Manteo, N.C. — This is the story of a father and a son. A father, a son and the game of football, their constant companion.

This is the story of a head coach and an assistant. The head coach, once the father, is now the assistant. The son, once the assistant — and once the 10-year-old on the father’s sideline — is now the head coach. Role reversal sent into a crossing pattern.

This is the story of Brian Emery, the kid who grew up in Montville, now the 34-year-old, second-year head football coach at Manteo High School on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This is the story of Mike Emery, now the assistant to his son, following a career in Connecticut that produced 195 wins, two state championships at Fitch, a 34-game win streak and a No. 1 ranking.

The son and the father. The father and the son. The head coach and the assistant. The assistant and the head coach. One and the same. And very different.

“People always ask me if I get butterflies before a game,” Mike Emery was saying one day last week as Manteo prepared for its 2023 season opener. “Of course I do. But if you want to make it 100 times worse, try having your son be the head coach.”

•••••

An attentive ear hears an ever so slight, if not endearing, twang in Brian Emery’s voice now. He’s been a Carolina guy for the last 10 years, what feels like a lifetime ago from his days on his dad’s sideline at Fitch.

Oh, it was a hoot back then at Dorr Field. The Falcons never lost. (Literally from Sept. 1999 to Dec. 2001, 34 in a row.)

And the personalities? Put it this way: It wasn’t lost on John McCoy, the kid who has grown up to be a preacher, to conceive the makeshift pulpit on the sideline, shoulder pads and all, and announce “this is gonna be a touchdown” to anyone who would listen. And McCoy wasn’t even on the field at the time. He just knew the play call.

And there absorbing the floor show was little Brian, 10 at the time, with dad and all these big brothers appearing larger than life.

“The thing I really remember is Fitch going through warm ups more than anything else,” Emery said, suddenly awash in the great old days. “Because they always started with the friendship drill (players would greet each other and converse cordially on the field). They'd line up at the 40. You got 120 guys and the whole other team has their mouths open staring at them. Every time I could jump in at the end of the line, I would.

“At every game, I actually had my own little job. I had to make sure the refs had the right game ball for us. I was so nervous. I was out there early. The way the lights were at Fitch, you could just barely see the fieldhouse. And then all of a sudden just before the game started, it was just this mass coming out of the fieldhouse. And I was like, ‘this is awesome, you know?’ I was on the field early because I always wanted to watch them come out. I knew how it looked. The mass of players coming down those stairs that never ended.”

The meticulous maestro at the time was his dad, head of the math department by day, football savant by mid afternoon. Even now, as Brian’s assistant, the white board in the locker room has a magnetic tug for Mike Emery, frequently drawing plays and schemes as any good mad scientist would. It should be noted that Mike Emery’s teams at Fitch went 136-44-1.

Mike Emery, driven and detailed, nonetheless allowed the personalities to do their thing. He had bombastic assistants — Steve McDermott and Kenny Wood could make a corpse laugh — and the cerebral ones, too, like Mike Campbell, the play caller. This just in: If Mike Emery trusts you enough to call plays, you probably had a stint as a returning champion on Jeopardy.

Now it’s more than 20 years later. Brian is the sheriff. Mike is the deputy. And yet the Manteo sideline, well short of the personnel Fitch used to have, has the same rattle and hum. The sheriff lets his people do their thing, too.

“After practice, I always give the coaches a chance to talk because I’m not going to think of everything,” Brian said. “Sometimes, my dad goes, ‘am I talking too much?’ I say, ‘Coach, I don't care.’ It doesn’t make sense to cut off a great coach. When we started talking about who’s going to call plays, I mean, my dad has seen everything. It makes sense for me to trust him — just as he trusted (Mike) Campbell. It's not an ego thing. I'm the head coach. I could call plays. But I'm not the best one to do it right now. But I'm learning it more and more.”

Just because they are father and son doesn’t mean they have the same way about them. Mike Emery, an old linebacker at Waterford High, coached like a middle linebacker blitzes: direct. Brian, an old quarterback, coaches like the quarterback in the huddle: Mindful of everyone.

“My dad is calmer here. In the Fitch days, you could say there was aggression,” Brian said. “He was good at getting aggression out of the kids, too. I remember if someone got a personal foul, that's it. Done for the day. But they were done for the day with five minutes of a (butt) chewing. He still challenges our kids to be aggressive. But it's a different dynamic with the number of kids we have. We're not quite to that point where we can challenge them the same way that you can challenge a team that has a big winning streak and state championships.”

Mike on Brian: “He's more calm than I was for sure. But he's got great relationships with the kids. I think that's the most important thing for any teacher because ultimately, we're teachers, too. The kids really look up to him because of his style more than anything else. He’s 10 times more organized than I was.”

The combination has captured the fancy of the players. Mike Emery works at Manteo High as a math interventionist. Brian is a history teacher. That means they’re in the building every day with a chance to connect to their kids.

“They really love football,” senior Chris Bryant Heath said. “You’re walking down the hall and one of them will pull you in to their room and say, ‘hey, Chris, come see this.’”

At this moment, junior Parker Gregory grinned and said, ‘it’s usually some play from a random college game.”

More from Bryant Heath: “My first two years here, all I cared about was hitting people as hard as I could. I didn’t really learn football. Now I’m being taught technique and how to think football. Our coaches are really smart.”

•••••

The sliding glass door opens on the third floor and you soon understand that bliss can be achieved without a prescription.

This is the view where Mike Emery and his wife, Carol Kirchoff, spend their days. Their home in Nags Head, just over the Washington Baum Bridge from Manteo, sits on the 18th fairway of Nags Head Golf Links. Which sits on the banks of Roanoke Sound.

Translation: You might sit in an Adirondack chair on the third-floor deck and stare at the setting sun, hovering over emerald green grass that leads to azure blue water, while wisps of breeze cut through the Carolina warmth. And you wouldn’t be surprised if Rockwell suddenly showed up and started painting.

As former Fitch teacher and assistant football coach Tony Cafaro, who was visiting Mike and Carol last week said, “Is this heaven? No, it’s Nags Head.”

There are Emerys, Emerys everywhere on the Outer Banks.

In addition to Mike and Carol, Brian and his wife, Ayra, live in Manteo with their seven-month-old daughter Eleanor (Nora). Brian’s mother, Eileen, a Montville native, lives around the corner with her boyfriend, Marcel Bouley, the former proprietor of Engine 6 Pizza in Norwich. Bouley also films all the Manteo football games and drives the team bus. Eileen sells Manteo paraphernalia, black and gold like the Steelers, at the games.

Eileen Emery was in charge of postgame fare after Manteo’s season opener last week, a 40-16 loss to Perquimans. The outcome became a duller ache after adult beverages and Eileen’s chicken parm. Mike and Carol, meanwhile, had a house full of friends visiting, thus adding two more coaches to the Emery tree. Brian is the head coach; his dad the offensive coordinator and Eileen and Carol are the Entertainment Coordinators.

Indeed, this is home now to a family with deep roots from our corner of the world.

“It's a lot easier when you can come home and a lot of people are feeling the same way you are. You're not by yourself,” Brian Emery said. “I want our kids to learn that you're going to have to ask for help in your life when things are hard. And hopefully your family can be there for you. Not everybody has that.”

It began innocently enough, this exodus to paradise. Brian Emery was on vacation on the Outer Banks visiting the man who has turned out to be the pied piper, otherwise known as former Fitch principal John Luciano, who has been the principal at Manteo the last 17 years. Luciano was first to the Outer Banks. An entire family followed.

“I was visiting John and on vacation when I met the principal from First Flight (High School, ironically Manteo’s rival),” Brian Emery said. “He had a teacher going out who was having a baby and school started about a week and a half later. They needed someone. My dad said this is free experience you can put on your resume. That teacher gave birth and applied for extended leave. They asked me to stay.”

Brian Emery’s first full-time job came at Hatteras in 2012 before the position at Manteo opened in 2014.

Mike followed a few years later, after retiring from Connecticut in 2015 as Director of Teaching and Learning at Central Office in Groton.

“I got a job in the middle schools in Groton helping the teachers there and saved a little money,” Emery said.

This allowed Mike and Carol to buy their first rental property in Nags Head, which has now morphed into a 10-bedroom, 10-bathroom palace in nearby Corolla.

“A wonderful place to live,” Mike Emery said. “It’s probably the only place where the surfer dude and your starting linebacker are the same person.”

••••••

The story could be simple: Football on the Outer Banks. Father and son following their passion in paradise. Sometimes, though, this feels like playing cards with a deck that’s all aces. They’ve got everything and they’ve got nothing.

Manteo’s enrollment is just under 600. The smallest school in the league (think Griswold trying to win the Eastern Connecticut Conference). Many bus rides are 90 minutes or more. There are barely north of 30 players dressing varsity.

Brian Emery took over a 1-9 program two years ago. Manteo went 2-8 in his first season, although it did defeat First Flight, its blood rival, in the “Marlin Bowl.” The marlin-shaped trophy, about as long as the Colonel Ledyard Sword, which First Flight had won in eight of the nine previous years, now hangs in Manteo’s locker room.

There has been progress. Manteo runs a version of the double wing, an offense Mike Emery popularized in Connecticut, with success. But there’s not much depth. Not a good combination for a father and son who share the competitive gene.

“Yeah, it gets to me,” Brian Emery said. “When Caz (assistant coach Caz Wheeler, who graduated from Manteo in 2017) was a senior, we had five shutouts. I was the defensive coordinator. And I felt pressure. No one said it to me, but it was like, ‘I gotta keep this thing going.’ But that’s the hard part about small schools. You just have those waves. There's a lot of kids playing, your chances go up. A couple years later, there's not a lot of kids playing, you know what happens.

“So I mean, does it get to me? Yeah, absolutely it does. I want to win. I mean, as competitive as my dad is, my mother's the same way. One time when I was growing up, my mother and I played one-on-one basketball. She beat me. We've never played again because she's 1-0.

“My whole family is unbelievably competitive. I'm competitive. We go play horseshoes at a picnic and we’re having a great time? I'm gonna beat you. I don't care.”

Manteo led 16-6 at one point in its season opener. Temperature at kickoff: 88 degrees. Humidity that could peel paint. Emery’s team withered. But there was an encouraging film session the next day. And while Brian Emery knows success gets measured primarily on scoreboards, there are other places, too.

“Everyone on the outside sees wins and losses. As if that’s all there is,” Brian Emery said. “They don’t see the kids that came through that program who leave as men. We have a kid who never misses a day of practice. He also doesn’t miss a call at the fire station because he's one of the volunteers over there.

“He's probably going to graduate with a welding degree from high school because he's already taken college classes. He wants to go into fire rescue in college. He decided to get baptized this summer and invited all the coaches. No one sees that. Win or lose, we can still help them become young men. And that's something that nobody sees. But to me, that's a huge part of what this is all about.”

Ah, perspective perhaps belying his age. Brian Emery has been taught well.

“I always knew in the back of my mind that if I was going to be assistant coach, it would have to be for the right person,” Mike Emery said. “And it doesn't mean it has to be my son. But somebody I respect. There’s nobody I respect more.”

m.dimauro@theday.com