By Brian Pitts
Davie Enterprise Record

Davie appears to have hit the jackpot with the hiring of Brett Hewitt as the lacrosse coach.
Solid lacrosse coaches are hard to come by in this part of the world. Hewitt, 33, doesn’t just have some experience as a player and a coach. He has experience on the college level as a player and a coach. He played four years in college, and he coached on the college level for seven years. He has 10 years of coaching experience between high school and college, including five as head coach.
Davie lacrosse was born in 2013 as a club team. Next year Davie lacrosse will be a varsity sport, and Hewitt is confident that Davie will be able to field jayvee and varsity squads.
“From an athletic director’s point of view, this is a great, great situation,” Davie athletics director Mike Absher said. “He’s got terrific knowledge. He’s been apart of it as a player and as a coach at a high level. He’s got great leadership qualities. He’s already had a player-parent meeting.
“He approached us and thank goodness he did. It doesn’t happen very often where you get a break like this. (Hewitt called Davie) about two weeks before graduation. (Principal Jinda Haynes) and I got him in as quickly as we could.”
Hewitt is a native of Wilbraham, Mass., which is near Boston. He was an elite athlete in high school. He was captain as a senior football player, and he made the all-league team as a defensive end/linebacker. He also played running back in a run-and-shoot offense.
He finished sixth in the state as a wrestler. “I loved wrestling, but I just couldn’t do that at the college level because I didn’t want to try to do that to my body, losing that kind of weight all the time,” he said.
Baseball was in his blood growing up, but as a high-school sophomore, he dropped baseball in favor of lacrosse.
“Some friends convinced me that it’s a fun game,” he said. “I’d never even seen a game at that point. Once I started playing, I really loved it. By the end of my sophomore season, I was up on varsity just because of the intensity I brought to practice every day.”
Hewitt was one of the lacrosse team’s captains as a junior and senior. While lacrosse is new around Davie County, it’s very well established in the upper east coast.
“My high-school coach is very close to 700 wins,” he said.
Hewitt played lacrosse well enough to extend his playing career to Division II Bentley University in Massachusetts. He played four years and was captain the last two. As a senior, he was a preseason all-America selection and he was named an east-west all-star.
After graduating from college in 2002 with a bachelor’s of science degree in accountancy, he got into coaching. Cathedral High in Springfield, Mass., was starting up a lacrosse program, and it tabbed Hewitt as its first coach. He coached three sports at Cathedral, serving as an assistant in football and wrestling.
After spending two years at Cathedral, he returned to his alma mater (Bentley University) as an assistant coach in lacrosse. He was Bentley’s defensive coordinator for five years.
Hewitt’s next stop was Nichols College, where he was head coach of the Division III school for two years.
“It was a struggling program,” he said. “It had not won many games the four years before I got there, and we won five games my first year. We did a lot to change the culture of that team.”
Hewitt left Massachusetts and moved to Davie County when he landed a job at Wake Forest University. He and wife Ashley have two young children, a 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old boy.
“So for family reasons, we decided to come down here,” he said. “I decided that the time commitment of coaching at the college level was a little more than I wanted to put into it.”
But Hewitt wasn’t about to get out of coaching. He coached Bishop McGuinness last spring.
“I really enjoy working with the high-school kids,” he said. “They can be more passionate.”
At Bishop, the deck was stacked against Hewitt. There weren’t enough players for a jayvee team. Not a single player had ever played goalie. The Villians endured a bumpy 1-11 start, but they hung in there and won three of the final four games for a 4-12 record.
“I think it was a very successful season,” he said. “We only had 18 guys that contributed on the varsity level, and we started the season without a goalie. We ended up having …