LEWISTON, Maine –
Matt Juneau '25 thought he had a pretty good first year as a linebacker for the Bates football team in 2021. He saw action in all nine games, making 26 tackles along the way.
When Bates hired
Matt Coyne in February 2022 as the 22nd head coach in the football program's long history, the first-time head coach made sure to personally meet with every player on the team that spring.
Juneau vividly remembers his first meeting with his new coach. He walked into Alumni Gym and it was just him and Coyne, who after maybe a minute of small talk, got down to business.
"I went into the meeting expecting to possibly get some praise for my rookie season," Juneau says. "But it wasn't anything like that. He was very direct, and outlined what I needed to do to get better."
Coyne recalls being impressed with how Juneau reacted to his critique.
"He took my message not as 'Coach, what the heck?' but as 'Okay, that's a challenge.' And he changed himself, he changed his body, and he changed his mindset. He bought in."
Juneau answered Coyne's challenge in a big way. He once again played in all nine games (this time on the defensive line) as a sophomore, despite suffering both a broken left wrist and a torn labrum in his right shoulder. He finished the season with 37 total tackles.
"I lost blood flow to my wrist due to the broken bone, so I had surgery immediately after the season," Juneau says. "It was a six-month recovery process."
To say that his performance (despite multiple injuries) left an impression on his teammates would be an understatement. He was voted team captain as a junior.
But Coyne wasn't done issuing challenges to Juneau: Not only did he want Juneau to get even better on the field, he wanted a team leader.
Fortunately for the Bobcats, leadership and hard work come naturally to Juneau, thanks in large part to how he was raised by his parents in Wakefield, Mass.
"My dad is the hardest-working person I know," Juneau says. "He's the type of guy to get up at 4:30 in the morning and then he's out the door. That makes me look in the mirror and ask, 'Why am I not up and doing something too?' He's my hero."
Juneau's father, Brian Juneau, played baseball at Babson (he is the only pitcher in school history to throw a no-hitter) and was excited when his son decided to take up football.
"My dad always wanted to play football, but his parents never let him," says Juneau, who started playing football at a young age but quit at age 10 "to focus on baseball because that's what my dad played in college, and I wanted to be just like him. I picked football up again when I started high school because it's always been my favorite sport."
Juneau attended Bishop Fenwick in Peabody, Mass., and was part of a team that finished state runner-up his junior year. They returned almost the entire team for his senior season, but a chance at a state title was wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A sign of the times, Juneau's journey to Bates started with a tweet.
"Colleges were not answering my emails," Juneau says. "One day I saw a tweet from a Bates assistant coach that they were looking for defensive linemen. So I responded."
A friend elevated the tweet with a response, and soon Juneau was on the Bobcats' radar.
Juneau came to Bates prepared to be a leader, as he was a two-time captain in high school.
"I met a lot of great coaches in high school who I still talk to consistently," Juneau says. "They're a big part of my life, big role models to me. The impact that they've had on me is really what's pushed me to just be the best teammate and leader I can possibly be no matter the situation."
Juneau has found another mentor at Bates in Coyne. He teases Coyne about the fact that Wesleyan, where Coyne was an assistant when Juneau was looking at colleges, didn't recruit him. But now that both of them are at Bates, they've developed a strong connection.
"I think the best thing about coach Coyne is that he would literally do anything to win, no matter what it is, and I saw that right away," Juneau says. "I saw that fire in his eyes."
Juneau moved back to linebacker as a junior captain in 2023 and had a break-out season, finishing with a team-high 66 total tackles, good for seventh in the NESCAC. But the Bobcats went winless, leaving Juneau even more determined to succeed this year.
"As an upperclassman the focus is on winning now, but I am also keeping my eye on the future," Juneau says. "Two years from now when I'm out and I'm an alum, these first-years and sophomores are going to be studs."
One of the young "studs" that Juneau raves about is sophomore linebacker
Ryan Rozich, who hails from Cromwell, Conn. Rozich tallied a game-high nine tackles vs. Amherst in last week's season opener, as Bates held the Mammoths to just 190 yards of total offense. Rozich was the second-leading tackler to Juneau on the Bobcats last season.
"There's no one else that I'd rather play linebacker next to," Rozich says. "One of the things I look up to about Juneau is his mindset. He's just a ferocious player. I model my game after the way he plays."
Juneau is happy to take Rozich and other young defenders under his wing, because that's how he first experienced life as a Bobcat, learning from veterans like
Mike Bulman '22 and
Tony Hooks '23.
"I still get texts from Hooks every week about our games, and I remember the second we walked onto campus in 2021, Bulman invited every first-year over to his house," Juneau says. "And to me that was amazing. So that's the type of culture that we try to continue here."
The football program's motto under Coyne is "R.E.A.L.", which stands for Respect, Energy, Accountability, and Love. Juneau embodies all of it.
"He cares about this program as much as anybody," Coyne says. "And he's a guy that you really love to coach because you
can coach him. He likes to be coached hard, he likes to get better and as we've seen, if you challenge him he doesn't shy away from it."
