by Steve Gilbert, Keene Sentinel

Tod Silegy will cry today. That's a given. He cried on the phone talking about today. He hopes he won't blubber all over his speech, but if he does, so be it.

You see, the passage of 32 years packs a powerful wallop. It reflects the brightest days and the darkest nights, the unbridled enthusiasm of a 25-year-old coaching a college soccer team to a worn-out 46-year-old forced from the only profession he had ever known.

His passion for soccer, for coaching, for winning, had both defined him and devoured him.

"My intensity was my strength; my intensity was my weakness," he says.

So there he was 10 years ago, unemployed, the father of two daughters, 5 and 2, and a son soon to come, staring at the first day of the rest of his life.

He may have lost his occupation, but he had a family, and that would be - and remains today - his No. 1 priority.

His parents divorced, his father left his mother with five children to raise, and he vowed he would not follow that path, no matter how messy his divorce from the college he cherished and the sport he loved. He would be the best father, the best husband, he could be.

Thus, he mulled a career in sales, anything to get away from athletics.

After a few months, after talking it out with his wife Beth, he bought a lucrative-sounding bread route, drove a bread truck. Some road trip. Driving a truck wasn't quite like touring the country with his nationally ranked soccer team, or recruiting players around the world.

"I got into it and in two days I knew I didn't want to do it," he says of the bread route.

He went back into sales training, got a job selling pagers with Arch Communications, did pretty well. But waking up every morning with the objective of selling pagers, well, Willy Loman he was not. His eagerness to sell stuff soon "dissipated" and he was stuck.

At 47 years old, "I didn't know what to do," he says.

Which brings us to this evening in Rindge.

Tod Silegy, whom his former boss, Bruce Kirsh, describes as "an outstanding family man, role model and teacher," will be inducted into the Franklin Pierce University Athletic Hall of Fame.

The prodigal son is coming home.

"I was stunned," Silegy said of his reaction when Peter Brodie, chairman of the FPU Hall of Fame Committee, told him he had been voted in. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think this day would come; it was never even a goal of mine. I never thought about it, ever, ever."

Silegy, who will turn 56 on Monday, has found contentment, not as a high-profile soccer coach, but as the father of three (Emily, 15, Katie, 12, and Sam, 10) and a middle school educator.

Nine years ago, thanks to a chance meeting with old high school classmate Richard Dunning, a door opened at South Meadow School in Peterborough and Silegy stepped into a new life. He is a physical education teacher and athletic director at South Meadow, and says he couldn't be happier. Dunning is the school's principal.

Silegy, who lives in Keene, has always been a top athlete. He was a three-sport star at Conval Regional High School, and was a stalwart in Keene State College's vaunted soccer powerhouse in the mid-1970s.

He then served as an assistant for two years at Keene State, where he caught the attention of Kirsh, the newly appointed athletic director at Franklin Pierce. In one of his first hires, Kirsh took a gamble on the 26-year-old, naming him the college's head soccer coach in 1976.

"I turned over a program to him that had minimal success," Kirsh says.

"I always had a deep respect for the Keene State men's soccer program. I always felt the leadership that (Coach) Ron Butcher provided his players was something I wanted to integrate in my program."

Kirsh wasn't disappointed. In 22 years, Silegy took a middling National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics soccer team, guided it through a transition into the much tougher NCAA Division II ranks in 1988 and built a premier program.

With Silegy pushing the throttle, bringing in players from around the world, Franklin Pierce became one of the best teams in New England and beyond. Silegy won 245 matches at Franklin Pierce and lost 130. He had some teams worthy of winning it all, only to lose in spectacular heartbreak. A national championship was the carrot dangling maddeningly at the end of a stick. He never tasted it.

Oh, how it ate at him. "I was getting stretched to the max," Silegy says. "The pressure of winning - a lot of it self-pressure, not necessarily from the college - was wearing on me. The only way to go any higher was to win that national championship, that elusive national championship."

Silegy started at Franklin Pierce as a bachelor committed solely to his team: 22 years later he had a young family and faced an inevitable conflict. The losses tore at him more than ever. His family wanted more of him.

"I remember to this day Beth would say, ‘Tod, can you go to work a little later?' and, ‘Tod, can you come home a little earlier?' It doesn't work that way. In the coaching profession, a day is done when the day is done," Silegy says.

Something had to give.

Although Kirsh and Silegy still won't talk about it today, the snapping point occurred on Oct. 13, 1999, when a night match at St. Anselm College, at Singer Park in Manchester, spiraled out of control. Fights, ejections, red cards, yellow cards, verbal assaults on officials, the whole ugly mess reverberated through the league and spilled into the press.

Less than a week later, Kirsh called Silegy into his office and Silegy resigned.

"When it finally happened, when it was all done, quite honestly, it was a relief," Silegy says. "Maintaining a high-level program year in, year out, was just wearing and tearing on me."

And it tore at Kirsh, for not only was he losing a coach, he was losing a best friend. Those dark days remain taboo today.

"Tod needed some time to heal and reflect and understand what happened and how it happened," is all Kirsh will say.

It was Dunning who believed in Silegy and steered him into teaching. After spurning sales, Silegy returned to Keene State for his teaching certificate. Dunning offered Silegy the job at South Meadow on the day he interviewed for it.

He's entrenched there, nine years and counting. He coaches several sports, runs youth soccer camps and is heavily involved in his children's activities - scholastic, sports, even glowing about 10-year-old Sam's artistic talents.

But the win-at-all-costs college coach is long gone.

"I work with young kids," he says. "Whenever I coach, I teach them the right way, the fundamentals. I develop the player, not the team. The team will evolve as the players evolve. ... I teach them to be ambassadors for your school and learn how to be coached."

Though he teaches just 20 minutes from Rindge, a straight shot down Route 202 and hang a right on Route 119, it took Silegy six years before he set foot on the Franklin Pierce campus again. He did so in anonymity, just showed up for a soccer match one day.

"I wanted to watch and see what Franklin Pierce looked like," Silegy says of the new state-of-the-art fields that were put in after he left. "It was unbelievable. There was no bitterness. I guess it was like an alumni going back to his college."

When Kirsh spotted him at the game, the two talked like old friends catching up on missed years.

"Not only was I surprised, I embraced it," Kirsh says. "It was like turning the clock back. He came to a game, we had a brand-new field, but otherwise it was deja vu."

Silegy continued to go back. And Kirsh quietly pushed him for the university's hall of fame.

On Saturday afternoon, Silegy hosted a gathering at the Wheelock Park pavilion in Keene for friends, former players and just about anyone who wanted to celebrate. This evening it culminates with Silegy's induction at the FPU Fieldhouse.

"I'm indebted to two people: Bruce Kirsh and Richard Dunning," Silegy says through tears.

"This is what I owe Franklin Pierce, at a minimum: They prepared me to be a very good physical education director. I learned how to be a teacher, a family man. ..."

Kirsh, too, will have to choke back the tears.

"I always hoped that there would be a time where we could move forward," Kirsh says.

"It's going to be very emotional. He gave his all for 22 years and he loves this place. There'll always be a spot in my heart for Tod Silegy and what we did, and the friendship we have. It will be an emotional night for a lot of people."

Tears are sure to flow.

Steve Gilbert is a Sentinel editor. His column appears on Sundays.