Father-son duo get one last game together with Team West in CHaD all-star football game

Flashbacks have been hitting Harris Jones harder than any linebacker on a football field over these last few weeks.

These memories are as fresh in the Milford High School graduate’s mind as when he experienced them for the first time - 67 days spent at the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon as a 2 year old following a snowmobile accident; multiple surgeries and visits to CHaD through his sophomore year of high school; discussions about amputation of his leg when the injury first happened; learning to walk without lifting his right foot due to a missing tendon at the ankle.

“Visiting current patients at CHaD was emotional,” he said. “Just being back there - because I haven’t been there in so long - seeing all the kids that are there. Thinking I was in their spot. It’s just obviously very touching, and I want to make them feel the way I felt when I was there. To make them feel supported.

“It brought me back to all the years I spent going there and the treatments and surgeries that got me to where I am today.”

Jones will be in Manchester on Friday, on the Saint Anselm College football field at 6 p.m., suiting up at tight end for Team West in the 12th CHaD New Hampshire East-West All-Star Football Game.

Harris flipped the coin at inaugural event in 2012. His dad, Keith Jones, was coaching that game. It’s just another memory that has come full circle as the father-son duo takes the field Friday, with dad as the head coach and son playing his last high school game.

“One last time,” Harris said. “It’s pretty cool. One last time to be coached by him. And then to think about him as my dad, coaching me in my last football game as a high schooler and then even maybe him coaching me as his last game as a high school coach.”

For Keith Jones, who resigned as Milford High School’s football coach in February after 23 seasons and wraps up his teaching and administrative duties at Milford High School also on Friday for a job in the Merrimack school system, those same thoughts have been front and center these last two weeks.

“It’s certainly a nice way to go out, to be able to have one last game with my son,” said Keith Jones, who actually reached out to the all-star game organizers to volunteer his services as head coach for the game.  “Considering the meaning of it and what it means to our family just to be part of anything that has to do with the children’s hospital is special.”

Keith Jones may return to the high school ranks some day, but for now he’s considering a return to coaching Junior Spartans football as Harris’ younger brother, Jamieson Jones, will be a seventh grader next year.

For Friday though it’s all about CHaD and coaching these high schoolers one last time, especially his son.

“I just felt like if for some reason I don’t coach again, it’s certainly an opportunity for me to go out with something I really love,” Keith said. “I really feel like I owe them. I owe them my time. I owe them my gratitude.

“And to have one last one with my kid, not many people get to do that.”

Harris Jones concurs.

“It’s really a cool experience overall,” said Harris, who will be attending and playing football at Plymouth State University in the fall. “I flipped the coin back at the first game in 2012 as a kid ambassador. I was really into the experience of that game with my dad as the coach, and everything I had been through and we had been through as a family.

“Back then I was looking up to all those guys and hoping to be playing in that same game one day. Here I am, alongside my dad, and I hope I just can make the kids feel the same way I did that day.”