Filmmaker Andrew McGowan met Jerry LaVasseur when McGowan was competing as a runner at Bowdoin College. At the time, LaVasseur was an assistant coach for the Polar Bears’ track and cross-country teams.
“I was lucky to overlap with [LaVasseur’s] coaching tenure when I was there,” McGowan said. “And I ran track and cross-country… all three seasons, all four years.”
Since graduating from Bowdoin in 2019, McGowan has pursued a career in film. When he was a graduate student at UCLA, he began to work on a documentary about his coach, whose life story he describes as “incredible.”
Jerry LaVasseur was born in 1937 in Connecticut. When he was just six, he survived the Hartford Circus Fire, which killed 167 people and left over 700 with injuries — LaVasseur among them. LaVasseur’s mother was killed in the blaze, and LaVasseur himself spent six months in the hospital recovering from serious burns. The scars are still there. “Medical technology was what it was in 1944, so [LaVasseur] has a distinct memory of doctors saying he wasn’t going to make it,” McGowan said. “But he did.”
Now, McGowan says, “Jerry is an 88-year-old track and field athlete who’s still competing in his advanced age, and his story is one of overcoming adversity with optimism.”
LaVasseur was a multi-sport athlete during high school and college, and as an adult, he spent 30 years racing sled dogs, which McGowan says “is an incredible story in and of itself.”
But it wasn’t until middle-age that LaVasseur started running competitively. In his 40s, he started entering races. He qualified for the National Senior Games at 55. Now, he’s 88, and he’s training for the 2026 Masters Track & Field National Championships, which are set to take place in Ohio in July of this summer.
LaVasseur still lives in Maine, so McGowan has returned from California to film the documentary. McGowan is working in collaboration with director of photography Josh Gerritsen, also a Maine resident, and he’s been reaching out to Maine colleges for filming support, too.
When Bowdoin was on spring break earlier this year, students at Colby College answered the call for help. Randi Radcliffe `27, Alison Angley `26, Yiyun Mao `26, Molly Lakritz `27, and Graham Rivers `26 drove down to Brunswick on March 8 to film LaVasseur while he competed in the USA Track & Field Maine Indoor State Championships. It was the first big shoot of the documentary.
After a quick tutorial at the beginning of the shoot, they started rolling film. McGowan describes how he was impressed by both the professionalism and experience that the Mules brought to filming LaVasseur’s races.
“They were great,” McGowan said. “They did amazing work, and I’m so grateful they were able to participate and come in on such short notice.”
McGowan is similarly excited about how the documentary has involved so many different people from around the state: “It’s been a beautiful community effort, which is really nice. The last few things I’ve worked on were all in Los Angeles, and it’s a very different culture out there, compared to working in Maine.”
Even LaVasseur has contributed content to his own documentary. “What’s great is that Jerry’s hobby, for much of his life, has been photography,” McGowan said. “All the years he was coaching, he was the unofficial photographer for the Bowdoin track and cross-country teams. And he’s taken photos throughout all of his travels over the years, so he has a wealth of personal archival material that he’s been able to share and is willing to put in the film.”
That’s part of how McGowan is able to tell a story spanning 88 years while sticking to a budget. He’s also put together a Kickstarter campaign to help finance the filming, where the documentary is listed under the title The Coach Jerry Story.
McGowan is hoping to wrap up production after LaVasseur’s July Masters National Championships bid, and then he’ll move on to an extended editing process. He hopes to have a finished cut by early 2027, when he’ll start shopping it around to film festivals.
What are McGowan’s aspirations for the documentary?
“I hope that people can feel inspired by Jerry,” he said. “[I hope they] can see that it’s possible to still be doing really meaningful things at an advanced age, and still be doing very physically active things at an advanced age.”
McGowan also hopes that the documentary will “bring a little bit of wholesome positivity to this world right now.”
~ Elias Kemp `27
Be First to Comment