The 2024 Vermont high school football season is here.

Preseason practices began Monday, Aug. 12 before the season kicks off on Aug. 29.

Several Vermont high schools hired new head coaches for this upcoming season. Some of these new head coaches received a promotion while others are returning to a school they previously coached at earlier in their careers.

For more on this year’s new hires, read on below.

Andrew Breting, Poultney High School

Down in southern Vermont, Andrew Breting takes over as the head coach for the football-crazed town of Poultney following Dave Capman’s retirement after 42 seasons at the helm.

“Even though it is Division III football in Vermont they [Poultney] takes their football very seriously,” Breting said. “The whole town really gets behind the football team.”

Capman started traditions like hosting a pep rally the night before every game. The whole football team parades down Main Street before culminating the evening with a bonfire. Breting got to experience the Poultney football culture first hand having coached at Poultney for two years in 2019 and 2020.

Breting left Poultney when an opportunity arose to coach the offensive line at his alma mater of Vermont State University Castleton. He coached the Spartans for the last three years where he gained his most valuable coaching experience and now is transitioning back to high school football.

Poultney opens up the 2024 season on the road at Woodstock on Aug. 30.

More: Vermont high school football: Key dates for the 2024 season

Chris Cadorette, U-32 High School

Chris Cadorette, a lifelong Vermonter, fulfilled his dream of being the head coach at his alma mater, U-32. Cadorette was an offensive and defensive lineman in high school and college, playing at Southern Connecticut State University and Norwich University.

Cadorette has been a coach at U-32 since 2015. He has worked his way up from offensive and defensive assistant coaches to assistant varsity coach to now the head coach.

“Football has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember,” Cadorette said. “It’s an honor to give back to my community in this way by helping raise the next group of future leaders in Vermont through football.”

U-32 and North Country will play each other Week 1 as the first game of the 2024 high school sports season on Thursday, Aug. 29.

John Guebara, North Country Union High School

John Guebara, the former offensive coordinator for North Country the last three seasons, got the job after the previous coach Lonnie Wade stepped down after three decades following the program’s first title since 1997.

“I took over just to continue the continuity of the program from the previous coach,” Guebara said.

Guebara is originally from San Diego before playing college football in Dodge City, Kansas. He eventually made his way to Vermont in the early 2000s and was an assistant coach at North Country for five seasons.

Guebara has been a staple in the Northeast Kingdom for the past decade as a coach for the North Country Junior Falcon football program and has been overseeing the organization since 2015. The Junior Falcon team, a member of the Northern Vermont Youth Football League, team serves as the pipeline for the high school team.

Adam Perry, Fair Haven Union High School

A staple of the program for years, Adam Perry gets his turn to lead his alma mater at Fair Haven.

The 1997 Fair Haven graduate has been on the Slaters’ coaching staff since 2011; he took control as the defensive coordinator in 2015.

“I grew up here. I went to school here. My uncle Dennis Perry coached here for 20-plus years,” Perry said. “I’ve been around Fair Haven football since I was a little guy.”

Expectations haven’t dipped despite the loss of five North-South players headlined by Joe Buxton and Trey Lee. The Slaters went undefeated during the 2023 regular season but lost to Colchester in a low-scoring semifinal at home.  

The Slaters do return a strong core of linemen and should have between 35-40 total players at the first week of preseason.

Perry succeeds Jim Hill, who had led Fair Haven since 2019. Fair Haven heads to Windsor for its opener on Aug. 31.

More: How Vermont rallied to beat New Hampshire in the 2024 Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl

Reid Rando, Mount Mansfield Union High School

Reid Rando, returns to Vermont for his first head-coaching gig.

Previously, Rando was added to the staff the year after Mount Mansfield won the state championship in 2018 and was the Cougars offensive coordinator for two years. Rando then followed his wife down to Maryland and spent the last three years working as an offensive assistant coach at the Gilman School in Baltimore before returning to the Cougars, this time in the lead role.

“When the previous coach stepped down and the job became open I jumped all over it,” Rando said. “The administration, the students, it feels like a good fit, feels like home.”

Rando is an experienced coach having coached every position except for kicking and punting throughout his career. He spent the first six years of his career coaching the defensive side of the ball, positions he never played.

Rando will seek his first win when Mount Mansfield opens its 2024 season at home against Burlington/South Burlington on Aug. 31.

Dustin Rock, Milton High School

After working under two championship-winning coaches the past two seasons, Dustin Rock is ready to take charge at his alma mater at Milton.

The 26-year-old who graduated from Milton in 2017 and played at Vermont State University Castleton on the defensive line, Rock called his new assignment “a boyhood dream.”

“I do know how valuable the program is because I was part of it,” said Rock, who is a behavioral interventionist at Milton. “I’m very integrated into my players’ life at school. IT was very easy for me to step into it.”

Rock replaces Mike Williams, who resigned due to personal reasons following one season at the helm, according to the Rutland Herald. Previously, Rock was on Jim Provost’s staff at Milton.

“I learned a lot from both of them, it’s been a blessing to work with them,” Rock said.

Rock said he expects around 45 players to show up for the first day of camp. He also has about 10 returning seniors for a Yellowjackets squad that went 2-7 in 2023, losing in the Division II quarterfinals.

While Rock didn’t reveal his planned schemes, he expects to go in his own direction compared to his predecessor.

“It will depend on what fits our personnel,” Rock said.

Milton opens at home vs. Colchester on Aug. 30.

Kris Sabourin, BFA-St. Albans

Kris Sabourin is back on the Bobwhite sidelines.

The 2009 BFA-St. Albans graduate and former Bobwhite assistant was hired to replace his former coach, Geoff Murray, who stepped away after a long, distinguished career.

Sabourin was an all-state quarterback at BFA and then a record-setting signal-caller for  Norwich University. One of Norwich’s most accomplished football players who led the Cadets to a 30-13 record, Sabourin was inducted into the Cadets hall of fame last year. He was twice named co-offensive player of the year of his conference.

Prior to accepting the BFA head gig, Sabourin was in charge of the St. Albans Steelers youth program since 2018, according to the St. Albans Messenger.

BFA plays at Middlebury in Week 1 on Aug. 30.

Note: Otter Valley is working to hire a new head coach following Jordan Tolar’s recent departure, the Rutland Herald reported earlier this month.

Contact Judith Altneu at jaltneu@gannett.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter: @Judith_Altneu.

Contact Alex Abrami at aabrami@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter: @aabrami5.

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Move fast and break things is the credo of the tech industry, which sees that strategy as the key to enormous profits. That model has been spectacularly successful — if your definition of success includes shoveling billions of dollars into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. But if success is measured by creating online town halls — places where people can come together to discuss matters that interest them, whether its politics or the latest recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie, without all the drama and chest thumping we find on Facebook or Xwitter — Front Porch Forum in Vermont is the model.

In 2006, Michael Wood-Lewis launched Front Porch Forum in 40 Vermont neighborhoods after several years running a neighborhood internet mailing list in Burlington. An engineer by training, Wood-Lewis was constantly tinkering with different ways of running the mailing list. Should users be anonymous or identified by their real names? Real names were best for building community, he decided. Should people outside a neighborhood be allowed to join? Not if you wanted to keep it feeling safe and intimate, he believed. Local businesses are permitted to join, but they have to pay for advertising. (Local ads make up most of the company’s revenue.) Should any topics be off limits? Not necessarily, but certain behaviors should be, Wood-Lewis decided.

What he learned quickly is that if you don’t set and strongly enforce rules for how people can talk to each other, things will get ugly in a hurry. “What we say is, attack the issue, not the neighbor,” Wood-Lewis told the Washington Post recently. “If your issue is a barking dog or hypodermic needles in the park, then let’s talk about that. But don’t say, ‘This particular person’ or ‘This particular dog.’ We can’t fact check that, and you could totally destroy someone’s reputation.”

Serving Vermont Since 2006

Front Porch Forum caught on quickly and began expanding across the state. In 2011, it played a leading role in mutual aid during major flooding. Growth surged again during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 when people used the site to offer masks and coordinate grocery drop-offs for elderly neighbors. Flooding the last two years in Vermont has spurred fresh bursts of signups and activity, with the site now claiming 235,000 active members in a state with just 265,000 households. Front Porch Forum says nearly half of the adults in Vermont are active members. It is where Vermonters go to interact with their neighbors online — without disparaging each other.

While Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have sought to frame their networks as forums for free speech, Wood-Lewis said he thinks of Front Porch Forum more like a corner pub. If a patron starts making a ruckus, moderators ask that person to tone it down, and they remove anyone who doesn’t comply. In rare instances, the site imposes a “topic timeout,” temporarily shutting down a debate the moderators feel has turned sour. But Wood-Lewis said the beauty of careful moderation is that, over time, most users learn to adhere to the site’s norms on their own.

At a time when Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social media, researchers are studying Front Porch Forum to try to understand what makes for a kinder, gentler online community. It has achieved critical mass in the Green Mountain State not by embracing the growth hacks, recommendation algorithms, and dopamine-inducing features that power most social networks, but by deliberately avoiding them.

New research from the nonprofit New Public finds Front Porch Forum is one of the few online spaces in America that leaves its users feeling more informed, more civically engaged, and more connected to their neighbors, rather than less so. What’s more, its users seem to genuinely like it. “I can’t imagine life in rural Vermont without FPF,” Don Heise of Calais, Vermont, told the Washington Post. He described it as “the glue that holds our community together.”

 Move Slowly & Moderate

The secret to success for Front Porch Form is to move slowly and moderate heavily. It has no real-time feed, no like button, no recommendation algorithm, and no way to reach audiences beyond the local community. It offers users no reward for posting something provocative or sensational other than the prospect that your neighbors will see it and perhaps bring it up the next time you run into them at the grocery store. The company “ultimately exists to stimulate real world interactions among neighbors,” said Wood-Lewis. “It doesn’t exist to be an online metaverse. We’re not trying to hold people’s attention online 24/7. We’d love people’s attention for 10 minutes a day.”

While most tech giants view content moderation as a necessary evil, Front Porch Forum treats it as a core function. Twelve of its 30 full-time employees spend their days reading every user post before it’s published, rejecting any that break its rules against personal attacks, misinformation, or spam. The process is slow and laborious, but it seems to work. Front Porch Forum is the highest scoring platform ever on New Public’s “Civic Signals” criteria, which attempt to measure the health of online communities.

One recent topic that got a lot of attention was the decision by Tractor Supply to cut its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and abandon its climate commitments in response to a pressure campaign by reactionaries. The debate stayed civil, if sometimes testy, on Front Porch Forum. If anyone tried to post an ad hominem attack or denigrate a group of people, there was no evidence of it on the forum. Such posts are typically rejected by its moderators before publication. “I’m just not going to shop there,” one person posted. “Their bird seed is too expensive anyway!”

Front Porch users’ satisfaction shows how careful moderation and prioritizing civility over engagement can lead to a vastly different experience of social media, said Eli Pariser, co-director of New Public and author of a book entitled The Filter Bubble. “I think there’s a real social media fatalism that has set in, that it’s just irredeemably toxic, and never going to get any better. The goal here is to demonstrate that local conversations don’t have to be toxic. That’s a result of the business model and how they’re designed.”

81% Approval Rating

In a New Public survey of more than 13,000 Front Porch Forum users, led by University of Texas at Austin communications professor Talia Stroud, 81% of respondents reported feeling like the site makes them a “more informed citizen.” Just 26% of respondents said the same about Facebook and 32% about Nextdoor. Respondents were also more likely to report feeling safe and free to speak their minds on Front Porch Forum than on other social networks.

“It’s not totally shocking that the ‘slow food’ of social media is coming from Vermont,” a state famous for artisanal small businesses, Pariser said, acknowledging the model might not translate easily to larger, more diverse states. “But Vermont also has a class divide. And one of the things we think is notable about Front Porch Forum is it seems to kind of bridge those divides.”

While Wood-Lewis is experimenting with an expansion into Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York, he said he intends to keep it to a manageable size, and he has rejected offers to sell it to a larger company. “I agree that something like we’re doing is needed in a way that’s not being provided in the vast majority of the country,” he said. “But if you scale up a successful small enterprise, you by definition will lose what’s special about it.”

The Takeaway

Those of you who have never been to Vermont may have difficulty understanding all the nuances behind this story. Vermont is one of the most beautiful states in America, with first-class universities, great cities, rolling farmland, and some of the most amazing fall foliage you are likely to find anywhere. One of its US Senators is a Democrat, one is an Independent, and the governor is a Republican.

I visited Vermont during the Covid pandemic at a time when the rest of America was losing its mind. At a local farmers market in Waitesfield, the public was expected to wear masks and everyone did. The customers walked in an orderly counterclockwise direction to avoid most personal interactions, there were systems in place to accept payment without exchanging pathogens, and about 80% of the people were driving either a Subaru, a Volvo, or a Jeep — all with 4-wheel drive, of course.

I had a classmate in college who got a summer job working for Vermont Power. He would drive up, read the meter, then knock on the front door and present the bill. He was always paid in cash and he claims he doubled his wages by separating out the rare coins people gave him from the jars they had stashed in the pantry or under the bed. Vermonters are hard working, industrious, and frugal. They are also keenly aware that changes in the Earth’s climate seem to have targeted their state in ways that could hardly be guessed at just a decade or so ago. See Bill McKibben’s book Oil And Honey for more on that topic.

To address the climate crisis effectively, we need to be able to talk to each other without rancor and without racist or fascist tropes. It’s hard to see how the model for Front Porch Forum can be extended to other areas of the country without breaking the mold, but it would be interesting to see if some of the lessons learned by that forum could cool the toxic nature of most online communications today.

Featured image by ngoc202020 from Pixabay

MONTPELIER, Vt. — Hikers and rock climbers can return to Vermont cliffs now that peregrine falcon nesting season has ended.  

The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, in collaboration with Audubon Vermont, has confirmed that all the young falcons have learned to fly and should not be disturbed by human presence on the cliffs.

“The young peregrines have fledged, and nesting data suggest many of Vermont’s falcons had another successful year,” said Vermont Fish and Wildlife’s nongame bird biologist Jillian Kilborn.  “The falcon’s nesting success is due to a combination of factors, including good weather early in the nesting season and cooperation from hikers and rock climbers who observe a respectful distance from nesting falcons during this critical period.  Peregrine nesting success would not be possible without more than 50 volunteers who monitor the nest sites statewide from March to the end of July.” 

According to Audubon biologist Margaret Fowle, who coordinates the monitoring effort on behalf of the Fish and Wildlife Department, biologists and volunteers monitored peregrine pairs that occupied at least 45 Vermont cliffs in early spring and summer. 

“We greatly appreciate the time and effort volunteers put into monitoring the population this year, and we thank landowners and recreationists for their cooperation in protecting nesting peregrines from human disturbance,” said Fowle.

Vermont Fish and Wildlife and Audubon Vermont partner to monitor and protect peregrine nesting sites in Vermont.  Peregrine falcons were removed from the state’s Threatened and Endangered Species List in 2005.  Ongoing cooperation from recreationists and continued monitoring efforts by Vermont Fish and Wildlife and Audubon Vermont will help ensure the peregrine’s remarkable recovery in future years.