NBC 10 recently aired a segment on beloved Acton-Boxborough High School Athletic Trainer Peter Cacciola, commemorating his career and featuring athletes praising him for his work.
One of those watching the feature on TV was his granddaughter, Leah, six 6 years old, sitting on the couch when she heard students chanting “Mr. C! Mr. C! Mr. C!” She looked up, confused: “Mr. C?” She doesn’t know who that is; she only knows him as Papa. After 44 years of impact on and off the field, it was about time Mr. C got some recognition.
Peter Cacciola, or as most know him, “Mr. C”, recently won MSSADA (Massachusetts Secondary Schools Athletic Directors Association) District 4 Yoshitaka Ando Athletic Trainer of the Year: an experience which Mr. C described as “extremely humbling” and making him feel as if “everything has come to a crescendo this past year”. In a congratulatory announcement in his May 8 Update, school district Superintendent Peter Light honored Mr. C. for “his tireless work keeping our student-athletes healthy and game-ready.”
But every crescendo has a beginning. For Mr. C, that beginning was at Northeastern, where he studied health and physical education from 1977 to 1981. Athletic training was “kind of fledgling” back then, as Mr. C recalls simply having one of his assistant football coaches do quick ankle taping for the team during his time at Revere High in the 70s. Despite athletic training barely existing as a formal field, Mr. C was drawn in by the balance it struck: “When you’re working as an athletic trainer, you have to have a lot of medical knowledge, but you also really have to appreciate and love sports.”
Armed with his degree and a certification he earned right out of Northeastern, Mr. C began his formal athletic training career at Bedford High School in 1982. At one point later in his career, in the summer of 2002, Mr. C found himself unexpectedly available. Having worked at Chelmsford High School for the past school year, Mr. C expected to be the one hired for a more permanent position. Ultimately, Chelmsford decided to go in a different direction. However, the Athletic Director at Chelmsford, Jack Fletcher, thought highly enough of Mr. C to call Jack Schofield, Athletic Director at Acton-Boxborough, a school in need of an athletic trainer. So, with Mr. C out of a job mere weeks before the start of the school year, that’s when AB called.
Throughout all of this, Mr. C spent his summers doing something entirely different. While establishing the foundation of his career during the school year, he spent his summers building far more literal ones: the foundations of pools. Through the age of 30, he worked, every summer, for Cosmo Pools, where he was tasked with “shaping the pool with a rake, a pick, and a shovel.” This time in the dirt is what Mr. C credits his work ethic to, as well as his nickname back then: “The Italian Backhoe”. He also recounted continuing these laborious summers into his 50s, working for masonry companies, carrying bricks, digging trenches, and mixing mortar. Mr. C loves to tell his athletes, “You want to work upper body, lower body, and core? Go shovel for 3 or 4 hours a day.”
From the moment he arrived at ABRHS in 2002, Mr. C had a front row seat to some of the most memorable moments in school athletics history. It began immediately after he arrived, with the Abare twins and the varsity football team. Bobby and Larry Abare are identical twins who played what seemed to be every position on the field between 2001 and 2004, running back, linebacker, defensive back: “They were the best high school football players I’ve ever seen.” On September 15, 2001, the Colonials started off their season with a loss to Chelmsford 28-21. That would be the last and only game the Abare twins lost in their high school careers. The football team then started a win streak that would reach 52 consecutive games, breaking the state record. They brought home four consecutive Super Bowls along the way.
Not every memory from those 24 years was a triumph, though. Around 2006 Mr. C watched a girls soccer team go 25-0 into the state final game at Worcester State, led by a player he described as “a woman playing against girls” in Haley Brock. They had beaten their opponent Algonquin 3-0 earlier in the year. Algonquin scored on a corner kick in the first half and then packed everyone back. AB could not find the equalizer and lost 1-0, their only loss of the season. Mr. C, who was just watching from the sidelines, described it as the hardest loss he ever had to deal with. That is the kind of investment he had in his athletes.
The triumphant bookend to that story came in 2014 when the boys lacrosse team faced Duxbury in the state final. It went to double overtime before Chris Wiggins went around the back of the net and scored to win it, the only state title in program history. Mr. C credited the win not just to their skill and speed but to their depth.
After 24 years at ABRHS Mr. C has watched hundreds of athletes come through those doors, seen dynasties built, heartbreaking losses, and championship moments that will never be forgotten. He has been there for all of it. In fact, in his entire tenure at ABRHS, Mr. C has only missed school over two stretches. The first time was in 2008 for a hip replacement. And the second? Getting his opposite hip replacement. He has accumulated around 215 unused sick days. As he prepares to step away from the job he has loved for over four decades, he leaves behind a legacy not just of championships witnessed but of athletes cared for, one ice bag at a time.
For Leah, he will always just be Papa. But for everyone at ABRHS, he will always be Mr. C.
Kieran Onigman is a senior at Acton Boxborough Regional High School, and is interning at the Acton Exchange for three weeks through the school’s Career and Financial Literacy Seminar. In the fall, he will be attending the School of Communications at Marist University.
