Hanover High’s Andrew Frechette played last football season with a broken thumb. His fraternal twin brother, David, toiled much of the campaign with a broken collarbone. The pair also broke with convention when choosing a college and its gridiron program.
Now at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., the Frechettes are part of a 2,100-student institution where 16% of their peers hail from foreign soil. U.S. News & World Report ranks it in the top 30 of American liberal arts colleges and in the top 10 for innovation. There’s little doubt about the quality education provided on a 53-acre campus known for liberalism, inclusion and intensity.
The football team? The Scots were winless last season and have lost two of their last four games by a combined score of 155-21, although those setbacks were to Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference opponents in the NCAA Division III top 10. Oh, and the squad practices at 6 a.m., sometimes in below-freezing temperatures not uncommon to the Twin Cities in late autumn.
Given that excellent small colleges with strong football programs proliferate within a three-hour drive of the Upper Valley, why would the Frechettes choose Macalester?
David Frechette, a first team all-state football player at Hanover, mentions Macalester’s leafy, upscale neighborhood, the engaged professors and the small class sizes. He notes how different it is to live and study among peers potentially from Idaho to Indonesia.
“In Hanover, everyone’s pretty much the same,” he said.
The Frechettes weren’t looking for an easy or predictable athletic path.
“We’re not the best team in college football but we’re trying to get better faster than anyone in college football,” said David Frechette, who’s the Scots’ third-leading rusher with 238 yards and a touchdown while averaging 3.8 yards per carry.
This season, the team is 3-5 overall and 2-5 in the MIAC with two games left in the season.
“Our younger classes are super strong,” Andrew Frechette said of Macalester’s roster and noting last year’s team lost five games by a combined 11 points. “I think there’s a bright future.”
That’s good because Macalester last posted a winning record nine years ago and has done so only four times this century. The best of those seasons, 2014, featured nine victories but also ended with a 55-2 loss in the national playoffs’ opening round. Attendance at the Scots’ 60-year old brick stadium (capacity 4,000) for a recent conference game against a nearby opponent was listed at 527 people but appeared at least 200 fewer.
The Scots’ helmets each feature a small sticker on the front that reads “Two Pct” in homage to a statistic promoted in Michael Easter’s best-selling book “The Comfort Crisis.” Easter writes that when faced with adjacent stairs or an escalator, 98% of people chose the latter, but advocates taking the stairs to build physical health and mental toughness.
“We’re looking for those two-percenters who embrace Macalester’s rigors,” said fourth-year football coach Phil Nicolaides, 35, who played at prestigious Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “It’s the social, academic and athletic equivalent of taking the stairs.”
Sam Cavallaro, who stepped down as Hanover’s head coach last year after 10 seasons at the Bears helm, said David Frechette combines the fire to drive defenders backwards with the ability to cut sharply and accelerate in crowded space. He lauded Andrew Frechette’s willingness to play on the line last season with his thumb in a cast.
David Frechette said his mother, Zoe, a Dartmouth Health social worker, helped him search for college options and first mentioned Macalester. Video clips sent there interested Matthew Reed, the Scots’ recruiting coordinator and offensive coordinator who attended New Hampshire’s Souhegan High. David Frechette visited last winter and soon applied to a school located roughly halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul in a greater metropolitan area of nearly 4 million.
“I wanted to play football and it was the best academic school I could get into,” said David Frechette, like his brother a prospective economics major. “It’s in a cool, quiet spot but there’s tons of city stuff around. As I advance in college, there are lots of internship opportunities around.”
He flew home and reported back to his brother, for whom it had only recently sunk in that his football days were over if he didn’t look at possibilities in college. Andrew decided to apply to Macalester sight unseen, and the twins now live in the same dorm, although with different roommates.
“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play football past high school at the start of my senior year,” said Andrew Frechette, who missed a chunk of games his junior season because of tendon damage in an ankle. “All the injuries had me a little discouraged. But once it hit me that it was going to be done, I became super committed to it.”
Andrew has seen sparing game action as a Scots defensive end but is a bit undersized for that position at 6 feet and 200 pounds. He and his brother, who’s 5-11 and 180 pounds, figure to benefit significantly from a strength and conditioning program of collegiate intensity. There are also innumerable details regarding tactics and techniques.
“The learning curve is a little tricky,” Andrew Frechette said. “It’s weird to watch games when I was playing more than 100 snaps in them last year and having a pretty big influence on how they turned out. I’m still having a good time. Our coach talks about how important it is to fully embrace the role you have.”
And to somehow wrap your mind around practicing before you eat breakfast. The campus slumbers while football Scots trudge towards Snelling Avenue and their artificial turf field, sometimes topped with frost.
“It sounds like hell and I was nervous when I heard, but once you get into the rhythm, you get used to it,” David Frechette said. “You just can’t stay up late.”
Said his brother: “I’m a morning person and I love it. I get to practice with nothing else on my mind and it frees up the day.”
Nicolaides recalled fighting for space on a field football shares with the men’s and women’s soccer teams. The gridders could sometimes use only half the surface in the afternoon. Their coach said the current schedule allows players to more often attend professors’ office hours, labs and tutoring sessions and said a Scots lineman was able to play in the orchestra because of it.
“We’re very transparent and it aligns with the student-athlete mission of being able to participate in clubs and other activities,” said Nicolaides, noting that it also allows the coaches to be home for dinner most weeknights. “Academics are always the priority and we cut a handful of guys loose so they can make it to 8 (a.m.) classes.”
The twins, whose father, Ethan, was a reserve receiver at Dartmouth College during the 1990s, might one day enjoy familial company during the predawn hours. Younger brother E.J., Hanover High’s current quarterback, is having a strong season and Cavallaro claims the youngster is the toughest of the three. Perhaps Nicolaides can convince another Frechette to break away to the Midwest and join the Scots clan.
Tris Wykes can be reached at ctwykes@aol.com.