What does a celebrated football coach do when he retires from the fray? Rest on his laurels? Bask in the afterglow? Play golf? Sit on his deck and drink tea and watch the sunset?
Or does he build houses?
Coach Mickey Heinecken has chosen to build houses. He has put significant time and energy in his retirement building homes locally for Habitat for Humanity, about 12-14 in all, he reports.
And now, he is building his own house, an ADU* on the beautiful nine-acre plot in Cornwall where he has lived for over 50 years.
He’s building this house, with a little help from his friends — actually, quite a bit of help from his friends: his former players.
Mickey coached the Middlebury College football team from 1973 to 2000 with remarkable success. With an eight-game schedule each season, he won 129 games in his Middlebury career (against 89 losses). Three times he was selected as the New England Coach of the Year. Three of his teams lost but one game in a season.
He has been inducted into three Halls of Fame: the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame most recently (2026), the Middlebury Athletics Hall of Fame (2019), and the Hall of Fame at the University of Delaware (2016), where he was a star football player, an end, and coached for 10 years before coming to Middlebury.
At his Middlebury Hall of Fame induction, Mickey was introduced by Roy Heffernan, a stalwart running back from his 1978 team, himself a Hall of Famer, inducted in 2015. Roy cited Mickey’s “authentic caring” and his commitment to family and community and described him as “a loyal friend and mentor to all his former players.”
Mickey’s first words in his speech that night were to acknowledge the “rock and love of my life,” his wife Carol. She was “a constant reminder to me of the power of love,” he told those attending, whose number included over 70 large, well-dressed men in their 50s and 60s there to celebrate their coach.
Carol and Mickey were married for 62 years. She died in December two years ago at age 84.
They lived for 46 of those years in the lovely, spacious home in Cornwall they purchased in their first year in Vermont. They raised their three children there, Dawn, Kevin, and Kerri, who all attended Cornwall Elementary School and graduated from MUHS.
Carol was a beloved elementary school teacher for 18 years in Bristol.
In July 2025, Mickey and his children planned a grand celebration of Carol’s life at their home in Cornwall under a tent. Over 300 friends and neighbors came together on a beautiful, warm, summer day for food and music and speeches and lots of intimate and animated conversation.
“It couldn’t have been better, truly an appreciation of life,” he said. “Our married life was idyllic.”
Mickey doesn’t want to live anywhere else, ever, than on his beautiful land in Cornwall, his Shangra-la. He has hatched a plan to ensure that he won’t have to. He is building a smaller house, an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit), a replica of the main dwelling, just a short distance from it.
It’s a place for him in his old age (he’s only 87 now) with an apartment for a caregiver when there is the need. When I asked him how his overall health is now, “achy back” was all he allowed.
“To have land here in Middlebury is the fulfillment of a dream come true,” he said. “I’ll have the same view I’ve always had. I won’t be sitting in a home somewhere looking at a brick wall.”
Mickey is grateful that his daughter Kerri is keen to return to Vermont with husband Marty to live in the house she grew up in, with frequent visits from her three adult children, Mickey’s grandkids, two of whom have attended Middlebury College, one recently graduated, one there now.
Mickey came to Middlebury with some carpentry experience and honed his skills working on this his house in Cornwall, building a large deck on the second floor and constructing two outbuildings: a workshop for himself and a small barn, a home for his daughter Dawn’s horse.
Last spring, Mickey started in earnest to implement his plan for a second home. He worked with an architect, Steve Rooney, to design the building and draw up plans. He intended to hire a professional carpenter to oversee the project, but, as Mickey said, “That didn’t work out.”
So he decided to do it himself. “I had the confidence — or audacity to think I could build it myself,” he said to me when I visited the site last week. “I became my own construction manager.”
He hired his own go-fer, grunt, a local “college kid” from Shoreham, Tanner Burns, to be his full-time helper during the summer. He described him as a “wonderful kid with little experience.” He’s back in college now in Florida.
“I can do lots of the stuff myself. But there’s lots of stuff I can’t do,” he said. “I hire the big stuff out. I have lots of respect for the talents of the ‘subs’ (subcontractors).” When I visited Mickey’s job site last week, adjacent to his home, an electrician and two plumbers were working there.
“As a coach, I like to be in control,” he said. “This project is good for my mental health. My mind as well as my body is always busy.”
This is where Roy Heffernan comes back in. Roy is in the Middlebury class of 1978, the first class of players Mickey himself recruited. There were 13 seniors on that team. Over the years, they have remained very close.
It was quite a team. In their junior and senior seasons, they were 7-1 both years, one of the strongest Division 3 teams in the region and perhaps nationally.
Aware of Mickey’s project, the men on that team, the ’78ers, were enthused to lend their old coach a hand. Aware of the help Mickey would require, especially in the early stages of construction, the labor, the brawn, Roy saw the need to be organized. He took charge last spring and divided the ’78 group into three teams who would provide labor for Mickey on weekends, long weekends, often for three or four days.
Each team had a captain, Duane Ford (“a wonderful carpenter”), Jack Dobek (“also a wonderful carpenter”), and Steve Mahoney (“very good carpenter and he’s ‘local’”). Ford is also in the Middlebury Athletics Hall of Fame, inducted just this year.
Roy placed himself on Dobek’s team and was thrilled to be “side by side with my old running mate. It was a far cry from football, . . . but also not that far.” He claims no expertise: “I’m good at holding up sheets of plywood. I leave the smart work to others.”
About Mickey, he said, “You should see him work. It’s nearly 100 degrees, Mickey’s out there without a shirt, and looks like he could still play end at Delaware! He’s 87, for God’s sake!”
The 78ers are open-minded — they have allies from other classes, and even a tennis player, David Buzby ’81 from Cornwall. Matt Whitcomb, a football player from the class of ’95 now lives in Weybridge and has worked his way into the ’78 inner circle.
“He’s just a kid. We adopted him!” Roy said.
Mickey hopes the house will be ready for winter. The roof’s on, the windows are in. “We’re scheduled to insulate in November,” Mickey said.
The 78ers remain committed. Those who are local, Kevin Ray (Burlington), Steve Mahoney, Matt Whitcomb, visit on a regular weekly basis (“There’s always work,” Mickey said). The rest of the crew, according to Roy, remains on the ready, for example “when he needs a small army to hang some sheetrock.”
“I came to Middlebury through the sports door,” said Steve Mahoney. “We would walk through a wall for Mickey. He’s still teaching me — everything has to be plum and square.”
Roy Heffernan: “The 78ers all love Mickey and relish the opportunity to deliver for him as he did for us 50 years ago.”
“Labor of love” is an overused term, a cliché. Rarely does it seem more apt.
*(An ADU, Accessory Dwelling Unit, by definition, is “a secondary, independent residential living space located on the same property or lot as a primary single-family home.” ADUs are one of the strategies to relieve the housing shortage here in Vermont, and elsewhere).
Karl Lindholm can be contacted at [email protected].
