and formations for every possible special teams scenario: punts, fake punts, kick-offs, and onside kick-offs for which there was a “hands” team. By the late ‘90s, Trauth’s playbook ran to 40 pages. It was a level of sophistication that his players would not see again unless they went on to play in college.
“Nothing was left out just because it was junior high,” he said recently from the porch in Harmony. “You know how easy it is to make excuses.”
Driving the playbook, however, was more than plodding diligence. Driving it was also the mind of the Bell Labs engineer that Trauth once was, a restless, contrarian mind.
Trauth grew up in Leonia, New Jersey, a town of 8,000 just west of the George Washington bridge, and well before the age of eight he had developed a serious stutter. It was a handicap that he and his family accepted, and then simply ignored with a kind of aristocratic pragmatism.
His parents, Bill, Sr. and Lorna, had met at Leonia High School in 1933. The former was in his senior year, handsome, and a gifted athlete. The latter, a freshman, had only just arrived from Chile.
Lorna’s father, a charlatan named Urquhart, was a British diplomat posted semi-permanently to Santiago. Aspiring perhaps to something greater, he had sent his Chilean bride and their two daughters first to London, and then to America, promising to follow shortly. He never showed, and the young mother of Santiago society was left to fend for herself in a foreign country at the height of the Depression. It was a challenge that she apparently met without complaint, and it was likely from her that Lorna and the rest of the family learned to maintain, or at least to project, a sense of ease in the face of both adversity and good fortune.
“Act like you’re used to it,” Trauth would later tell his football players when they scored a touchdown, never failing to reprimand those who veered towards ostentation.
Lorna and Bill, Sr. were married shortly after she graduated from Leonia High, and he got a job coaching at Buckley in 1943. Billy, Jr. was born the following year, the middle of three children.
Each summer, the couple took their kids north, living and working at summer camps. Bill, Sr. felt that most of the camps were poorly run, however, and in 1956, he and Lorna invested everything they had in a 900 acre hunting compound outside of Harmony. That summer the family opened the Wild Goose Camp for Boys.
And so it was that Bill, Jr. spent virtually every summer of his life at camp, and from an early age he learned every nuance of boyhood’s hopes and fears, and how to manage them.
At Leonia High, Bill, Jr. was small and still stuttered, but he played football and nearly made all-league as a scrappy guard who memorized the playbook. He scored 730 on his math SATs and went on to St. Lawrence University from which he graduated in 1966. From St. Lawrence, he took a job as a part-time researcher for Bell Labs while working towards his masters in engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. In 1969, his masters complete, the research laboratory hired him on full time.
And he might have stayed there indefinitely had his father not died of a heart attack during Buckley’s football season in 1971.
The prospect of spending the rest of his life behind a desk, without his summers off, had already begun to sit poorly with Bill, Jr. Moreover, his father’s death had left his mother and Wild Goose in limbo. Not needing much time to ponder, he offered himself to Buckley as a replacement for his father. The school gladly accepted, and he promptly quit his job at Bell Labs and joined the Buckley faculty as a “Sports Sir” — (for that is what coaches are called in the school’s vaguely Arthurian ethos.)
The following summer, he took over the summer camp with his mother, and over the next three decades, at Buckley and at Wild Goose, he fine-tuned his father’s practices and expanded upon his father’s ideas until they became his ideas and his practices, and he never looked back.
One of his ideas, which arrived in the fall of 1997, was the run-and-shoot. The run-and-shoot is a passing-intensive offensive with four wide receivers, and it had every reason to fail. Junior high school quarterbacks can’t throw. Nor can junior high school receivers catch. And junior high school linemen can’t protect the quarterback. Nobody uses the run-and-shoot in junior high.
But Trauth had seen that his own defense was vulnerable to a team that could complete even the simplest of passes, and he knew that if he could get his kids to execute, the offense would be unstoppable. And he knew he could get his kids to execute.
“He not only knew the game,” said Walsh, “he knew the developmental stage of the kids he coached.”
Like all great coaches — like his father before him — Trauth was part fundamentalist preacher and part master social engineer. Not surprisingly, his ethics were Rockwellian: a reverence for boyhood and sports, for gutsiness vs. wimpiness, for humility vs. cockiness. And underlying the rest: a deep faith in the primacy of fair competition.
“I don’t think Mr. Trauth meant to promote individualism or selfishness on the field,” says Thorne, “but he was definitely interested in causing competition.”
The Trauth system was a carefully measured, public meritocracy to make even the most geeky of organizational theorists proud. Spots on the 1997 starting team, like all others, had been earned based on obvious talent — speed or size — but also based on performance in competitive blocking or tackling drills for which Trauth maintained challenge ladders.
After each game, players received detailed notes on their performances and were awarded blue star decals, to be affixed prominently to their helmets, for any exceptional plays they might have made. (At Wild Goose, patches were awarded for achievements -- in archery, or canoeing, etc. -- at the camp’s dinner each evening.)
Individual feedback sessions during the football (and wrestling) season were made possible by the fact that Trauth had long since begun filming the games, another practice not taken up by the rival coaches.
But the key tactic for the Allen Stevenson game was the hurry-up offense.
The seeming contradiction of Trauth, given his prodigious capacity for preparation, was that he didn’t believe in work for work’s sake. Neither in football, nor in wrestling -- where it is de rigueur -- did he emphasize physical conditioning, and he had only scorn for wind sprints, which he felt tired kids out meaninglessly and actually prevented them from engaging their minds.
In 1997, instead of sprints, Trauth ended every practice with a “two minute drill,” wherein the team would run plays non-stop without a huddle as they might in an emergency situation at the end of a game when time was running out. The drill served to keep the kids moving while also preparing them for an important game situation.
Early in the season, however, Trauth realized the team had gotten so good at running the hurry-up that they could use it at any point in the games to rattle their opponents, and, with this in mind, he began to look ahead to Allen Stevenson.
Game day was clear and dry, but not overly cold for November. Allen Stevenson’s field was in the shadow of one of Robert Moses’ monolithic power-generation facilities, with three enormous, brick smoke-stacks and an incongruous row of flags which flapped brightly in the light wind. Players and teachers lined the both sides of the field along with parents and alumni, the latter a smattering of long, dark wool coats bespeaking car services and plush midtown offices.
Trauth opened with the hurry-up offense. Allen Stevenson was caught flat footed, and it took only four plays for Peter Smith — calling all his own plays at quarterback — to move the team from its own 18 yard line to midfield. Once there, Trauth brought back the huddle and began mixing I-formation running plays to Combs and Thorne with passes from the run-and-shoot. On the 13th play, Thorne powered into the Allen Stevenson end zone.
But then it was their turn. Someone had tipped off Allen Stevenson about Buckley’s No. 1 jersey, so Williams was in disguise, wearing No. 84. It wasn’t hard to spot him, however, towering over the children around him.
Allen Stevenson went straight to Williams, but Williams went nowhere. The Buckley defenders swarmed, motivated in a thousand small ways and trained beyond thought.
A Williams sweep towards the Allen Stevenson sideline gained a few yards, and a Faherty run up the middle one or two more. But then another sweep lost yardage, and on fourth down Allen Stevenson punted.
Fourteen plays later, Combs had scored six more. There was no question that Buckley would go for the two point conversions after it scored, and they converted this time as they had the previous.
Junior high school games are brief affairs. Each quarter lasts only nine minutes, and the clock runs uninterrupted until the final two. When the first half ended, Buckley was up16-0. The second half did not go better for Allen Stevenson. On their first possession, they actually lost yardage. After which, working from the run-and-shoot, Smith completed a pass to Thorne and then another to Billy Harmon, a scrawny kid with great moves who made it into the end zone. Back on offense, Allen Stevenson attempted to pass, but the ball was picked off. Touchdown number four for Buckley came on a Thorne run, after a Harmon reverse had put them close to the goal.
By the end, Buckley had scored on every possession, and Smith had completed six of ten passes for 97 yards and a touchdown. Allen Stevenson gained only 64 yards, and never came close to scoring. The final score was 32 to 0.
Bill Bradley was the ref that day. He’d worked the Manhattan Private Middle School league throughout the 90s, and before that he’d refereed for high schools and colleges.
“If we were bettors,” he said recently talking of that game, “we would’ve bet the house, the mortgage, and the boat on Allen Stevenson. But they were outplayed from the beginning to the end.” And he remarked of Trauth’s teams in general, “It’s phenomenal what they do. It’s like another world.”
The retirement party was June 12th. Nearly 200 alumni showed up for the evening, roughly one in five of all the students who had passed through Buckley’s doors during Trauth’s tenure, and a much larger percentage of those who had actually played for him. Still others sent letters and forwarded donations to the fund which had been set up in his honor. By the day of the event, the school had raised $600,000 on behalf of its outdoor sports program.
Name tags were set out on a table in the lobby of Buckley’s sports building beneath the long rows of royal blue championship banners. Returned to the place they learned to compete, ninth graders long since become stock analysts smiled uneasily at sixth graders who had made it to Vice President before them.
Eventually, they all made their way over to Mr. Trauth, which is what they all called him, and he greeted them by their last names, called them “knuckleheads,” and asked what they were up to now. Occasionally, in sharing a memory, Mr. Trauth would get stuck on a “t” or an “s,” the tendons in his neck would tense, and his former players held their expressions and knew to wait for the stuttering to end.
He was gaunter than his players remembered, but his eyes were still pale blue and intense behind his big metal framed glasses.
“Remember the films?” the football players said to each other. The baseball players remembered the pop quizzes: “Man on first and third, one out, grounder to the short stop. Where’s the play?”
And they all talked about wrestling, where everyone agreed Trauth’s systems were at their best, and where he lost only one match in his final 13 years as a coach.
“It’s really about saying thank you,” said Jay Aston of the class of 1989 who spoke first when everyone had been settled around large round tables in the basketball gym. “Your dedication was unbelievable,” Aston said, and the room nodded vigorously in agreement, as each man thought of some pivotal, confidence-boosting moment achieved under Trauth’s guidance.
Thorne spoke, and so did Ken Natori who is a local radio personality. Natori was the captain of three league champion teams at Buckley, but when he went to high school he barely made the varsity.
“He was such a good coach,” said Natori, “that I actually thought I was good.”
They had come to thank him, for sure, but they had also come to see him through adult eyes, to try to understand his success, which had once been theirs.
Finally, Mr. Trauth took the stage, and there was a standing ovation. He spoke for only a few minutes and stuck to the facts. He thanked everyone, and said that he was grateful that he had gotten to work with the greatest group of boys at the best school in the country. He said that he will play golf and spend half the year in Maine and the other half in Florida.
“I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life,” he said, and he didn’t stutter. And then he was done, and there was another standing ovation.
People lingered afterwards. Tom Broderick, who will be the head coach of the baseball team next year, held a pitcher of beer in one hand and a cup in the other. He said that the coach that most reminded him of Mr. Trauth was Lou Holtz, formerly of Notre Dame, and that he’d happily remain an assistant if it meant that Mr. Trauth would stay on.
“I’ll be coaching his baseball team,” he said. “That’s how I look at it.”
Ten weeks later, with Labor Day approaching, Trauth’s retirement remained an abstract concept -- as lost on the 2003 team and perhaps even on himself as it was on the Buckley School voice mail system, which continued to provide callers with the extension to a phone at a desk he no longer occupies.
Sitting on his porch in Harmony in the August afternoon quiet, Bill, Jr. had, at 59, outlived his father by three years, and there may be many more to go.
He and his mother, who at 86 remains vibrant, closed Wild Goose in 1994. The buildings now sit expectantly, as though at any moment boys will come paddling around the bend, or return from “Lazy Hour,” ready to lend a hand with supper — ready to do it “the Wild Goose way.”
He has never married, and he never had his own kids.
“I was with them for so long,” he says when talking of children, “and I was never really cheated out of the chance of being with them.”
There was once a woman, but it didn’t work out. “100 different reasons,” he says, but speaking of her, and her daughter by a previous marriage who died, tears come suddenly to his eyes.
“I have nothing against marriage,” he says later. “And if the right woman comes along, I wouldn’t rule it out.”
Eventually, he will head down to Florida. He sold the Trauth home in Leonia and bought a condo in Del Ray beach near a college fraternity brother, Jack Kern. At the retirement party, Kern talked about how Trauth had taken to golf.
“You have no idea,” Kern said. “We’ll go to the driving range. I’ll spend one hour, he’ll spend four hours. I used to be 10 or 15 strokes better than him, now I’m only two strokes better. And I’ve improved five strokes thanks to him.”
Even in Maine, Trauth plays golf every day, and he practices his short game on the old Wild Goose baseball diamond. He has placed orange cones at ten yard intervals on a line from home plate, over the pitchers mound, deep into center field. The cones allow him to gauge what clubs work for which distances. With the driver, however, he can send the balls far into the woods, where they knock hollowly off the pines and break the Maine silence.
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Posted by oliver at August 10, 2003 02:20 PM
