Sharon (Beaudette) Kennedy remembers the smell of the grass at Piscataquog River Park every August when the Manchester West girls soccer team began preseason tryouts.
And Lauren Lavigne can still picture coach Jack Amero, in his old brown Saab, pulling in for practice.
Amero, who died Sept. 14 at age 76, became Manchester West’s first girls soccer coach in 1977 with little knowledge of the sport. When he retired in 2005, Amero was the state’s all-time winningest high school girls soccer coach with a 417-60-15 record and had led the program to a state-record 16 state championships.
Likely more important to Amero than his accolades, though, was the lasting positive impact he made on those around him through the decades.
“With Jack, he just wanted the best for us and it was so obvious that he wanted the best for us,” said Michelle Winning, who succeeded Amero at West in 2006 and is now the girls soccer coach at Bedford High School. “Obviously, he loved winning games but he wanted it for us — not for him and I think that’s very different for some coaches.”
The NHIAA began sponsoring a girls soccer tournament in 1980 and did not split schools into classes until 1987. West reached two of the first five state finals before winning its first championship in 1985.
The Blue Knights then won 11 of the next 14 state titles (11 in Class L) and appeared in 13 finals from 1986-99.
Amero, who also taught English at West, was inducted into the New Hampshire Soccer Coaches Hall of Fame in 1997 and the NHIAA Hall of Fame in 2017.
Amero learned soccer as he coached, knew which of his players would be best at each position and always had a well-researched game plan for West’s next opponent.
“I would describe him as a student of the game,” said Hanover High School boys soccer coach Rob Grabill, who coached the Derryfield School boys from 1975-79. “I would describe him as a players’ coach. He did more than just coach the team. He really coached the athletes as students, as humans and I think that’s one of the reasons for his longstanding success. He built something really sustainable.”
Peter Lally, who retired in 2019 as Manchester Central’s girls soccer coach after 36 seasons, was looking for a change when Amero asked him to be his first junior varsity coach in 1978.
Lally had coached girls cross country at West the previous three fall seasons and admittedly did not know anything about soccer when Amero offered him the position.
Amero didn’t need to do much convincing though, Lally said. The two met at the Raphael Social Club in Manchester when Lally was a student at Saint Anselm College and were good friends by then.
Jack Amero is at top left in the team photo from the 1993 Manchester West yearbook.
Manchester West Yearbook“We knew each other and to work with somebody that you knew and got along with is certainly a plus,” Lally said. “Off we went on our merry way.”
Lally, who led Central to five state championships, nine state finals and owns the most wins in state history (453), said Amero gave him free rein to coach the West junior varsity team how he wanted.
Amero and Lally each coached their teams at opposite ends of Piscataquog River Park and often incorporated scrimmages into practices. Players sometimes spent practices with both teams and junior varsity and varsity players were mixed together for scrimmages, which Lally said helped the program improve and players on both teams get to know each other better.
Lavigne, who played fullback at West from 1986-90 and is now an assistant director of athletics at Plymouth State University, said she remembers running plenty and often during those practices.
Winning, who graduated from West in 1995 and played goalie for the Blue Knights, said Amero focused on simplicity and repetition while encouraging his players to have fun.
That’s how she runs practices at Bedford, which won its second Division I title last year and has finished runner-up five times under Winning.
“He always got us working as a unit, but he also kind of let us have our independence in some ways — to have a character and to really be a team that can have fun together,” Winning said. “It wasn’t such a strict practice that the love of the game was lost by any of us because we went there and we had a good time with our friends.”
Whenever she stepped onto the practice field, Lavigne said she knew it was about the program and the family of West girls soccer.
“He pushed us to be great and he wasn’t going to let us not strive to be great,” said Lavigne, who coached the Plymouth State women’s basketball team from 1998-2012. “For my four years, we won three state championships and we were No. 1 in the country at one point. And, to that end, that’s not what it was about to him. He wasn’t boisterous about that. It was the ability to get a group of girls from the West Side and from the town of Bedford to come together and create these great teams.
“That’s why I believe that we had the success that we had before, after and during.”
For much of Amero’s tenure, West used a diamond formation that Lally borrowed from Blue Knights boys soccer coach Dave “Goose” Gosselin. Lally used that same system for most of his tenure at Central.
During games, Winning said, Amero emphasized winning the ball in the air, running through the ball, finishing and playing physical.
You knew whether you had played well or not after a game, Winning said, but it was always clear in Amero’s message how much he valued his players.
“In his postgame speeches, that’s what was evident — that he cared about us and he cared that we were successful for us,” Winning said. “He was a very unselfish man. He did a lot more for us than I think a lot of people realize.”
Kennedy, a 1993 West graduate who logged 180 points (87 goals, 93 assists) as a center midfielder, can still picture Amero on the sideline during games wearing his suspenders with his arms crossed, yelling for her to take more shots on goal.
“He really had a lot more confidence in me back then than I think I had in myself,” said Kennedy, who previously taught English in New York City. “Definitely over time in my 20s and living in New York City and learning how to take care of myself, I think, in the back of my mind, his voice screaming at me and really boosting my confidence is something that I’ll take with me throughout the rest of my life.”
When the Central varsity girls soccer coaching job opened in 1984, Amero encouraged Lally to apply. Lally remembers Amero saying, “What’s the worst that could happen? You don’t get it and you stay here with me.”
Central had just graduated most of the players that led the program to its 1981 and 1982 state championships when Lally took the helm, he said.
“I was starting at ground level over there but it was going to be my program to do what I thought was going to be successful,” Lally said, “and I took much of what we did at West and implemented it at Central and Central ended up, over the years, being a fairly successful program.”
The first time Lally and the Little Green faced Amero’s West team in the fall of 1984, the two coaches went out for breakfast together before the game. West won, 3-0.
West also defeated Central for the 1996 and 1997 Class L championships. When Central beat West, 1-0, to win the 2000 Class L title, Lally and Amero went to the Raphael Social Club, which they code-named “church” when in front of players.
Lally estimated there were about 4,000 fans in attendance for the 2000 final at the old Singer Family Park, which was located where Delta Dental Stadium is now. The West boys also made the Class L final that year, defeating Nashua, 6-3.
“You don’t find coaches that would go out and have a couple of beers together after you just played each other in a state final,” said Lally, who passed Amero for the state’s all-time wins record in 2016. “Jack and my friendship went beyond the soccer field.”
Winning coached the Concord High School girls soccer team from 2002-03, her first varsity head coaching job, but returned to her alma mater to coach the JVs after a phone call from Amero.
Amero told Winning he was going to retire soon and wanted her to succeed him.
“Jack got on the phone and gave me a call and was like, ‘Hey, I need someone to take over my program and I want a former player to do that,’” Winning said. “I was like, ‘OK, what do you need?’ He said, ‘I’m not going to just give it to you. You’ve got to earn it.’
“That’s how much this program meant to him. He wanted West High to continue on to be something great and he knew that all of us as his players knew what it meant. And he wanted it to go to a former player so that tradition at West would continue.”
During Winning’s one season coaching West, she felt pressure as the coach to succeed Amero but never from Amero himself. Amero, Winning said, always supported her — even when she talked with him about going to Bedford.
Winning wanted to apply to be Bedford High’s girls soccer coach ahead of the school opening in 2007. She also did not want to break her promise to Amero.
“I basically called him and said, ‘Hey, I made you a promise that I would take over your program but,’ and he cut me off and he said, ‘Michelle, I give you my blessing to put in for Bedford ... You can take the West High legacy to Bedford and make something of that program.’ I wouldn’t have taken the Bedford job if he didn’t give me his blessing.”
Whenever Winning starts to wonder if she is running the best possible practices for her players, Amero’s voice pops into her head and reminds her of what made West successful: repetition and the basics.
While coaching at Plymouth State, Lavigne said she instilled in her players the value of hard work, always striving to improve no matter how great the team’s record is and that nobody is bigger than the team.
Those are the lessons Lavigne learned while playing for Amero.
“He won a lot of state titles at West and it wasn’t because he talked about winning state titles,” Lavigne said. “It’s because he talked about hard work, he talked about community, he talked about being good teammates.”
Lavigne said many of Amero’s former players likely have similar memories to hers and she is proud to be part of the West girls soccer legacy.
When Winning returned to the program as Amero’s JV coach, she said not much had changed.
Amero had the same standards and kept the program to the same traditions. Parents still brought the white banner she and all of West’s state-title-winning players signed to home games.
“Those experiences will never fade because of the amount of positives that came out of those experiences,” Winning said. “He just made soccer really special.”