From the “winningest” coach to the “most valuable player,” six former athletes and coaches were inducted into the Old Rochester Regional Athletic Hall of Fame in October 2024.

The inductees range from student-athletes in the class of 1967 to the class of 2013, who competed in football, field hockey, track and field and basketball. And about a combined 100 years worth of coaching is represented, with one coach retiring as recently as 2020.

Rory McFee

Across multiple decades, Rory McFee coached several sports at Old Rochester; he started with football, then hockey. But it was girls soccer that he really wanted to coach, he said.

The job opened up in 1988. By the end of his tenure, McFee had coached a team that, like him, would later be collectively enshrined into the Old Rochester Hall of Fame.

A Mattapoisett resident, McFee said he feels “so unbelievably blessed and grateful,” as he looks back at his career, which also included years coaching Special Olympics teams, running the junior high “Survival” program and leading an effort to construct a rink behind the school.

“That's what I think is so special about working with kids — teaching, coaching, counseling,” McFee said. “Just the fact that I could spend my life working with kids, and bumping into them all over the place is such a satisfying feeling.”  

He coached the 1997 girls soccer team, which was inducted as a group into the hall of fame in 2015. They won a South Coast Conference title and outscored opponents 95-7, including 17 shutouts. The team went 23-0 until a postseason tournament loss ended the season. 

McFee said it was a “perfect storm.” 

“They were fast,” he said. “They were skillful. They had played a lot of youth soccer.”

Robert Hohne

Bob Hohne is the winningest coach in Old Rochester history. He coached girls basketball from 1978 to 2020 — earning 652 wins during the over four-decade span, according to the Old Rochester Hall of Fame.

Hohne said there were three words that were the cornerstone of his coaching and teaching philosophy. They were words imparted by Principal Frank Gifune during Hohne’s first week of teaching: passion, dedication and commitment.

“You have to have passion if you want to be good,” Hohne said. “You have to have that. You have to have that dedication, and you have to have commitment.”

Hohne began coaching the girls basketball team just a few years after the passage of Title IX, a federal law barring sex-based discrimination in education.

He took the job on three conditions, Hohne said: that the girls team be equally funded to the boys, that they have equal practice time and that the girls could play at night. Hohne also created infrastructure that supported local girls basketball, like a fundraising association and a summer league.

Twenty years later, Old Rochester would win a state championship. 

“It was a loaded team, but they were the product of all of this,” Hohne said. “They all loved basketball, and they worked at their games in the summer, offseason and so forth.”

A Mattapoisett resident, Hohne also coached hundreds of wins in boys and girls tennis.

He said his “legacy is all the kids who are on the wall in the Hall of Fame ahead of me.”

“It's not necessarily just wins or losses, but the behaviors of kids and hopefully how you have influenced them with what you brought to the table,” Hohne said.

Clifton Lopes Sr.

A graduate of the class of 1967, Clifton Lopes Sr. excelled in three sports at Old Rochester, just a few years after the high school first opened in 1961 and during a time when students had to wear shirts and ties to school. 

“Growing up, that’s all we ever did,” Lopes said of playing sports. “We played outside constantly.”

A neighborhood jammed packed with energetic kids who opted to play sports instead of watching them fostered Lopes’ love for games and the camaraderie that goes hand-in-hand with it.

He recalls looking up to the boys who played for Wareham, believing that’s where he would play given that Old Rochester high school hadn’t been quite built yet.

He was a Standard-Times All-Star in football, basketball and track and field, according to the Old Rochester Hall of Fame 

Lopes was a member of Old Rochester’s 1965-66 undefeated football team, which he said was his greatest accomplishment along with being named the Most Valuable Player his senior year. 

Even as a seventh grader, Lopes made Old Rochester’s freshman football team, which then had an undefeated season, according to former coach and athletic director Jim Hubbard.

In his time playing sports for the high school, Lopes said the coaches all meant a lot to him, especially Hubbard who was a point of inspiration.

His one regret was never making it to states with the basketball team, losing in just the last minute of the game that would have sent them to the championship.

However, he said he’s proud of what he’s accomplished and the friends he gained in his time as a student athlete, adding how “mind-boggling” it is to join his daughter Tiffany, who played soccer, basketball and track, and son Cliff Jr., who played football and basketball, in the Old Rochester Hall of Fame.

Craig Sherman

Craig Sherman competed as an athlete at Old Rochester then later coached at the school for over three decades.

A Rochester resident while a student, Sherman played center and linebacker for the 1965-66 undefeated football team, a group that allowed opponents to score just 16 total points the entire season.

The year was “amazing,” Sherman said, and the team gelled with good players and chemistry.

“We played hard, and that's exactly the background I had that propelled me forward when I did get into coaching,” Sherman said. “I took some of those same principles.”

Sherman has coached football for 50 years, including 34 at Old Rochester — 18 as a head coach and 16 as an assistant. He coached an undefeated state champion team in 1993.

There are lessons to be learned in football of hard work and loyalty and the correlation between hard work and success, according to Sherman.

“I just love the sport,” he said. “I love what it does. It's the best teaching vehicle I know to teach young men — for the most part — some of the traits they need to develop in life to be successful.”

Sherman said his 18 years as head coach at Old Rochester — in which he amassed a 113-69-5 record — were a “a tremendous, life fulfilling experience.”

To be considered for the Hall of Fame was “over and above what I had ever anticipated,” he said.

“It was my life's work,” Sherman said. “It was a passion for me, and it was rewarding itself, and the Hall of Fame was just icing on the cake.”

Lauren O’Brien

Upon moving to the Tri-Town from New Bedford in seventh grade, Lauren O’Brien tried out for the junior high field hockey team. She wasn’t sure she was going to make the team. But then they needed a goaltender, and O’Brien figured she would try it.

She fell in love with it by the time she started high school, O’Brien said.

A member of the class of 2008, O’Brien went on to finish her Old Rochester career with a .917 save percentage. 

“Being a goaltender, you can go from being a hero to zero in two seconds, so I knew that I had that mindset — that it was one play at a time, one ball at a time,” O’Brien said. “And it was a simple task, don't let it in the net.”

With O’Brien in goal, the field hockey team won multiple South Coast Conference titles, while O’Brien was named Standard-Times Player of the Year, among other honors. In 2008, O’Brien allowed three goals on 114 shots against, according to the Old Rochester Hall of Fame.

“I was excited to go to school because we had a game that day, and I honestly just had fun with it,” she said. “I was my own worst critic.”

O’Brien also excelled in basketball and competed in track and field. Now a seventh grade science teacher at Old Rochester Junior High, she said being “a strong, young female athlete is hard to come by.”

“There's not a lot of female coaches or role models anymore, and so it does feel good, and it is an honor to have been inducted,” O’Brien said.

Ally Saccone Durocher 

Ally Saccone Durocher first began running track and field at Old Rochester as a way to get in shape for the softball season. Then spring came after the winter track year, and it was time for softball.

“I was a little bit heartbroken, because I kind of fell in love with track,” Saccone Durocher said.

She returned to track and proceeded to set multiple school records. At the time of her graduation in 2013, Saccone Durocher had the third-fastest 60-meter hurdle time in state history at 8.85 seconds. She won two all-state championships in the 400-meter hurdles and set Div. 4 meet records, according to the Old Rochester Regional Hall of Fame.

“I'm very into challenging myself and competing with myself and obviously competing with everyone else, and I was obsessed with just winning,” she said. “It definitely fueled that fire that I had to defeat people and win.”

A Rochester resident as a student, Saccone Durocher also tied the school record in the high jump at 5' 3". She was named the Standard-Times Scholastic Athlete of the Year for 2012-13. 

Saccone Durocher also played field hockey and was Old Rochester’s leading scorer her junior and senior years, according to the Old Rochester Regional Hall of Fame. Fellow inductee Lauren O’Brien was the captain of the team when Saccone Durocher was a sophomore, she said.

“In the end, it really came down to just, I loved winning,” she said. “I love that feeling of winning.”