Walk onto the fields at 275 Essex Street on any night this month and you'll find three different stories happening at once. A new athletic director is still learning where things are kept. A soccer team that hasn't hung a championship banner since before its seniors were born is being told this might finally be the year. And a football program that won three games last fall is trying to convince itself, and everyone watching, that the offseason actually meant something.
None of this is unusual on its own. Coaching turnover happens. Teams rebuild. What's unusual is that it's all happening at the same time, on the same campus, in the same September. If you've lived in Lynnfield long enough to remember a different athletic director, a different soccer captain class, or a football team that actually won more than it lost, this fall is worth paying attention to before the record books settle it for you.
A New Athletic Director Learning the Job in Real Time
Steven Burndrett officially started as Lynnfield High's athletic director on August 18, arriving from Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham, where enrollment runs considerably larger than Lynnfield's. The job search wasn't quiet. Principal Patricia Puglisi said 58 people applied for the position, and Burndrett rose to the top in part because of what he found when he compared the two schools.
He pointed to something specific: both schools have an athletics participation rate of roughly 75 to 80 percent, a number he said mattered to him because it told him the culture would translate. He's also a certified Master Athletic Administrator, a credential that isn't handed out casually, and he coached baseball at Merrimack College and Westfield State before running athletic departments in Connecticut and then at Minnechaug.
What he said he wants first isn't a banner. It's trust. His plan is to get comfortable with the community and let parents get to know how he operates before he starts making the kind of calls that affect playing time and college recruiting conversations, which he considers one of his more personal missions given his own path through college athletics.
That's a low-key way to start a season. It's also exactly the kind of detail that tells you something the schedule alone won't: whoever is running Lynnfield High athletics this fall is still building relationships, not just filling out lineup cards.
The Team With the Longest Memory in Town
If any program in Lynnfield carries the weight of history this season, it's girls soccer. Coach Mark Vermont led the Pioneers to state championships in 2003 and 2004. Twenty-two years later, that banner still hasn't been joined by another one, even though Vermont was named the Cape Ann League Kinney Division's Coach of the Year last season.
Last year's team got close enough to make the near miss sting. Lynnfield finished the regular season 13-2-3, sharing the CAL Kinney Division title with longtime rival Newburyport, then entered the Division 3 state tournament as the No. 6 seed. They knocked out No. 27 Old Rochester 5-0 in the Round of 32, a result that looked like the start of something, before No. 11 Auburn eliminated them in the Round of 16, 3-2.
This year's roster returns eight starters, four of them first-team CAL All-Stars, led by four senior captains Vermont has taken to calling his "four horsemen." Giada Antidormi, headed to Bentley next year, is the reigning CAL Co-Player of the Year after a season that included 13 goals, 16 assists, First Team Eastern Massachusetts honors, and a spot on the Massachusetts All-State team. Kaylee Barrett, a Colby commit, put up 15 goals and 15 assists with a pair of hat tricks and earned Eastern Massachusetts Second Team recognition. Jordan Calichman and Ava Damiani round out the group, with Damiani a four-year starter who scored four goals in a single rout of archrival North Reading last season.
Antidormi has said the team's biggest strength is that nobody is chasing personal stats, and that everyone understands what's at stake for the seniors in particular. The Pioneers open the regular season Tuesday, September 8, on the road at Newburyport Stadium against a team they split with last year, and they close out the schedule October 29 at Pentucket. Between now and then is the only chance this specific group of seniors gets to end a drought that's now old enough to vote.
The Program Trying to Rewrite Its Own Story
Football is a different kind of rebuild. Head coach Pat Lamusta's team won just three games last fall, the sort of season that either breaks a program's momentum or becomes the reason the next one gets taken more seriously. Lamusta is betting on the latter, pointing to an offseason that included a Northeast 7v7 East Small School Division championship along with steady work in the weight room and passing leagues as evidence the roster is further along than the record suggests.
The slate is already in motion. The Pioneers opened with a September 1 scrimmage against Peabody Veterans Memorial, then face Amesbury on September 10 and Shawsheen Valley Tech on September 18, both before most of the leaves have started to turn. There's no dramatic history riding on this season the way there is for girls soccer. What there is instead is a coach and a roster trying to prove that a bad year was a blip, not a pattern, which is its own kind of pressure.
The Town Turns Out Before the Varsity Teams Do
Two days after football's first scrimmage and five days before girls soccer opens at Newburyport, the youngest athletes in town already had their moment. Lynnfield Pioneer Youth Football & Cheer held its Jamboree Night on September 3, sending its players up against the Danvers Falcons as part of the 2026 Cape Ann Youth Football League Jamboree, played at Lynnfield High School, the same field the varsity teams use.
LPYFC is open to Lynnfield residents in second through eighth grade, and its season runs from mid-August through early November, which means the youth program and the high school programs are effectively sharing a calendar and, on jamboree night, a field. The organization's 2026 board, led by president Adam Rystrom, has been building toward this season since its annual meeting last winter. For a lot of Lynnfield families, this is where the fall sports season actually starts, not at the varsity level but at the youth level, on the same grass where their kids might eventually play varsity themselves.
Why the Overlap Is the Actual Story
Any one of these threads would be a reasonable thing to know if you live in Lynnfield. A new athletic director is worth knowing about. A soccer team with a real shot at ending a two-decade drought is worth watching. A football program trying to turn a bad year into a footnote is worth rooting for. But the reason this particular September stands out isn't any single storyline. It's that all three are unfolding simultaneously, on the same campus, under a brand new administrator who is himself still learning the rhythms of the town he now works for.
That kind of alignment doesn't happen often. Most years, one program is rebuilding while others coast on stability. This year, stability itself is one of the things being tested. If you're the kind of Lynnfield resident who ends up at the fields on a Friday night more often than not, this is the season to actually keep score, not just of the games, but of how a town's entire athletic identity can shift in the span of a single fall.
If Lynnfield's community rhythms, from Friday night lights to the families who've called this town home for generations, are part of why you love living here, the Louise Touchette Team would love to hear from you, whether that's a question about the neighborhood or something further down the road.
