Erwin Dill, former Bethpage football and lacrosse coach, dies at 69
Bethpage football head coach Erwin Dill during a game on Oct 17, 2015. Credit: Steven Ryan
Erwin Dill put on a tough exterior but those who knew the former Bethpage football and lacrosse coach remember the heartfelt details the most.
He wrote Christmas cards by hand to send to former players and staff and kept the ones he received in return. He prepared detailed scouting reports for his players, even customizing the colors of each report to the opponent they would face.
Dill wasn’t married and didn’t have kids. But former player and assistant coach Roddy McCoy said Dill poured that time and care into his players.
“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say — and I think many people would say the same thing — that his kids were really all the boys that played for him and the special connections he made,” McCoy said. “Not only with the kids, but with the coaches.”
Dill, 69, died of heart illness on June 11, according to his brother, Mike Dill, at Glen Cove Hospital.
Erwin Dill, who lived in West Babylon for decades, was undergoing dialysis while battling myriad ailments in recent years, including a broken leg he had suffered a year ago. He spent months recovering at Our Lady of Consolation Nursing & Rehabilitative Care Center in West Islip.
“He had a big heart, a caring person,” Mike Dill said. “ At the viewing, almost everyone that came up said he was a great man.”
Erwin Dill began coaching football in 1983 at Bethpage’s John F. Kennedy Middle School. He served as an assistant coach to legend Howie Vogts on Bethpage’s varsity team from 1986 to 2009. Dill became the head coach from 2010 to 2018, leading the Golden Eagles to a 52-34 record before stepping aside after receiving a colon cancer diagnosis.
As a player, Dill helped Bethpage’s varsity football team become 1972 Conference II co-playoff champions, and he won 13 county titles, five Long Island titles and three Rutgers Cups across his coaching career.
His brother recalled the attention Dill gave every player he coached, whether he was giving someone a chance on special teams or going through pregame details in his office. He may have been stubborn, Mike said, but he “had a big heart, probably bigger than he was.”
“He could take the last kid on the roster and give them some self-worth, make them feel important,” Mike Dill said.
Erwin Dill also was as an assistant varsity coach for Nassau lacrosse icon Jim Amen Jr., helping the Golden Eagles win their only state title in 1996. Dill was the program’s head coach from 1997 until 2014, boasting a 205-78 record. Bethpage boys lacrosse coach Patrick Gorman remembers meeting Dill for the first time in 2003, before Gorman began coaching junior varsity the following year.
He fondly recalled how Dill’s scouting reports were “pages and pages and pages long.” Dill wrote it by hand throughout the day, from an opponent’s best player to the bottom of a roster. But it wasn’t just about whether a player was right-handed or left-handed. Dill went the extra mile.
“He’d quiz you on it,” Gorman said. “He’d include what color their cleats were, he’d include something about their father or grandfather that he knew about, and he’d ask you about it later. If you didn’t know, you didn’t read the scouting report. He definitely put everything into preparing and getting the kids to prepare.”
McCoy, a three-year varsity lacrosse player and two-year football player at Bethpage from 1992 to 1994, later coached with Dill beginning in 2000 before taking over for him. He remembers certain scouting reports very well.
“It said something in there like, ‘The kid rides horses, and he’s part of the rodeo,’ ” McCoy said. “And Erwin thought it was the funniest thing in the world. So, he put it in the scouting report to see if the kids would actually read it . . . That’s just one way of how much he cared and wanted to see the kids succeed.”
Born on Aug. 6, 1956, Dill graduated from Bethpage High School in 1974 and Gettysburg College in 1978. He worked as a special education teacher for Eastern Suffolk BOCES.
Dill was buried at Farmingdale’s St. Charles Cemetery on June 19. He is survived by younger brother Mike of North Carolina, and stepbrother Billy Watts of Bethpage.
Michael Sicoli covers high school sports for Newsday. He graduated from Quinnipiac in 2022 and left with a master’s degree in sports journalism in 2023.
