Jude Kelly, who spent five decades building winning football programs at Connecticut High schools, lifting up the young men who played for them, died Saturday after a short illness. He was 73.
Kelly won 248 games and four state championships as coach at East Catholic-Manchester, Southington and St. Paul-Bristol before retiring in 2019. Two years later, he came out of retirement to restart the football program at Weaver High in Hartford, stepping away in 2022.
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Dozens of his players went on to become coaches themselves, and remember him as a devoted and gentle mentor who messaging went far beyond football.
“He was a builder,” said Jon Esmail, who played for Kelly at Southington and is now the town’s Youth Services Coordinator. “He was a builder of men, he was a builder of programs, he was a builder of community. He always instilled all of the important aspects we needed as young people playing football, and always communicated how the game of football is a direct parallel to life.”
Kelly, who graduated from Wethersfield High in 1970, played at Southern Connecticut and began his coaching career there, eventually earning a master’s degree from UConn. Taking over at the football program at East Catholic in 1979, he was 61-33 with CIAC Class M championships in 1983, 86 and 87.
“When he developed teams, created teams, it was more than that, it was families,” said Tim Feshler, who played on Kelly’s first teams at East Catholic, later coached under him at Southington at St. Paul, and became a head coach himself at Avon and Xavier-Middletown. “His teams were extremely tight. He was just a constant in all our lives. There was no judgement, just love and guidance and mentorship. And there was always a home for any of us, there was always a place with him and you felt welcomed and loved.”
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Feshler was among those who visited Kelly this week. “He just had a way of showing you, tell you, that he loved you and he cared about you,” Feshler said.
Beginning a career pattern, he left East Catholic in 1987 seeing a new challenge and moved to Southington High, where he was 115-62-2, leading the Blue Knights to a Class LL championship in 1998. Frank Stamilio, a youth football coach in town at the time, joined Kelly’s staff at Southington and has remained with the team 35 years.
“He’s a mentor, a father figure, and he teaches you all the life lessons that the beautiful game of football is,” Stamilio said. “I’m still indebted to that man. He was the kind of person you’d want your own children to grow up and emulate.”
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In 2005, Kelly moved to Bristol to take over a St. Paul program that was 0-10 the previous year with only 31 players. With declining enrollment, Kelly saw rebuilding football as a way to help keep the school from closing.
“When he came in, we were a co-op program at that point,” said Tony Mazzarella Sr., who coached under Kelly at Southington and St. Paul, eventually taking over at St. Paul. “He came in and he had a plan, and four or five years in, we were in state competition. But the impact he had on people’s lives, he set a standard of character and behavior, and he could relate to kids to well, and he did it subtly, that’s the whole thing. You didn’t realize what he was doing until you saw the outcome, and then you’d go, ‘Okay, I get it now.’”
Kelly won 70 games in 15 seasons at St. Paul, helping to develop Byron Jones, who went on to play for UConn and star in the NFL. Mazzarella and some of Kelly’s other former coaches started compiling a list of those who went on to coach at some level. “We were up to 45,” Mazzarella said. “And I know we didn’t get them all.”
Said Stamilio, “He used to tell me, ‘never let that candle go out, keep the flame going.”
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Chris Kennedy, who now coaches football and basketball with the CREC program and lacrosse at Southington, was about 9 when he first met Kelly in church in Southington.
“I’m one of the lucky ones,” Kennedy said. “I went to his youth camp every year, had the honor of playing for him, then after high school I was kind of lost and didn’t know what I was going to do. Then what I always do is go visit Coach, and I started coaching with him right away, at Southington, and I went with him to St. Paul and my son, Brycen, got to play for him. … He knew that kids were great — everywhere. The lessons he taught players and young men were seldom about X’s and O’s, he would make you a better man.”
Weaver returned to the field first as a JV team in 2021, going 8-1, then Kelly coached his last varsity season, going 2-8 in 2022.
“Why did I do this? That never comes into my mind,” Kelly told The Courant in a 2021 interview. “Just, what do we need to do today? What can we do better? Be patient, as long as we get better every day and the kids are learning life skills. We all want to win, but I don’t think I could have coached the years I did if I didn’t believe in the fact that high school football is the best thing in education.”
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Kelly leaves behind life partner Norma Kendrick and family including Kai, Hazel, Jacqueline, Alaina, Josie and Brendan Kendrick; daughter Karen Plourde, her husband Joe Plourde and their children Ethan, Logan and Ellie. Arrangements are pending.
“He was so much more than a coach,” Norma Kendrick said Sunday. “He was a good person who wanted to make the world a better place. ‘Leave a place better than you find it,’ he always said.”
