THE STORIED RIVALRY started with a separation.
The element that makes the feud between Pinkerton Academy and Londonderry High School in every sport unique, Astros athletic director and football coach Brian O’Reilly said, is that Londonderry kids once attended Pinkerton (along with Manchester Memorial).
In the infancy of the rivalry — Londonderry started its own high school in 1978 — parents of Londonderry students were Pinkerton alumni. They were also friends with the Pinkerton parents through growing up in the neighboring towns of Derry and Londonderry, and attending Pinkerton together.
“It was a serious thing,” said O’Reilly, who took over as Pinkerton’s football coach for the last two games of the 1978 season. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re playing Londonderry this week.’ It was a topic of conversation in everybody’s household on both sides through the ’80s and ’90s.”
Pinkerton and Londonderry will add another chapter to their rivalry on Saturday at 1 p.m., when the schools meet in the NHIAA Division I football championship game at Exeter High School.
Fourth-seeded Pinkerton (9-2) defeated the Lancers, 38-15, in the regular season. Saturday will mark the fourth straight final appearance for third-seeded Londonderry (9-2) and fifth in the last six years.
The only other time the Lancers and Pinkerton have met in a football state final was 1993 — a 21-0 Astros victory in the Division I title game at Londonderry.
Today, the school separation isn’t a theme, not with the passage of time and the migration of families to and from the area. But the rivalry is still among the most heated in the state.
Jimmy Lauzon, who quarterbacked Manchester West in high school, became Londonderry’s football coach in 2014 and now also serves as the school’s athletic director.
For Lauzon’s first four years coaching the Lancers, every season started with talk of, “This is the year,” he said.
“When you hear kids say, ‘This is the year,’ you’re thinking you mean to win a championship,” Lauzon said. “It was like, ‘No, this is the year to beat Pinkerton.’”
The Astros owned a 22-game winning streak over Londonderry before the Lancers ended that run with a 42-24 regular-season victory in 2019. The Lancers also defeated Pinkerton, 45-3, in the Division I quarterfinals that season on their way to their first state title since 1998.
O’Reilly vs. Sawyer
The first-ever football game between Pinkerton and Londonderry was at Londonderry in 1982. O’Reilly’s Astros won, 7-6, in overtime against the Tom Sawyer-led Lancers.
After Londonderry answered Pinkerton’s overtime touchdown with one of its own, Sawyer elected to go for the two-point conversion over a point-after kick attempt.
The Astros stopped Londonderry’s ballcarrier about one inch short of the goal line on the two-point try to clinch the win, O’Reilly remembered.
“That’s how the Pinkerton-Londonderry rivalry started — as close a game as you could get,” he said.
Sawyer, a Londonderry High and NHIAA Hall of Famer, coached the Lancers from 1980-2007, finishing with a 182-90 overall record, two Division I championships (1996, 1998) and four Division II titles (1985, 1986, 1988, 1994).
Sawyer, who, like O’Reilly, ran the Wing-T offense, is one of the state’s all-time great high school football coaches, O’Reilly said.
The two New Hampshire gridiron legends coached against each other in that 1993 Division I final on a rain-soaked, muddy field at Londonderry.
“It was like a Mack Plaque game — the field was lined with people,” O’Reilly said of the scene that day. “The Londonderry field is smallish stands-wise, which gives it a unique atmosphere. ... No matter where you turn, people are on top of you.”
Pinkerton was undefeated entering that title game and had beaten the Lancers, 40-20, in the regular season.
The teams were in different conferences that year and Londonderry’s conference was chosen as the host for the final before the season, O’Reilly said.
The Astros’ offense struggled at first, O’Reilly said, but took a 7-0 lead into halftime and got things going in the second half. Astros quarterback George “Bubba” Sealy ran for about 65 yards on a sneak that O’Reilly called mostly out of frustration. It wasn’t even a short-yardage down for Pinkerton on that play, he said.
Star running back Matt Jordan, who went on to win a national Division I-AA title at the University of Massachusetts, and fullback Russ Massahos, a Plymouth State University Hall of Famer, each rushed for an Astros touchdown that day.
Massahos’s son, Griffin, is a senior on the Londonderry football team this year.
That Division I title was Pinkerton’s second in a run of three straight from 1992-94.
Streaks
There was a time during the 22-game Pinkerton winning streak when Lauzon wasn’t sure if he would ever beat the Astros. He even started to think that he and his team might have a pre-2004 Red Sox-like curse on them during that 2019 regular-season game against Pinkerton.
The Lancers had a 35-7 advantage at halftime. Pinkerton cut that lead to 35-24 in the second half before Londonderry scored the game’s final TD on a 10-yard Jake McEachern TD run with 7:40 left.
McEachern, a QB, also tossed two TD passes in that game. Teammate Jeff Wiedenfeld added TD runs of 1 and 2 yards.
“It was like a Week 4 win, but at that time it felt like it was a playoff win or state championship win,” Lauzon said.
That victory started a seven-game winning streak for Londonderry over the Astros, which ended with a 24-20 Pinkerton win in 2023. The Lancers won the rematch in the D-I semifinals last fall, 42-7.
Pinkerton leads the all-time series 36-16-0 entering Saturday.
With a state title on the line, and an influx of alumni back in town on Thanksgiving weekend, the championship game may have an even bigger crowd than a typical Mack Plaque game.
“The kids don’t realize how fortunate they have it,” Lauzon said. “Everyone’s always focused on the next step and playing in college ... but unless you’re going to Division I (college) football, this is as big a crowd as you’re going to see for a game.”