EDITOR’S NOTE: Coach Doupe has sent word that he did not resign, but was fired for not winning.
Word on the street is that Wayland High School varsity football coach Mike Doupe has resigned after five seasons.
Doupe has been reported to have stepped down after the Wildcats suffered through an 0-9 season, scoring only 66 points and yielding 365. Ironically, he came on board succeeding Jerry Diorio, who guided Wayland to an 0-9 season in the fall of 2014, yielding 353 points defensively..
Doupe’s team went 2-7 in his first season, then was 3-6 in both of the next two and was 4-5 in 2018 before going winless this fall. His five-year record overall was 12-33.
Wayland has not had a winning varsity football season since it went 6-5 in 2013 under Diorio, its only winning campaign in the past 11 seasons.
There were indications that Doupe announced his decision to step down Thursday evening at the football team banquet.
Before he was hired at Wayland he had been an assistant football coach at Kalamazoo College.
Assistant coach Mike Salisbury posted on Facebook, “It was my pleasure to work with Mike Doupe for the past three years on our football program. This guy is classy. He repeatedly stressed doing the right things for our kids.
“He closed his tenure tonight in his usual classy way, doing the right thing. I wish we’d had been able to win more games. No question that we all want to win. And we failed in that regard.
“But Mike did successfully fold in the seventh and eighth grade program from a community team to a school sponsored team. He improved the equipment we used in the program. He helped to unite the Wayland and Dorr juniors programs. Mike was trying to build the foundation, from the ground up.
“He’s a great man, husband, father and teacher. It was my pleasure to work with him and I will miss doing so next fall.”
Efforts to contact other people close to the program were not successful.
Thanks coach for your time and effort. There is more to coaching than a stupid win – loss record. Thanks again.
I’m just curious if anyone has contacted Coach Doupe regarding the facts in the article? A few of these details seem a little off. I can think of a few people pretty close to him that could have helped with these details – they weren’t contacted either.
So the coach’s team goes 0-9. He had 5 years. Hes probably a great guy. Winning sometimes is importatant too. If he wasn’t fired he should have been. One of the very few times we have had success in football was when Bob White was coach and winning and all snowflakes in town couldn’t run him out of town quick enough. Didnt like his tactics. When you played coach Whites teams you were in a fight. I loved it