Suitland Coach's Influence Stretched Far Beyond the Football Field

By Preston Williams
Thursday, January 8, 2009

"During the holiday season, we lost one of our colleagues, a friend, a teacher, a father to most of you: Coach Lynch. So at this moment, I would like for Suitland High School to stop everything that we're doing and have a moment of silence for Coach Lynch."

The second after Suitland Principal Mark Fossett made his request via the school's public address system at 9:52 a.m. Monday, sirens screamed past the school, a rude intrusion to a display of respect that had halted conversations in hallways and frozen at least one student in the middle of a flight of stairs.

Then again, the timing of the wailing siren was fitting because few events could have jarred Suitland as much as losing football coach and athletic director Nick Lynch, 43, in a fatal car accident at 2:30 a.m. on the last day of the 2008, about a mile from his home. In that announcement, Fossett referred to Lynch as "the backbone of the school."

Friday evening, hundreds of Suitland students and community members gathered at a vigil for Lynch on the school's football field, which has been renamed in his honor. But Monday was the first day back to school after the holiday break, and for some, the first time to encounter the stark message on the school's marquee:

We Love You

Coach Lynch

Rest In Peace

And the first time to not see Lynch in the hallway, in a classroom, in his office, in the weight room, in the cafeteria working his usual shift, in guidance Chairwoman Angela Gaskin Stewart's office with his usual 1 p.m. lunch crowd, in the main office, on the football field.

Lynch's name was on a 2004 state championship banner at the front of the school and on a list of coaches outside the gymnasium. But Monday, the guy who had seemed to be everywhere at Suitland for 13 years was nowhere to be found.

"For some reason, I still expect him to show up and come around the corner," senior defensive back-running back Anthony Bush said that day. "When I got here, nah, he's really gone."

"I didn't want to believe it," senior quarterback Devonte Lindsey said. "I still don't really believe it. I'm trying to accept it, I guess. I just never thought he wouldn't be here."

More than 30 members of a Prince George's County schools regional crisis response team, many of them counselors, were on hand to roam the Suitland halls Monday to tend to grieving students and faculty members. As the counselors got organized in the school media center, underneath smiley face and sunshine decorations that happened to be dangling from the ceiling, they needed to track down a key supply and tool of their trade: tissues.

At one point, Tyrone Massenburg, who works security at Suitland, used to coach basketball there and who grew up with Lynch, walked through the media center and past the counselors.

"You all right, Massenburg?" one asked. The coach did not offer much of a response.

"You all right, Massenburg?" he was asked again, a bit more forcefully.

Massenburg, who said he was with Lynch the night of his death but not part of the two-car accident at Branch Avenue and Brandywine Road, appeared to consider himself more of a comforter than one to be comforted. So he soldiered on.

The Suitland football players had spent a lot of time together in the preceding days and had been addressed by school personnel and clergy members from the church where Lynch often took them. So the emotionally battered Rams were more reflective than somber as they chatted in the weight room Monday morning, even as they wore custom-made R.I.P. T-shirts with photos of Lynch.

At that point, Massenburg had had enough tears.

"Anybody that comes in there now that's weeping, we take 'em out," said Massenburg, who coaches boys' basketball at Douglass and loved to talk sports with Lynch over chicken wings. "We talk to them and let 'em know: This is a celebration room. You want to come in here, you can celebrate Coach Lynch with us. But we've already done the weeping and grieving. You can come in here and share some good times, but that's it."

Assistant coach Eric Wade, who grew up in the same Glenarden neighborhood as Lynch, recalled how Lynch was able to rattle off the name of every player on his roster in alphabetical order year after year and would know the addresses and family situations of most.

What Wade said struck him about the players' interaction Monday was how they were discussing the best way to honor their fallen coach. One suggested dedicating the upcoming season to Lynch. Another said that Lynch would want them to play for themselves, not for him.

Either way, August cannot come soon enough.

"They're physical guys, so they wish we could have a game so we could go out and play and maybe work some of this [emotion] out," Wade said outside the weight room.

To hear the Suitland players tell it, they loved and respected Lynch as much as anyone in their lives, but he sure had a knack for showing up at inopportune times. Ram after Ram mentioned how Lynch, who taught special-ed math and English, would appear out of nowhere in the school hallways in his black Nike boots, catch a student loitering and, in his signature rasp, order him to get to class. Lynch was not yet of school age when his father died.

"Teachers, they didn't call your parents," said football player Aneko McClain, who spoke Monday with one of the counselors. "They just called Coach Lynch because he was like a father to us."

"For some of these kids, that was the affection they got," Wade said. "For some of them, it may have been the only affection they got. To know that somebody cared about them. It had nothing to do with sports or anything, but as kids, the struggles they go through in their everyday lives was a lot of what he's about."

Earl Hawkins, the county's director of athletics, was on hand Monday at Suitland. He observed in the players' response some of the characteristics he saw in Lynch's teams, togetherness being one. Suitland qualified for the playoffs in nine of Lynch's 13 seasons -- the Rams' first postseason appearances -- and reached four state championships, winning two.

His death marked the second time in about three weeks that a Prince George's team had lost its coach. Northwestern boys' basketball coach Gerald Moore, 49, died of a heart attack last month.

"You really lose a part of you," Hawkins said of a young athlete dealing with a coach's death. "You miss a piece of you because they mold you and your being and what you stand for and how you live your life in many cases. But hopefully, Nick has also shaped them and prepared them for something such as this just by the way he carried himself and did not allow his team to ever make excuses or find ways to quit."

"I think they all grew up," Massenburg said, motioning to the weight room. "Now they're going to live with what he instilled in them. That's going to carry over and make them even better young men. And they can turn that over into some other young men.

"We might have two or three or four or five Coach Lynches coming out of that room now."

Varsity Letter is a weekly column about high school sports in the Washington area. E-mail Preston Williams at williamsp@washpost.com.