This is the final installment of the Valley News’ weekly profiles of local high school coaches this summer. It’s a chance to better know some of the people guiding Upper Valley’s student athletes. Today, we meet 55-year-old Barre, Vt., resident Bill Goldsworthy, the third-year coach of the Hartford High girls ice hockey team.
Family: Born in Jersey City, N.J., Goldsworthy grew up in St. Johnsbury, Vt., where his father, also named Bill, was a firefighter and later worked for an electrical transformer company. Mother Patricia raised younger Bill and his two older sisters, Wendy and Carol, and worked for a local furrier. Wendy breeds hunting dogs at the Kirby Mountain Kennels in East Burke, Vt., and Carol teaches middle school in Barton, Vt.
Family, Part II: Bill has been married to Beth, a bookeeper for a Berlin, Vt., electrical company, for 31 years and they have two children. Jillian, 27, is a certified public accountant working for Coca Cola in Manchester; she was once Vermont’s top-ranked female bowler under age 21. Matthew, 25, played club hockey at Lafayette University in Pennsylvania and works for Campbell Soups in Camden, N.J., while living in Philadelphia. Bill coached his kids extensively in hockey and softball during their school years.
Outdoor Ice: “I started hockey at age 5 or 6, and we played on whatever piece of ice we could shovel off because there were no formal rinks. The two indoor ones I remember were both in actual barns, one in St. Albans and another in Lyndonville. They had side boards with chicken wire on top of them. Then rinks in Barre and White River Junction went up with roofs but no sides. I remember playing defense and I couldn’t see the goaltender at the other end because the snow was blowing so hard across the ice.”
Straw Men: St. Johnsbury Academy didn’t sponsor varsity hockey until after Goldsworthy’s 1981 graduation, so he played the equivalent of Midget-level hockey, riding to games with friends in a recreation department van. When that broke down, they crammed into the back of a farming teammate’s pickup truck, burrowing under equipment bags so as not to freeze en route to road games. “We’d skate out for warmups and have hay falling off us,” Goldsworthy remembered with a chuckle.
College Daze: After a freshman year at the University of Hartford, Goldsworthy transferred to the University of Vermont for cheaper tuition and earned an electrical engineering degree in 1986. He played club hockey there and got his coaching start with a girls softball team at age 20.
Day Job: Goldsworthy teaches in Hartford High’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Math program (STEM) to sophomores, juniors and seniors and has 26 years in the field. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to integrate all four of my loves in one class,” he said.
Not That Goldy: Goldsworthy is not related to the former NHL player of the same name. “I wrote him many letters but never heard back,” Hartford’s Goldsworthy said of his more famous namesake. The other Bill Goldsworthy, a five-time NHL All-Star and 14-year player in the league, died at 51 of complications from the AIDS virus in 1996.
Honest Toil: Raised in a family of few means, Goldsworthy held all sorts of jobs as a young man. He drove trucks filled with thousands of dollars of fur coats to Boston for cleaning while working for his mother’s employer, labored as a dishwasher and ran a pizza shop in downtown Burlington. He was also briefly a General Electric field engineer before getting into teaching and drove a truck for a paper company.
Space-Age Technology: Goldsworthy followed his sisters into education. His first job was as a science teacher in Danville, Vt., where he also oversaw the computer network and its budget. A hot new hardware was called a Macintosh and made by a California company named Apple.
So Long, Solons: A three-year stop at Montpelier High saw Goldsworthy serve as its head JV football coach and as a varsity assistant, where he helped produce a state title team. He moved on to teach in South Royalton for 18 years, during which time he was a colleague of Jeff Moreno, now Hartford’s assistant principal and athletic director. He also earned a master’s degree in education from Southern New Hampshire University.
Lifelong Learning: Goldsworthy teaches summers at NVU-Lyndon’s six-week Upward Bound program, aimed at convincing low-income high school students to become the first in their families to attend college. “These are your tax dollars at work,” said Goldsworthy, who’s himself pursuing an online Ph.D. in school leadership via the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. “We’ve had kids go on to Dartmouth, Middlebury and MIT.”
Home Improvement: Goldsworthy’s summer project has been a $14,000 rebuild of his team’s locker room at Barwood Arena, made possible by fundraising and applying for grants. “I used a pressure washer to blast the mold and fungus off the walls and then bleached the whole place,” he said. “Now it’s clean and dry and we have do some painting. We’re building new flooring and lockers and installing new lighting and air exchange. If the kids feel proud of their space, it carries over to their play.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.