Joe Yukica Jr.’s last football coaching performance might have been one of his best, never mind that it occurred at the middle school level.
The head coach at the University of New Hampshire, Boston College and Dartmouth College for more than two decades and honored as New England’s Coach of the Year at each stop, Yukica was coaxed out of retirement in 2004 by the oldest of his three sons, Joe Yukica III. The younger Yukica was overseeing three Hanover teams for sixth, seventh and eighth graders and needed expertise and organization.
His father responded by writing an entire playbook, tirelessly and patiently instructing players on the early edge of adolescence and helping the program win all but a handful of the more than 50 games the teams played during a three-year stretch.
“You could hear a pin drop when he spoke,” said Joe Yukica III, whose father, Dartmouth’s bench boss from 1978-86, died last month at age 90. “The boys might not have known his history, but their parents did and they made sure their kids knew what an opportunity they had.”
Youth sports are full of unexpected developments, and the Yukicas were involved in one during a game on Thompson Terrace. To ease communication and limit confusion, coaches were allowed to stand behind their players during games and the former college boss was there when his son called a reverse.
Hanover’s misdirection worked well, but the ball carrier veered away from the line of scrimmage, causing the only grandfather on the field to move suddenly backward. Yukica tore his Achilles tendon and his coaching days were over, once and for all.
Despite the injury, Yukica’s final exit was likely less painful than the one for which he’d become well-known two decades earlier. He and Dartmouth made national headlines when the coach sued his athletic director for breach of contract, seeking to work the final 18 months of the pact after being shown the door.
To that point, athletic administrators had fired coaches at will, and Dartmouth’s two prior losing seasons influenced second-year athletic director Ted Leland, to attempt to do so.
However, after a Dec. 13, 1985, court hearing during which Penn State coach Joe Paterno testified, Grafton County Superior Court Judge Walter Murphy ruled the college had violated the terms of Yukica’s contract, allowing him to work a final season, during which the Big Green went 3-6-1.
Yukica, universally regarded as a gentleman and known for rarely raising his voice, said he took his case to court as much for other coaches as for himself. He and his wife, Betty, became successful Realtors before retiring from that profession in 2010 and spending more time at the golf course and with their grandchildren.
“He was around but he didn’t want to intrude,” said current Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens, who helped the Big Green to the 1978 Ivy League title during Yukica’s first season at the team’s helm. “He was always supportive. He’d send a note after a big win or a tough loss.”
Joseph Michael Yukica Jr., was born in Aliquippa, Pa., to a father who prohibited his son from playing football because of injury concerns. Beaver County, northwest of Pittsburgh, is one of the sport’s U.S. hotbeds and produced such NFL stars as Mike Ditka, Joe Namath and Darrelle Revis.
Joe Yukica Sr., was a steel mill crane operator and farmer who’d emigrated from Croatia and spoke broken English. He often worked double shifts at the plant and was not a man to be crossed, but his 6-foot-3, 175-pound son wanted to play football badly enough that he forged his father’s signature on a permission form before his senior season at Lincoln High in Midland, Pa.
Already a basketball player, Joe Jr., performed well enough as a football tight end that he was selected as an all-star and spotted by Penn State. Yukica played for legendary Nittany Lions coach Rip Engle and one of his assistants, Paterno, who would later succeed him and become even more of a college football icon.
A knee injury midway through Yukica’s senior season ended any realistic pro football hopes. He earned a master’s degree at Penn State, where he one day spotted a Pomeroy’s Department Store model on break at the in-store coffee shop. Joe and Betty Yukica were married three months later and together for 54 years until her death in 2014.
“He was very confident but very humble,” said Joe Yukica III. “He grew up in a tough neighborhood full of Croats and Serbians and the only way he got to college was through football. Otherwise, he’s probably in the steel mill for life.”
A young man on the rise, Yukica by 1958 was the Pennsylvania high school coach of the year after going 10-0 at Harrisburg’s Central Dauphin, where he started the program. After a brief tour as a West Chester (Pa.) University assistant, he was hired in 1961 by Dartmouth coach Bob Blackman, who’d called Engle looking for a recommendation on an offensive ends coach.
The Big Green won two Ivy League titles during Yukica’s first stint in Hanover and he was hired as UNH’s head coach in 1965. He took the Wildcats from laughingstock to competitive and got them to 5-3 during his second season.
Boston College, which hadn’t experienced much success since winning the 1941 Sugar Bowl, hired him in 1968 with the stated hope of returning to national prominence. Yukica remains second on the Eagles career victories list with 68, none of them bigger than B.C.’s 14-13 victory at Texas during the 1976 opener. The storied Longhorns program featured future Football Hall of Fame running back Earl Campbell at the time.
“They thought we were a high school team,” Yukica, a 2000 inductee into Boston College’s Varsity Club Hall of Fame, told the Valley News in 2018.
Yukica had only one losing season in Massachusetts and went 9-2 in 1971, but the Eagles didn’t receive a bowl game invitation in the days before such contests proliferated. He had turned down an overture from old friend and Dartmouth athletic director Seaver Peters earlier in his Eagles career, but Peters renewed his courtship after Big Green coach Jake Crouthamel unexpectedly departed for the Syracuse athletic director’s job in 1978.
Dartmouth, dominant in the Ivies as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, hadn’t won an Ancient Eight crown since 1973. Yukica had always revered the tradition of the true student-athlete, but Boston College’s future schedules featured higher-profile opponents and promised only more scrutiny and pressure. The Eagles went 0-11 the season after his departure.
“He knew and loved Dartmouth and its approach,” Joe Yukica III said. “He felt he could go there and coach as long as he wanted.”
With Peters in charge, that was likely true. However, the athletic director increasingly didn’t enjoy working with college president David McLaughlin, a former Big Green football player hired in 1981, or the institution’s dean, Ralph Manuel. College sports was transforming and the Dartmouth quickly latched onto stricter, more codified admissions standards, resulting in markedly worse performance for its sports teams.
That turn would have been hard to predict when Yukica returned to town. His move startled New England sports observers and left national football pundits scratching their heads. Dartmouth, however, won the Ivy League title during his first season, when the new coach and his talented staff energized a team with few standout returnees, including Teevens, an undersized, little-known senior quarterback.
Teevens, who recently completed his 20th season as Big Green coach, divided over two terms, enrolled as one of 10 freshmen quarterbacks. He played a bit as a junior but, along with his classmates, was concerned that the incoming coach would “flush” them and embark on a full-scale rebuilding project.
Instead, Yukica featured his oldest players, although he moved some to different positions and installed an offense based more on the pass. They repaid their coach’s confidence with belief, feeding off his calm but intense personality and noting that this man knew their sport inside and out.
“He was a big guy with a presence and if you did something wrong, he’d stare at you over his reading glasses,” Teevens recalled. “But he made football fun and he was open to suggestion and we felt like we were working on this together.”
Dartmouth beat Yale and Pennsylvania to begin the league season but lost to Harvard, dimming its championship hopes. Three consecutive victories brought on the season finale at Princeton, where the Big Green won, 28-21. Visiting fans tore down one of Palmer Stadium’s wooden goalposts and co-captain Teevens was gifted a chunk he retains to this day.
Teevens fumbled that day and Dartmouth suffered a blocked punt, but Yukica wasn’t rattled. Instead, he called a double reverse pass.
“We all looked at each other because we couldn’t believe we were actually going to run it,” Teevens said. “But Joe had been through a lot of high-pressure situations and he handled himself so well and he was a calming influence.”
Sadly, the Boston College and Dartmouth jobs consumed enough of Yukica’s time that his two oldest sons, Joe III and Jim, each recall their father being able to watch only one of their high school football games.
Jim, who improbably landed on the television show Good Morning America after throwing seven touchdown passes for Hanover High against Lebanon in 1980, recalls his dad tucking himself into a small study to watch film of his team and its opponents before and after weeknight dinners.
“We were a real busy household and my mom was the stalwart in raising us,” Jim Yukica said. “But I never had any problems with my dad unless he wouldn’t let me use the car.”
Dartmouth shared the Ivy title in 1981 and 1982, giving Yukica crowns in three of his first five years with the Big Green and was again the New England coach of the year in 1978. That should have earned him some slack, but Ted Leland, who followed Peters as athletic director, felt otherwise.
A third-place finish in 1983, followed by sixth-place showings the next two seasons, led the corner office’s occupant to tell the coach he was done after the 1985 season.
Intrigued by the situation, my father took me out of school for a day so we could drive to Haverhill and watch the court hearing. I don’t remember much about the spectacle, except that I was surprised at Paterno’s diminutive stature and Brooklyn accent and that the adults around me reacted with genuine shock when, after a lunch break, the judge ruled in Yukica’s favor.
“I strongly feel that they’re entitled to the stated number of years on their contract,” Yukica said of coaches while discussing the issue with the Los Angeles Times shortly after the hearing. “They’ve made some long-term decisions that might hurt them short term. Then the school steps in and deprives them of an opportunity to finish what they started.
“All too often, they lose an opportunity that never comes again.”
Yukica went only 3-6-1 during his final campaign, but the Big Green did win his last game, 28-6, at Princeton. I’d worked several seasons as a Dartmouth ball boy and de facto student manager and the coach authorized my traveling with the team to New Jersey. The ride home was marked with singing, shouting and the rattling of dozens of empty beer cans each time the bus turned a corner.
The seniors disembarked at the Vermont end of Ledyard Bridge, linked arms and strode (stumbled?) across the span while singing “Men of Dartmouth” in the early morning darkness. Yukica, who’d been carried off Palmer Stadium’s field hours earlier, surely smiled.
The old coach expressed his continued love of football by starting the National Football Foundation’s New Hampshire chapter, which later adopted his name. The group raises funds to help support youth and high school programs throughout the state, growing their numbers and having local impact with the creation of Mascoma High’s team more than a decade ago.
Yukica, who since 1985 had lived adjacent to the Eastman Golf Links in Grantham, teed it up for the last time last June and attended his final Dartmouth football game last fall, a victory over visiting Princeton. He watched that contest from the Big Green football lounge, but for years had a pair of season tickets on Memorial Field’s 50-yard line.
Yukica was inducted into the Lou Holtz Upper Ohio Valley Hall of Fame in 2018, following his selection for the Beaver County Hall of Fame in 1986. He moved to Hanover Terrace, across from the town’s fire station, last September. Crouthamel is a resident there and the two often had dinner together. Kidney failure led to Yukica’s death on Jan. 20.
“My dad had a great coaching run and a great life,” Joe Yukica III said. “I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about him.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.