An unsung Saugus High hero

Saugus Lions honor Sachem senior Wilderson LaFortune with “Heisman Award” at Annual Football Meeting and Dinner

By Mark E. Vogler

As a freshman student athlete at Saugus High School, Wilderson LaFortune “thought he was a basketball player,” Football Head Coach Steve Cummings recalled last Wednesday night. But Cummings said he saw Wilderson as a potential player on the young and inexperienced Sachems football team.

“Luckily for us, we were able to get him out his sophomore year, and football is a sport he just took to,” Cummings told the audience that gathered in the second floor dining room at the Kowloon Restaurant.

“This young man’s come a very long way. He’s interested in playing football next year at the next level [college], and I know he’s going to be fantastic at it,” the coach said. “Every year we see him in the weight room, getting stronger, getting bigger and becoming more of an influence.”

LaFortune received this year’s Saugus Heisman Trophy during the annual Lions Club Saugus-Peabody football dinner Wednesday night. In making the presentation, Cummings stressed that the trophy was not intended as a team MVP Award. “We present this award to our senior who we feel has gone above and beyond…in the preseason and during the season.”

The coach cited LaFortune as one of the senior leaders on the team. “He had to push the guys around him because the guys around him were very young. They were inexperienced and they needed a leader,” Coach Cummings said.

“They needed somebody they could lean on. They needed somebody who could push them in the right direction at practice, to show them the right way to go about things,” he said.

Cummings said he’s optimistic about LaFortune’s chances of playing college football after he graduates. “With his size and work ethic, he should be able to catch on somewhere.”

In an interview after receiving the award, LaFortune said it was a total surprise that he wasn’t expecting. “Coming into this banquet, I didn’t think I was going to get anything. I thought Cody [Munafo] was going to get it,” LaFortune said.

“I went through a lot to be on the football team here. The fact that the coach recognized me means a lot. The highlight of my career is winning this award and helping out the younger guys, helping them to develop to become the guy I am on the team,” he said.

LaFortune, the team’s defensive tackle and offensive guard, said he has a brother (Nathan) in the fifth grade who he hopes “can carry on my legacy someday.”

He’s a first generation American whose family immigrated here from Hati, but returned there before coming back to America when he was seven years old. He’s been in Saugus since the sixth grade.

“My aspirations are to play college football and go get a degree in business administration or accounting and give back to my community of Saugus,” LaFortune said.

He said he would like to attend one of four colleges next year: UMass Dartmouth, Bridgewater, Worcester State or Southern Connecticut.

LaFortune is one of five senior players on the Sachems football team who will be playing their final game tomorrow.

“Saugus is on the way up. Just believe in the young guys,” he said, predicting that the Sachems would be a winning football team in the near future.

“The Classes of ’26, ’27 and ’28 are the future,” he said.