Soon after arriving at Blair as a postgraduate in the fall of 1999, Panos Voulgaris ’00 sat in Cowan Auditorium listening to the journalist Buzz Bissinger. Bissinger, that night’s Society of Skeptics speaker, was discussing Friday Night Lights, his New York Times bestseller about high school football culture in Texas, a book Panos had read a number of times. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this event to Panos; two weeks before, he had taken a call from Blair’s former dean of admissions Barbara Haase, inviting him to join the senior class of a school he had never heard of before, and now, here he was at eighteen, engaging with the author. After the presentation, Panos followed Bissinger, former Blair history teacher and director of the Skeptics program, Martin Miller, PhD, and other faculty to Marty’s campus house to continue the discussion. At the end of the night, Bissinger signed Panos’ own, well-thumbed copy of Friday Night Lights.

Panos has reread that copy many times in the quarter century since. Now it sits, among such foundational football titles as The Split Line T Offense, The Football Coach’s Guide to Secondary Defenses and The Modern Short Punt, in his office at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he is head football coach and a member of the faculty. The office itself is one of those spaces that those of us who do what we do don’t know we want until we see it. It is the last remaining of the original squash courts in Exeter’s stolidly iconic Thompson Gym, dating from sometime in the 1920s, a high ceilinged room with telltale black ball smudges on the white lapped walls. Panos has turned it into a library, a museum and a command center. The front and right-side walls are lined with bookshelves containing all those football books, and hundreds of others—Herbert’s magisterial biography of Lincoln and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov among them—reflecting Panos’ interests in history and classic literature. There are dusty, slightly deflated footballs painted with the scores of historic Exeter victories, alongside dozens of photographs, most notably one of Panos and two Blair teammates celebrating the famous 1999 come-from-behind victory over Peddie. There is a conference table that seats six and a giant flat-screen television for watching game videos, or for playing cartoons when you bring your children to work. It is an office that may make sense only at places like Blair and Exeter, where coaches are not only the leaders of teams, but also the keepers of athletic legacies at the schools, and may, like Panos, have a keen enough appreciation for history to have earned a master’s degree in the subject from Harvard. 

Throughout his career, which led him to teaching and coaching appointments at Blair, Taft in Connecticut, Episcopal High School in Virginia, Noble and Greenough School in Massachusetts, and, since 2021, Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire, Panos has been the consummate “triple threat” boarding school teacher. He has taught history, coached track and baseball as well as football, and lived with students in dormitories. While his current role does not include classroom teaching, he and his family—his wife, Shannon, an administrator at another local independent school, and their three young sons, James, George and Charley—serve as resident faculty in Exeter’s version of Locke Hall: the school’s largest girls dormitory. Panos and Shannon are popular dorm parents; of a given evening, the girls are in and out of the spacious apartment, looking for advice, snacks or just a place to hang out for a while. 

As naturally as he has embraced a life of dorm duty and Saturday classes, of eating with his family in a dining hall alongside

four hundred teenagers, Panos came to Blair a day after he was admitted with no sense of what to expect. Not only was he the first in his family to attend college, he was the son of parents whose education in their native Greece did not extend even to high school. But Blair reflected his family’s values, especially at the intersection of hard work and interpersonal connection. His experience over just nine months at Blair—playing on football coach Jim Stone’s MAPL championship team, having long conversations with Marty Miller and living in Mason Hall, where he made lifelong friends—drew him back to the boarding school world after he graduated as valedictorian from Merrimack College. While Panos’ desire to coach was certainly inspired by Jim Stone’s example, he was equally motivated professionally by Marty Miller. “Marty taught me to read The New York Times every day,” he notes. “As a former college athlete, a legendary coach and a trained historian, he showed me that a good teacher and coach can never know enough.” Panos came to Blair and went on to play football at Merrimack because of Jim Stone, which was no surprise to anyone, but his eventual pursuit of an undergraduate double major in history and political science was inspired by Marty and the Society of Skeptics. “What can be done in a year?” Marty asks rhetorically. “If you approach your postgraduate year the way Panos did, with diligence, curiosity, and the desire to be the best you can be, it gives you the idea that you can do something.”

On a Monday in November, Panos and Dave Hudson, his offensive line coach, are in the old squash-court-cum-reliquary, conceiving a plan for their upcoming game against Phillips Andover, the Peddie to Exeter’s Blair. The Exeter-Andover game has been played 143 times since 1878, the nation’s longest active prep school football rivalry. Given that legacy, regardless of how either team has fared during the fall, beating Andover is what really determines whether Exeter’s season has been successful. The Big Red are 6-1 thus far, but that one loss came at the hands of a tough Williston-Northampton team less than forty-eight hours ago, and everyone is still a little shocked. Panos and Dave know they need to acknowledge the setback during practice this afternoon, but to quickly focus on Andover.

Having already watched the video of the previous week’s Andover-Suffield game, probably more than once, Panos reveals something in the Andover defensive line that looks like an advantage but is actually a weakness. This chink in the Andover armor will give the boys something specific to focus on, to help them put Williston behind them. Dave cues up the video on the large screen, and Panos begins to write on a whiteboard.  

“There it is again,” Panos says, pointing to the screen. “Here’s where the weakness is, and it shows up when Suffield takes the ball here.” At the whiteboard, he diagrams a strategy as fluently as if he’s writing a sentence. It is deeply satisfying to watch someone who knows what he’s doing.

“Nobody prepares better than Panos,” Dave Hudson observes as Panos writes. A former college player and 40-year veteran of the sidelines, who also served as Exeter’s athletic director, he’s worked with dozens of successful coaches over the years. “That’s why he’s able to come up with new ideas, to see solutions so quickly. And no one is a better in-game coach, either.” 

At schools like Blair and Exeter, the decision in recent years to continue football has become a conscious choice, rather than, as it had been for most of their histories, a matter of course. Bill Rawson, Exeter’s principal, identifies his hiring of Panos four years ago as a manifestation of the school’s renewed commitment to “take football seriously.” “Safety is the most important thing,” he says. “It’s a big part of a strong program. Panos was a guy who had a track record of establishing safe football programs that were, at the same time, very competitive. He’s fundamentally honest and brings credibility to Exeter football, and so good people want to work with him. Coaches want to recommend good players to him.” 

Jim Stone, who has worked with his share of coaches over his own thirty-year career, echoes the Exeter head’s observations. “It’s clear that Panos cares about the kids, and he does as good a job as anyone at creating a culture in which his players care about each other, too. Good athletes around the country hear about the way he coaches and aspire to play for him.”

Soon after his appointment at Exeter, Panos achieved what he had done in his previous head-coaching roles: turned a struggling program into a winner. Most importantly at Exeter, they had won the last three Andover games, halting an eight-year losing streak. They had been riding the momentum of those recent triumphs, as well as a season record that made them the presumptive 2024 New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) champions, but the Williston game still rankled; the history of games and, well, everything else is marked not only by things that turned out the way they were supposed to, but in equal measure, the things that didn’t. “I’ve got to help them understand that it’s important to take note of what we did wrong at Williston,” Panos said. “But we have to spend most of our time focusing on what we have to do to beat Andover.” 

In the slanting cold light of that Monday afternoon, the kind typical of late football season in New England, Panos, Dave and the rest of the coaches assemble to meet their team in Exeter’s vast field house. The boys listen respectfully as Panos acknowledges the Williston game, and their understandable disappointment in having to wait until next year for another crack at an undefeated season. But it is clear that Panos has already laid the groundwork for the sort of maturity that enables his team to accept that defeat for what it was: the only Saturday afternoon this autumn when things didn’t go the way they had hoped. They trust him, this team Panos and his other coaches had built, and one another, and they want to hear about Andover. 

Two weeks later, Panos’ Big Red won the NEPSAC championship over Connecticut powerhouse Avon Old Farms, establishing him as the only coach to have won that title at three different schools: Taft, Nobles and now Exeter. Everyone was duly impressed, but these triumphs savored, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, of anticlimax. Indeed, the week before, just as Panos’ old team, the Blair Buccaneers, defeated Peddie in the fading light almost three hundred miles to the south, Exeter won handily on Andover’s home turf, 42-21. Winning the NEPSAC? A great accomplishment, to be sure. But beating Andover? Like Blair beating Peddie, that was history.