LEBANON — After 15 years guiding his alma mater, Chris Childs has stepped down as head coach of the Lebanon High football team.
Childs, who graduated from Lebanon in 1995, led the Raiders to their first NHIAA state championship in program history in 2010. His son, CJ, was a senior on the team that reached the Division II semifinals last fall and will play defensive back in college at Castleton University. The elder Childs informed athletic director Mike Stone of his decision on Tuesday and told the team two days later.
He finished his run with 77 wins and 55 losses.
“As (CJ) started looking at schools, it really started to hit me in the face that if he does go play in school, it’s going to be pretty hard for me to do the things I’ve always done and then go watch him play football,” Chris Childs said. “He’ll play on Saturday afternoons, and I have to be out scouting, so it’s hard for me to be able to do both those things.”
After his playing days at Lebanon finished, Childs played in the 1995 Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl. He and his full staff will coach the New Hampshire team — which includes CJ on the roster — in this summer’s Shrine Game at Castleton for his last event as a coach. Childs also coached the Granite Staters in 2011, the year after he won the state title.
Childs was a three-sport athlete with the Raiders. In addition to playing running back and linebacker in football, he was also a forward and center in basketball and a catcher in baseball — some of the most physically demanding positions in all three sports. Football was his strong suit, though, and he initially planned to continue on the gridiron at Plymouth State University.
But after just two weeks training with the Panthers, Childs decided college football wasn’t for him, so he left school and took a sales job at Plumbers Supply Company in Lebanon, where he still works to this day. Rob Johnstone, Lebanon’s longtime boys soccer coach, helped him land the position.
Childs’ coaching career began at age 21, when he started working with the Windsor junior high program under Dave Boisvert. Boisvert took the varsity head coaching position at Stevens in 2000, and Childs moved back across the river with him as an assistant. Two years after that, Childs returned to Lebanon, first at the middle school level before getting the varsity job prior to the 2007 season.
“When something means a lot to you growing up, it’s always great to want to get back to it,” Childs said. “I always wanted to get back to my roots, where I was brought up. When I got there, they weren’t used to winning. Some of my proudest moments are getting the kids to realize that being in the weight room, doing those things, that’s what produces the wins.”
The Raiders had gone through some lean years before Childs took over, and his progress was slow at first. Lebanon was 2-7 in his first season, 3-6 in his second and 4-5 in his third. But everything came together in 2010, when the Raiders completed an undefeated season with a 24-14 victory at home over Trinity for the Division IV state title.
Cody Patch was a senior running back and linebacker on that team and first met Childs when he was in the middle school program. Patch went on to play defensive back at Dartmouth, though he rarely saw the field for the Big Green.
He has stayed in touch with his former coach — Childs attended Patch’s wedding, and Patch visits him regularly at Plumbers Supply.
“The time he spends with the team that a lot of coaches don’t is the biggest thing,” Patch said.
“He’d be at morning workouts, he’d be at summer workouts, he’d be having the team work out all winter, all spring, all summer. The time and effort he put in was a big reason why he turned Lebanon football around.”
Childs never won another state championship, but his teams were regular playoff contenders in the 2010s, with at least six wins every year since 2015. The Raiders advanced to the finals in Division III in 2019, falling 28-21 to the Trinity team they had defeated nine years prior.
Now that coaching will no longer take up his time, Childs plans to focus on his day job and attending CJ’s college games, as well as raising cows on his small farm near the Lebanon-Enfield border. Even so, he will remain emotionally invested in the future of Lebanon football.
“When I got here 15 years ago, we would play teams where before we walked on the field, the kids felt like they couldn’t beat them,” Childs said. “It can’t go back to that. You have to have to have that (belief) that you can beat anybody on any given day, and I’m hoping that’s how it stays.”
Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.