By Andy Walter

DOVER — Gary Lowery has made his share of stops during a 20-year football coaching career.

Now the 43-year-old former lineman says that experience has made him ready to do some good things at Dover High.

On Wednesday night, Lowery was officially hired as the Senators’ new head football coach by the Capital School Board.

Lowery’s most recent job was as an assistant coach at Cherry Hill (N.J.) West High. But he’s coached at eight different programs, including 14 seasons at the college level.

A native of Florida, he’s coached at Alvernia, Hampton, Fayetteville State and Winston-Salem. among others. This will be his first time as a head coach, although he was the associate head coach at NCAA Division III Alvernia.

“I just think, looking at the facilities, looking at the area of Dover and some of the athletes that have come out of Dover, I believe you can be really successful there,” Lowery said on Wednesday night. “It’s just getting them to have some consistency with discipline in the schemes and getting them to understand that being a student-athlete is one of the greatest privileges you can have as a student.

“I want to make sure that those four years that they have to play football are the most fruitful times of their lives because a lot of times they’re not going to get another chance.”

Lowery replaces Rudy Simonetti, who finished with a five-year record of 22-25, including 15-15 in the Henlopen North. The Senators went 17-10 with a 12-6 record in the North over the last three seasons.

Dover athletic director Kevin Turner said the school interviewed 15 candidates for the position and he was impressed with all of them.

“There wasn’t a bad one in the bunch,” said Turner. “There was just good, and better and best.

“We’re happy to have him,” he said about Lowery. “The kids that participated in the interview were very excited. He was able to handle all questions very succinctly but very firmly. He exudes a confident nature. ... He’s a leader. He just had that sound of a coach.”

Turner said Dover isn’t necessarily looking for the program to win titles every season. But he wants the Senators to be more consistent, game-in and game-out.

“If we’re competitive and we lose a hard-fought game by a single score, and you come back the next week and your team is fighting again, I appreciate that,” said Turner. “That’s where we want to be. We want to be able to be consistently competitive. The five-touchdown losses, they need to be something that is more of an aberration.”

Dover has had only five head football coach since 1986. That list includes Simonetti, Dante Jones, Carlton Brown, Darwin Manges and Jim Oxford.

Jones was let go in 2016 after his teams went 16-16 in three seasons. Brown went 45-37 over eight seasons before stepping down.
After back-to-back winning seasons, the Senators went 2-4 this past fall. The season was condensed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Their game against 1-4 Sussex Tech was canceled.

An all-conference lineman at Union College (Ky.), Lowery has coached both offense and defense during his career. Besides Cherry Hill-West, Lowery was also an assistant coach at Terry Sanford and Jack Britt High Schools in North Carolina.

“I’ve coached some really good football throughout my career — especially at the high school level,” said Lowery. “I was blessed to be on some really talented staffs and with some really talented teams. If we weren’t playing on the week of Thanksgiving, it wasn’t a successful season.

“In all my years of coaching high school ball, I coached every Thanksgiving so we were doing pretty good.”

As of now, Lowery doesn’t have a full-time job in the school but thinks being in the building every day is important.

“There’s a lot of potential to be competitive,” said Lowery. “There’s some programs in the state, they’ve established themselves as dominant programs. My thing is, why not Dover?

“It’s going to take some work to catch up with those teams but I think it can happen at Dover.”