Dear Coach Pfeiffer:

It may have been 30 years ago but I daresay that not a soul who played in that ECAC Championship Game against Williams will ever forget it. The signal victory was a fitting capstone to your excellent coaching stint at Middlebury and a harbinger of future successes for the increasingly talented Panther Lacrosse teams.

One might conclude, however, that winning teams and an ECAC Championship were the significant milestones of your time at Middlebury.

But that is not the case.

Your most important contribution to the Middlebury athletes was your steadfast example of integrity.  Your honesty, candor, humility, and commitment to hard work and simple living spoke volumes to us about what it is to live a responsible life -- at a time in our lives when discipline and responsibility were often in short supply. Self-aggrandizement was anathema to your example.  

Your philosophy and your example transcended by far any business about the significance of winning and losing games.

Remember those training runs to the farm out beyond the hospital? In the very last one of our time together there, you took the runners who were fastest and told them to team up with the runners who were slowest and help them get back.

Having spent four years trying to run back as fast as possible, a few of us had Pavlovian responses to the course: We stayed with our slower partners until the last quarter mile or so, then abandoned them in order to try to beat everyone else back and win the race.

And in so doing we lost.

Your quiet remonstration that, in essence, we had blown the assignment has stayed with me all these years.  And that is because we failed -- until that moment -- to realize what you were trying to teach us: that winning is not about coming in first or looking the best; it is about helping others in need.

And that is how you have lived your life. It is why you left Middlebury, as you said, "to help those fish who couldn't swim."

It is why we respect you today, why you influenced our lives in the positive, and why sports -- when coached by the right folks with the right values -- are transformative for youth.

Your ultimate lesson to us was that character ultimately determines destiny; that those who are blessed need to help those in need.

Thirty years later, as a father and a School Head, I can say without equivocation that you were spot-on.

From all of us who played for you and learned from you. thank you.

Mike Mulligan
Captain, '75