In many of Mike Sherman’s 33 years as a college and pro football coach, the winter was a time of bustle and activity.
This January is a far cry from that.
There are no playoff games, bowl games, recruiting trips or even coaching vacancies on his radar right now. Sherman instead is relaxing in his sprawling home overlooking the Bass River on Cape Cod, wondering how he will fare in his latest incarnation — a leadership role in fundraising for the Nauset Endowment Foundation. It will raise money for activities such as performing arts and academic pursuits in the Nauset school district
It is, Sherman said, “something totally out of my comfort zone.”
The foundation is expected to help with teachers’ research projects and other endeavors in an area of Cape Cod known more for music and art than for blocking and tackling. But it is unlikely to help Sherman in another Nauset undertaking of his own choosing: finding players for his football team, which went 1-10 in 2015.
That, too, is totally out of Sherman’s comfort zone.
The man who recruited Johnny Manziel and coached Brett Favre is facing the biggest challenge of his coaching career. Among his array of high-profile jobs, Sherman, 61, was the coach at Texas A&M for four years and the coach of the Green Bay Packers for six.
“I felt like I’ve had the two best jobs a coach could ever have — the best NFL job and the best college job,” he said.
It would be difficult to put the Nauset Regional High School job in the same category. Nauset is a school of 1,000 students in Eastham, on the elbow of the Cape. The football program is barely 20 years old, so there are few generational ties and little institutional memory. It was almost eliminated for budgetary reasons five years ago.
Last summer, Sherman, who was the Miami Dolphins’ offensive coordinator in 2012 and 2013, was contemplating his next career move, and he turned to his five children for advice.
He had taken a year off from coaching in 2014 to oversee the construction of the house on Bass River while running football clinics and making speeches.
Sherman was considering other business prospects, moving away from the nomadic existence so typical of football coaches. But he said he had decided to avoid the business world “because the only sure way to make money on Cape Cod is to sell ice cream in the summer and coffee in the winter. I wasn’t all that fired up about either one at the time.”
But the children knew their father. They knew, instinctively, what he knew — he was a football coach.
In June, he answered the call from Nauset. Sherman, who was paid $6,000, started the season at the first football meeting with 44 students interested in playing. At the end of the season, he counted about two dozen on his roster.
As of now, he is planning to return for a second season.
“As a coach and as a father, I’ve always told my team and kids to live in the present — take care of today,” he said. “That is exactly what I am doing. There is no crystal ball. Who knows what lies ahead?”
He is settled on the Cape, with his parents two miles away and his in-laws about to move even closer. His wife, Karen, volunteers at the library.
Having a former NFL coach on the sideline of a small New England high school generated publicity, if not victories. The Warriors lost their first nine games before defeating Pembroke on Nov. 13. Sherman may have been the most high-profile one-win high school coach in history. NFL Films and NBC Sports sent video crews. Boston magazine assigned a writer to follow the team.
Defensive lineman Mike DeVito of the Kansas City Chiefs, the one Nauset graduate in the NFL, said, “It’s not every day you get an NFL coach who is coaching high school, let alone at a place like Nauset.”
He added: “I see big things, especially if Coach Sherman keeps coming back. You’ll have the experience for the players, and there’ll be the added draw to come out because they’ll want to be coached by the best.”
Those were the thoughts of a father in Upland, Calif. Once he heard that Sherman would be coaching Nauset, he sent the coach a videotape of his son, a quarterback, asking if he should think about moving to the Cape.
“I’m watching this tape thinking, ‘This guy is pretty good,’” Sherman said. “He was lighting it up, had great size and strength. Then I called his dad and found out the kid was in eighth grade. I told him to stay put.”
Then, Sherman quipped, “I wouldn’t have minded getting the kid.”
On Cape Cod, students in one town can opt to attend middle school and high school in another town. So maybe there is a star quarterback in Mashpee or Dennis waiting to learn from Sherman.
The numbers are a pressing concern. Sherman recalled the Warriors’ 36-8 loss to the traditional powerhouse Marshfield. Before the game, he saw about 50 Marshfield players and thought to himself, “This can’t be too bad.”
“But their linemen hadn’t come out yet,” he added. “They show up, and they’re all 6 feet-plus and 225 pounds-plus. They have a tight end going to Penn State. They have a center going to Boston College. They have 110 kids. We have 33.”
That number dwindled further because of injuries. The mounting defeats prompted Sherman to “readjust my thinking,” and he tried to make the game more fun over the second half of the season.
“However many kids we had at the end, I wanted to make sure we didn’t lose any more,” he said.
It was not just the losing; that gnaws at every coach. What surprised Sherman were the little things that he always took for granted at the bigger programs. The footballs would always be available — and plentiful — for pregame drills and workouts. There were three video cameras, not one. The field was always perfectly lined. There were police escorts for the team buses.
“It was hard, in the sense from where I was coming,” Sherman said.
He was also dealing with a different type of player. He said he felt a coach could influence players at any level, but, he added, “in high school, they’re more malleable. They’re unformed clay. You can mold them any way you want.”
Sherman’s 34th year in coaching produced that lone victory, but he said it was as instructive as any of the previous 33. He learned, as he put it, “that words matter, especially to young adults.”
