WORCESTER—Friends and family call him Sean, his special education students call him “mister” and his players call him “coach.” But they can all add a new name in front of Mulcahy, and that is “dean.”
Doherty High School’s football coach Sean Mulcahy has quietly become the dean of Worcester high school football coaches. When his Highlanders take on Dartmouth High in a Division 3 playoff game Friday night it will be Mulcahy’s 356th as Doherty’s head coach.
His overall record is 176-179-0.
Mulcahy, 58, is so far ahead of any other city coach that he has almost lapped the field. Only two other coaches have passed the 200 mark in games coached, and the 100 mark in victories: Owen Ryder and Ron Silvestri. Ryder coached at Classical, then Burncoat, from 1961 through 1985. His teams were 110-91-7 in 208 games. Silvestri spent his entire career at what is now Worcester Tech from 1992-2010. Those teams were 106-96-3 in 205 games.
Another comparison — since Mulcahy took over late in the 1990 season the other four city public schools have had 28 different coaches.
“That just means I’m old,” he said when told of his milestone, “and you’ve got to remember that — even when I was a player — you only played eight Inter-High games so your sample size was a lot smaller. You figure 10 years of three more games and that’s 30 games.”
Maybe so, but Mulcahy has 34 years at Doherty. Ryder is next in line in that category with 25 seasons.
Mulcahy is 100 percent Worcester. He played linebacker and backup quarterback for Ralph Raymond at Doherty from 1980 to ’82, then went to Hofstra and Assumption. While he was at Assumption Mulcahy had a chance to get into coaching and joined Bill Erven’s staff with the Highlanders.
Late in the 1990 season, Erven was sidelined with a knee injury and had to sit out the Highlanders’ last three games. He was set to come back for ’91 but went on disability with the knee problem. Erven could not both coach and be on disability, so two days before training camp started, Mulcahy took over as head coach. He was 26.
“In hindsight,” he said, “when I started I was 26, and you think you’re ready but now, knowing what I know as a coach, I really wasn’t ready. I kind of feel bad for those teams. I mean, I knew what to do and I knew how to do it, but I was wet behind the ears in terms of what the job of being a head coach encompasses, especially in the city where there are a lot of responsibilities that probably don’t fall on a lot of other coaches.
“It was trial by fire. I look back at those teams now and think we might have won a few more football games.”
The first few seasons were tough ones for Mulcahy and the Highlanders. High school football had been re-aligned and Doherty played against the iron of Central Mass., schools like Wachusett, Leominster, St. Peter-Marian, Milford and Nashoba.
“The schools we played against — we were running the gauntlet,” Mulcahy said, adding, “We had a 1-10 year, a 2-9 one, and those are hard to go through. They’re frustrating.”
The Highlanders were 0-10-0 in 1994, then things bottomed out again in 2006 at 1-10-0. At that point in his career Mulcahy’s record was 59-112-0.
The bad years set the stage for the good ones, though. Doherty was 6-5 in 2007, 8-3 in 2008. Starting with ’07, the Highlanders are 115-66-0.
“There was a time when we weren’t doing very well,” Mulcahy said, “when I was worried that maybe they’d make a change. But I’ve got a great group of teachers here, a great group of players and that made a difference.
“My dad [Frank Mulcahy], who was a grammar school coach, used to say to me ‘the best coaching job you do in your career will probably be the 0-10 season.’ We started that year with 60 kids and finished with 56. They all stayed with it.”
The game has changed tremendously in the 34 years Mulcahy has been at Doherty. The Highlanders have gone from throwing two passes a game to running every play out of the shotgun. Mulcahy learned along the way from coaches like St. Peter-Marian’s Owen Kilcoyne.
“They’d run just five different plays,” Mulcahy said of the Guardians, “but they ran them almost perfectly. We could run a million plays — we’d run everything we saw on TV that weekend — but didn’t run any of them well.”
While football has changed drastically, its players have not.
“You will hear people say that kids are different,” he said, “but they’re pretty much the same. They respond to discipline. I don’t care what anyone says. They crave it. Once they know that you’re the boss, these kids do exactly what my coach would have had us do.”
Coaching city public high schools has been a tough assignment through the years. Rosters were often thin and there was a lack of fields to play on. The gridirons that existed were often as hard as iron.
The sport was adopted here in the late 1880s. The first documented games were played in 1887 and the roster was a combined one between Classical and Commerce, playing as Worcester High. More public schools opened in the early 1900s but the city still had just one combined team.
That changed in 1913 with the formation of the Inter-High League, each school fielding its own team.
Until the 1940s the Inter-High was a dreary league that featured week after week of 0-0 or 6-6 ties. From 1920 through 1937 its four members had the exact same coaching roster. Al Ott was at North, Joe Shaw at South, Ralph Ward at Commerce and Jack Cantwell at Classical.
There have been a few notable Worcester coaches with short tenures.
Most notable was Frank Cavanaugh, the only city coach to have a movie done about him, “The Iron Major.” A city native, Cavanaugh coached Worcester High in 1902 and became a college coach at Holy Cross, Dartmouth and Boston College among others. He is in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Cavanaugh was seriously wounded in World War I, thus “Iron Major,” and came back from the war to coach at B.C.
Dr. Ralph Caroll, a dentist who played major league baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics, coached South in 1918. Dr. George Delaney, a graduate of the Baltimore School of Medicine, coached Worcester High and several local schools. He was fired from his Worcester High job in 1901 for secretly calling plays from the stands during a game.
After a disappointing 3-8 season in 2022, the Highlanders are 7-1-0, back on track, back in the playoffs, and Mulcahy does not feel like it is time to slow down.
“I’v always loved coaching,” he said. “It’s a passion of mine and I haven’t lost the passion. I’d like to do it as long as I feel I’m effective and not blocking someone from the job. At this moment I go year to year.
“We go to the beach for the summer and by that second week in August I’m itching to get back to football. If I ever get to the point where I tell myself, ‘I wish we weren’t going home,’ then I’ll know it’s time to go.”
Until then, Mulcahy still has a record book to help rewrite.
Bill Ballou covered the Red Sox for the Worcester Telegram from 1997 through 2018. He has covered pro hockey in Worcester since 1994 and currently does a weekly column for the Worcester Red Sox. Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
