New Era Dawns as Hoosac-Drury-Greylock Co-Op Opens Camp
CHESHIRE, Mass. – After driving a pickup truck loaded with gear up to the practice field at Hoosac Valley High School on Friday evening, head coach Marshall Maxwell surveyed his team as it stretched before the first practice of the 2025 season and had a revelation.
“We don’t have enough footballs!” he yelled to his assistant coaches.
As problems go, that may be the best a football coach can face.
After sending someone back to the equipment room for more pigskins, Maxwell got down to business with a bumper crop of Hurricanes.
Not Hurricanes, Blue Devils and Mounties. Hurricanes.
Because while the newcomers may be coming from Drury and Mount Greylock, they already are part of their new football family, Maxwell said this week.
“My biggest concern is: We have to make a team,” Maxwell said of the first-year, three-school cooperative program. “But I don’t know if it’s because the world is smaller with social media or because of all the other co-ops, all the kids have taken to each other.
“We’ve been lifting all summer. I had a bin of T-shirts from last season, and any kid not originally from Hoosac, one of the first nights they were in the weight room, I said, ‘We have a T-shirt for you. You’re part of Hoosac football now.’ And they took to it. I haven’t felt any resistance at all.”
It might help that this is the latest in a long-line of North County cooperatives.
In the winter, ice hockey players from four schools play under the single banner of McCann Tech, and all the high school wrestlers from the area compete for Mount Greylock. In the spring, Hoosac Valley student-athletes who want to play baseball do so at Drury, and Hoosac hosts a boys lacrosse team that includes Drury and Mount Greylock players; the Mounties last spring revived their own program, but some upperclassmen who started their careers with the ‘Canes chose were grandfathered into the Hoosac Valley program.
“[The co-op] plays out pretty well because we already know these kids,” said Hoosac Valley student and quarterback Kamarion Kastner, who also plays boys lacrosse. “We know most of them. It’s not like way back when, when we had the Drury rivalry. Most of us are pretty good friends with these kids. So it’s easy to add them to our team and put them on a roster.”
“Back when,” Drury-Hoosac Valley football was one of the county’s most storied – if, toward the end, one-sided – rivalries. But the schools have played only sporadically in recent years: a 2023 Week 2 meeting that Hoosac Valley won, 34-6, an April 2021 meeting during the “Fall 2” season when all county teams played a Berkshire-only schedule, and a 2016 Thanksgiving Eve game that went the Hurricanes’ way, 66-6.
The practice of playing in the last week of the regular season ended in 2015, with Hoosac Valley winning, 52-18.
Declining numbers at Mount Greylock forced the school to give up its football program in 2019, and it has been part of a co-op with Drury since then.
Drury, which shares an athletic director with Hoosac Valley, was facing a similar decision after the 2024 season.
But in addition to the remaining members from last fall’s Blue Devils squad, the Hurricanes picked up an additional two Drury student-athletes: Julian Feliciano and Noah Arnold from the Blue Devils’ 2025 state semi-finalist baseball team.
“We were both pretty excited,” Arnold said of learning about the co-op. “We’re both new to football. We know that Hoosac has a great program down here. We were able to come together and hopefully win a ton of games this year.”
Arnold said that success could help drive even more Drury student-athletes to give the sport a try down the road.
Feliciano, a standout behind the dish in the spring, will be behind the center this fall as he straps on football pads for the first time.
“I never played a fall sport when I was younger,” he said. “I kind of just stuck to baseball until basketball season. A lot of baseball, it’s my best sport.
“I didn’t know what position I would play [in football]. Coach just kind of took me to the side and said, I’m gonna be backup QB to [Kastner] and put me at corner[back] and see how I do.”
And as for the Hurricanes who did have experience at a gridiron position, Maxwell was not concerned about any hard feelings from kids being displaced in the merger.
“I’m not very orthodox in a lot of the things I do in football,” he said. “Last year, second to last game, I took my starting left tackle and made him a fullback. If you put guys in a spot and coach them the right way, I’m pretty positive those kids will have success.
“The great thing is the level of competition now. We brought over some very good O-linemen from Drury. What is it they say? Iron sharpens iron? I think, by us creating an environment now where kids can’t get complacent because they have the competition of someone right behind them, that will bring the program to another level.”
Hoosac Valley, which went to the state semi-finals two of the last four seasons and played in the state final at Gillette Stadium in 2017, open the 2025 campaign at home on Sept. 6 at noon against Wahconah.