A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
Five decades of coaching: From gymnastics to football, Mark Dunn has done it all at Stafford High School
STAFFORD — Mark Dunn played football and ran track in high school and college. When he came to Stafford High as a physical education teacher in the fall of 1972, the administration was looking for a gymnastics coach.
He had done his student teaching in Darien and coached junior high boys gymnastics. He had told the athletic director there he knew nothing about gymnastics. The athletic director said, “You’ll learn.”
He did learn. Those gymnastics state championship banners in the Stafford High gym from 1982 and 1984 — those teams were coached by Mark Dunn.
Dunn has coached a little bit of everything at Stafford — gymnastics for 10 years, JV basketball, football for 11 years (seven as the head coach), boys and girls indoor and outdoor track and cross country.
He was the athletic director at Stafford High for 17 years.
And he’s still there, out behind the school on the track, running practices and track meets.
At age 74, Dunn is in his 50th season of coaching — he’s still
working with the girls and boys indoor and outdoor track and cross country teams. He has no plans to stop.
“The thing about Mark is that he has one of the most different coaching paths — he won state championships in gymnastics, and he was also a football coach and track and field and cross country coach,” said Stafford athletic director Damien Frassinelli, who was a student in Dunn’s physical education classes before graduating from Stafford High in 1986.
“I don’t know that there’s a lot of folks that do all those different sports during their career.”
Dunn has not only coached the children of his former athletes, he coached his son Steve in football and two of his grandchildren in track.
“I’ve had so many (good memories),” Dunn said. “Just working with the kids. We had some great wins in football. We had a rivalry with Windsor Locks and prior to that on Thanksgiving Day, it was Stafford and Tolland. Those days were a lot of fun. Had some great champions through the years in every sport.
“The most rewarding thing is when I get letters from kids who have graduated saying, ‘This is what I’m doing now. I’m a doctor, I’m a pediatrician.’ They say, ‘Thanks for the direction.’ ”
Dunn graduated from Bristol Eastern High in 1968, where he was a city and conference champion sprinter.
“There were only a few facilities for indoor track, and we ran in the Hartford Armory,” Dunn said. “You had to run short, a 45-meter dash, because if you went any further, you’d crash into the wall. The coaches would stand there to catch everybody. We went to Yale and the track had a dirt surface. We ran on dirt. It wasn’t even cinder. Hard-packed dirt.”
After a year of prep school, Dunn went to Southern Connecticut, where played football and run track. Upon graduation, he began looking for a physical education job.
“At the time, jobs in PE were kind of hard to come by,” he said. “It was very competitive. I had an interview in New York City at a very exclusive private school. I was living in Stamford at the time.
“I took the train in. I’m not a city person, I’m a country boy. I had a good interview. Got back on the train and the whole day was gone and I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ A position opened up here in Stafford; they were looking for somebody who had a basic background in gymnastics.”
He started with an intramural club program, which, at one point, had 220 boys and girls involved, and became the owner of the Stafford Gymnastics School from 1978-83. In 1977, the parents went to the board of education and asked for
a girls gymnastics team and Dunn was the coach. His teams won two state titles and the Bulldogs were the Class M runners-up in 1983.
In 1981, Dunn became the assistant football coach, then the head coach and athletic director in 1985. He started coaching boys track in 1983 and took over girls track in 1991. When legendary cross country coach Steve Levinthal died in 1995, Dunn took over cross country. His girls team was the Class SS runner-up in 1996 and the state champion in 1997.
“Steve was a national coach of the year in cross country,” Frassinelli said. “How many people could step in after a guy like that? He did a great job.”
These days, things are a little quieter. Dunn gets a list of chores from his wife Ialeen (they’ve been married 51 years) and when those are done, he heads up to the school for track practice. He has 62 kids on the team, which is large for a school with about 400 students.
“I still love working with the kids,” he said. “The nice thing is these kids want to be here. It’s a little different than being in the classroom where half of them don’t want to be there at all.” He laughed.
“Mark’s been consistent — he’s always there for the kids, straightforward, not too high, not too low — he’s not a jumping up and down kind of guy,” Frassinelli said. “He says what he needs to say, he’s direct and clear.”
When Frassinelli took the athletic director’s job, Dunn gave him some advice.
“He told me one thing that stuck with me from the beginning when I started being the AD,” Frassinelli said. “‘When you’re done with the conversation or the discussion about whatever it is you’re doing, ask one question and it is: Is this in the best interest of these kids? And then make the call.’”