May 21—MANCHESTER — Coach Kip Jackson brought a host of his Merrimack High School football players over to meet Joe Raycraft after the banquet.
They all wanted to thank him.
“Without you, coach, they wouldn’t be here,” Jackson told Raycraft.
Raycraft, who started the Merrimack High football program in 1973, received the Andy Mooradian Award for his outstanding contributions to football at the Joe Yukica New Hampshire Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame’s 37th Annual Scholar-Athlete Awards banquet at the DoubleTree Hilton on Monday night.
The Dover native and now Penacook resident coached football and served as the athletic director at Merrimack from 1973-2000 before leaving to become the Manchester School District’s athletic director. Raycraft, 77, later returned to Merrimack as athletic director and coached the Merrimack Valley football team from 2018-22.
Over his first stint with Merrimack, Raycraft also coached the softball and girls basketball teams for a time and served as a physical education teacher.
“When you really look back on it, over 50 years, he’s had an incredible run,” said Exeter High’s longtime football coach, Bill Ball, who serves on the Yukica board of directors.
Raycraft played high school football at St. Thomas Aquinas and became interested in coaching when Lou D’Allesandro, his basketball coach at New Hampshire College (now SNHU), asked him to help with the Bishop Bradley (now Trinity) football team.
Raycraft first coached football, basketball and baseball at Bishop Brady in Concord in the late 1960s but was drawn to Merrimack by the challenge of starting a new program.
“I said, ‘If I’m going to stay coaching, let’s find out if I’m good enough to do that,'” Raycraft said. “Because if I wasn’t, I was going to find something else to do.”
During his first few…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/joe-yukica-banquet-raycraft-built-035900674.html
Author : New Hampshire Union Leader, Manchester
Publish date : 2024-05-22 03:59:00
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