Former Weymouth High and Weymouth South boys track coach Ed Meehan always believed In the “we” approach of coaching his sport for nearly six decades. That approach is the reason why Meehan has coached teams to numerous league titles as well as 10 class titles and two state championships and numerous athletes to success in 50 years. His hard work in the sport earned Meehan appointments to four Hall of Fames. He was selected into the Oliver Ames High and Harvard Hall of Fames for his running abilities. Meehan was also selected for the Mass State Track Coaches and Weymouth High Athletic Hall of Fames as well. The Hall of Fame coach was honored by the town that he taught and coached in for 50 years as the track at Weymouth High’s Sergeant Mullin Field was named after Meehan with a celebration at the high school on Saturday. A stone that states what he has meant as a teacher and a coach was unveiled near one of the turns of the oval track bearing his accomplishments. “When I started, I never thought of 50 years,” Meehan said. “I guess it is mind boggling. I loved it and I received all of the credit who ran and were members of my teams and I learned from them too.” “This was about Ed Meehan,” Greg Zopatti, who was part of a 4x800 meter New England Relay winning team with Brian Cronin, Wayne Lewis and Adam Carlow and is presently the head track coach at Pembroke. “Ed cared about us. “He cared about us as men and we might have failed him at times, but he never failed us.” Mike Miller, who is the current girls cross country and track coach emceed the event and organized it with Meehan’s daughter, Kate Trudeau. He felt that Meehan had an impact on him in his opening remarks. “I’m here coaching and teaching because of Ed,” Miller said. “It is tough to try to fill his shoes as both as a teacher and as a coach. “No one has had as big an impact as Ed. He has been able to help so many young people.” “I met Ed in the early 1990s,” said Weymouth athletic director Kevin Mackin, who rehired Meehan to coach again as the boys cross country coach in 2009. “We had conversations about coaching. “His approach has been what is best for the students. It reflects his dedication to the community.” Meehan worked at getting students who could not pay their users fee a chance to get a waiver in the school’s athletic program. The number of speakers from the different eras of athletes that Meehan coached reflected how much they learned from him and what he meant to them in the ceremony that was held in an overflowed Weymouth High Gold Cafeteria. The speakers were also members of his family as well his former athletes who talked about what the coach meant to him in a serious as well as a humorous approach which included numerous imitations of him. There were stories on how Meehan picked up some his athletes and drove them to workouts or the story how he talked his miler Dan Doyle into running in the states on the morning of his graduation in 1975. Doyle ran into the states and took a helicopter back to graduate from Weymouth South in the afternoon. “Family, friends and old baby sitters,” Trudeau said. “It is fun to reminisce. I can remember shoveling the snow off the track when I was in the first grade. You learned life lessons from Ed’s teams.” Meehan, who retired as the school’s head coach in 1998 and came back in 2009 to become an assistant coach feels that he learned a great deal from his the over 1,000 athletes that he estimates that he coached. “I guess what I learned from my athletes vindicated what I felt,” Meehan said. “I felt that if you bought into something, that if you work at it and that if you were part of a team you become part of something much bigger than yourself. “I believed in it and it bounced back and reinforced to me that was the way to go. ... I coached roughly 90 seasons and a lot of the kids repeated from one season to another and they’re over a 1,000. I was also their primary teacher and had several thousand more in the classroom.” A proclamation reach by state senator Patrick O’Connor also honored Meehan. The senator remarked about another side of Meehan “When I was elected, one of the first people to congratulate me was Ed,” O’Connor said. “He wanted to fight for seniors to have the chance to get health insurance.” “I worked hard at a lot of things,” Meehan said. “I enjoyed sticking my nose into things that I felt needed to be corrected or worked on. “I found in my own personal life that if you found something that was worthwhile working for, if you work at it and your polite about it there are a lot things you can do.”
Inducted: 1994