John Wolfgram, one of the most successful and revered coaches in Maine high school sports history, has died.

Wolfgram died Tuesday at his home in South Portland after a lengthy illness, his family said. He was 77.

Wolfgram’s football teams won 309 games and 10 state championships over 40 combined seasons as a head coach at Madison, Gardiner, South Portland and Cheverus. He is the winningest football coach in Maine history.

“He had success everywhere he went. Public or private, urban or rural, over four decades. In all settings his approach resonated,” said Mike Vance, who played for Wolfgram at South Portland in the 1980s.

Vance also served as an assistant coach under Wolfgram at Cheverus. He succeeded his mentor as the Stags’ head coach following Wolfgram’s retirement in April 2016.

“He was excellence with integrity in everything he did,” Vance said.

Wolfgram’s coaching career spanned seven decades. His first job was not in football but coaching Orono High baseball in 1969 while he was a senior at the University of Maine. He also coached a state championship softball team at Gardiner in 1980. In 2017, he returned to Cheverus as an assistant on Vance’s staff. Last fall, Wolfgram filled a consultation role for South Portland head coach Aaron Filieo, another of his former South Portland players.

“I was grateful that he was able to be part of our staff last year. It was full circle, at least for us,” Filieo said. “He loved it. A part of it is he’s still around football and then he got to talk football with a lot of his former players who are on my staff.”

Wolfgram and his wife, Adin, were married for 58 years. High school sweethearts in Marblehead, Massachusetts, they were married while John was playing football and studying at the University of Maine, where he earned his bachelor’s and graduate degrees.

They have three children — Beth, Brett and Josh — and six grandchildren.

Beth Wolfgram, 57, had her father as a history teacher at Gardiner High. Wolfgram switched to teaching English when the family moved to South Portland.

“He was the type of teacher you wanted to work hard for because you wanted to be respected by him,” Beth Wolfgram said. “He always made things fun and engaging and timely.

“One thing people may not know is he had a really good sense of humor. He was funny. He liked to tell jokes. He had a lot of puns,” Beth Wolfgram continued. “He was serious and an amazing competitor and wanted to always be prepared but he wanted it to be fun and he instilled that with his practices and traditions he did with his teams.”

At each of his coaching stops, Wolfgram quickly improved the teams and positively impacted the schools’ cultures, Beth Wolfgram said.

Madison won a Class C title in his fourth season in 1974. At Gardiner, he inherited a team that had gone winless the year before, had them playing .500 ball the next year and then won Class B titles in 1979, 1981 and 1985. In 15 years at South Portland his teams won four Class A titles (1992, 1995, 1996, 1999), went to seven straight Western Maine championship games and had a 31-game winning streak. After a stint as an assistant coach at Bowdoin, he became Cheverus’ coach in 2006, winning back-to-back state titles in 2010 and 2011, with a 34-game winning streak that broke the Class A state record his South Portland teams had set.

Wolfgram’s overall record as a high school coach was 309-92-1.

Bonny Eagle head coach Kevin Cooper considers Wolfgram Maine’s greatest high school football coach.

“When you compile his record both in total wins and championship wins, it’s hard to refute that,” Cooper said. “And the success he had at different schools and different levels of schools is pretty incredible.

“You throw in a few years coaching at the collegiate level, too, and then to come back to Cheverus and do what he did there, really cements his legend in Maine,” Cooper said.

ON THE FIELD

Wolfgram was known in coaching circles as a humble man and fierce competitor who was willing to both learn and teach fellow coaches.

Cooper, who had played against Wolfgram’s Gardiner teams in high school, said once Wolfgram wanted to know more about a particular play Bonny Eagle was running with great success.

“It ended up that Coach (Wolfgram) and Mike Vance came up to Bonny Eagle and talked about football for two hours and that was a pretty awesome moment for me,” Cooper said.

Thornton Coach Kevin Kezal said he first met Wolfgram when he was a high schooler attending Camp Touchdown at Maine Maritime in Castine and Wolfgram was one of the coaches. Years later, the two were coaching on opposite sides with two of Class A’s top programs.

“In 2009, we were undefeated and hosting them in the semifinal round and they came over here and beat us big,” Kezal said. “I totally overcoached that game and they just lined up and did their thing. That game in 2009 taught me, get your players ready and let them play. That’s what John did.”

Kezal added, “He was one of the best the state has ever had. He got kids ready. He was fundamentally sound and his kids were going to play hard and fast and he was an excellent technician during the game. He would make very good calls during the game. We lost a great one.”

Filieo was on Wolfgram’s first South Portland championship team in 1992, which went 12-0.

“His superpower was his ability to prepare,” Filieo said. “And the things he focused on as early as his Madison and Gardiner days are things that people are reposting on social media as if it’s some new-fangled coaching philosophy.

“Poise is a term he used constantly with us. Just understanding that in a physical, borderline violent game, the challenge of being able to play with poise while also playing tough and physical is hard. But that’s the goal,” Filieo said.

Wolfgram’s influence was also felt at the collegiate level, said Colby College and former University of Maine head coach Jack Cosgrove.

Shortly after Cosgrove took over as Maine’s head coach in 1992, his assistant coach Bobby Wilder came back from a recruiting visit to South Portland talking about Wolfgram’s “individual player development program.”

Cosgrove soon asked Wolfgram to come to Orono to explain to the college coaches what he was doing at the high school level.

“He was going above and beyond, coaching life skills. Just the whole student. The student-athlete as a young man. He coached them for success in the classroom and for life,” Cosgrove said.

Former Cheverus Athletic Director Gary Hoyt said he was, “privileged to be John’s boss, privileged to know him as a teacher and a friend.”

IN THE CLASSROOM

As an English teacher, Wolfgram “several times kind of reinvented himself in terms of the subject matter he was teaching.”

As a football coach, Wolfgram stayed mostly true to the Wing-T offense that emphasizes crisp and precise timing between the offensive line and running backs.

“Whatever John Wolfgram said, our student-athletes believed,” Hoyt said. “There was no question. He would map out how he believed a game would go and the kids just believed in him totally.”

After retiring as Cheverus’ varsity football coach, Wolfgram continued to teach English at the private parochial school in Portland.

“He was a master teacher and tireless advocate for kids. He supported so many kids in so many ways,” Vance said.

His impact on others was often felt by his children and grandchildren, Beth Wolfgram said, noting that strangers would tell them how much John Wolfgram had meant to them.

“One of the family jokes is you can’t go anywhere without someone knowing Grampy or Dad. At the rim of the Grand Canyon. We have a lot of funny stories of that.”