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Who's going to be using that No. 2 pencil now?

The keys to the golf cart used by members of the North Attleboro High School athletic staff had to be turned in.

The No. 19 jersey was returned to its storage spot with the other baseball uniforms.

The athletic department will never be the same now for the Rocketeers since the self-proclaimed and later anointed "associate" director of athletics at North Attleboro High has left the building.

You never have read about him. You probably never even noticed him. He wasn't the same caliber of some of the student-athletes earning All-Hockomock League and All-Sun Chronicle acclaim.

Perhaps, the only sports in which he might have gained a varsity letter in would have been pickle-ball, street hockey or badminton.

But, there might not have been a better "sport" around the NAHS Athletic Department over the past four years than Tom Howard.

Who?

Howard was the official go-to guy for Kurt Kummer's football team. He introduced the starting lineups and worked the 30-second clock for Chris Perron's boys' basketball teams. And during the spring, Howard was the stat-man for Paul Sullivan's baseball team.

But, more than that Howard was an unofficial game analyst, deciphering situations, making suggestions on just what the best remedy, the best avenue might be for the Rocketeers to travel to victory.

Howard had an awareness for athletic endeavor and a step-ahead perception. After all, the recent graduate from NAHS not only was accepted at Harvard, Notre Dame, Brown and Boston College, but he chose to continue his studies in biology-pre medicine at Yale University.

Maybe Howard chose New Haven to be closer in proximity to Hartford's Rentschler Stadium, the home of the University of Connecticut football team and his best buddy, his neighbor and Husky fullback Anthony Sherman.

If there ever were two unlikely candidates for bosom buddies it was Sherman, one of the great three-sport athletes of all time at North and Howard, a kid who would likely end up on a stretcher had he played football or wrestled, might have had his glasses broken were he to engage in a basketball brouhaha or twisted a back or knee trying to swing at a pitch on the baseball field.

"He's not the least bit athletically inclined, but he'd be in my office talking, having frequent discussions about how we should do this, use that player - and most of the time he was right," said Sullivan, the AD. "Like in baseball, he understands the game so well, he's helping me make out the lineup, telling me the relationships of what I could do on the field with players, the DH, a pinch-runner, analyzing the stats." Howard does have some athletic talent, not just writing in a scorebook, picking up a microphone or using a few fingers to start and stop the clock. He played Little League baseball, basketball at the middle school and some soccer through the eighth grade.

"I think that I definitely had more strikeouts than hits during my baseball career," chuckled the ever self-deprecating Howard. "I just found that once that I got to the high school level, there were a lot of kids who were a lot more competitive than me, better than me.

"I think that street hockey was my one athletic talent," continued Howard. "I was the goalie for my middle school team and we won the championship."

It was a suggestion by Sherman to Kummer that he knew a kid that North had to have on its "team" as a freshman that Howard became involved with the Rocketeer football program. The Rocketeers needed a volunteer to work the scoreboard for freshman basketball games and Howard raised his hand. Brian Sankey, then North's baseball coach and also freshman basketball coach, had Howard as a student in his freshman history course and told him to report on the opening day for spring sports.

The rest has been etched, either in ink or pen, in the North record books.

"I wanted to get involved, helping out any way that I could," said Howard of becoming the "Big Man" behind the scenes, if not on the playing field. "Sherman had something to do with it.

"He was always so much better than me," added Howard of Sherman's athletic prowess. "Like when we'd have neighborhood games, it'd be Sherman against everybody else. But, if we had to pick sides, he'd always pick me for his team."

That friendship of true teammates extended itself even this past year while Sherman was in Storrs and Howard was finishing up his duties and academic workload at North. Howard even flew down to Charlotte to support Sherman and the UConn football team for its bowl game.

"That's what you have to admire about those two kids, the backgrounds of both of them," Sullivan said, delighted to have had both touch his own life. "Neither one of them had a lot growing up, but they're both so well-grounded - both of them got along great with all the other kids."

Sullivan gained so much respect for Howard that he entrusted in him the responsibility for the Big Red golf cart, turning the keys over to him during the fall sports seasons to make the trips between the practice fields, the field hockey matches, the soccer matches, the cross country meets.

"Mr. Sullivan put me through an obstacle course before he gave me the keys," grinned Howard, the only Rocketeer student-athlete to have his chauffeurs license as well.

The hat that Howard wore best was as a student, a top 10 scholar. Who knows, he could have become manager of the Fighting Irish football team. He passed up local Ivy League outposts in Cambridge and Providence because he developed a rapport with the faculty and staff at Yale.

Howard is spending his pre-Eli days around North as a summer camp counselor with the Parks and Recreation Dept., "I can do fairly well in the games with kids that age," laughed Howard.

Make no mistake about it, Howard is a winner in a lot more ways than on the scoreboard.

"He's the type of kid who will do anything for you," said Sullivan. "He's into the intellectual side of the game, not the physical side. He has a great sense of humor, he's going to be missed."

And Howard, for that matter, is going to miss North, being able to don jersey No. 19 ("no particular reason, it was the last jersey that they had left"). "I remember one time during my freshman year and I was helping Coach Sankey. We were way up in the game and he had put everybody in. He said that if somebody got hurt, I had better be ready, that I was the next one in."

Without having stepped onto a playing field or floor once, Howard was quite a Rocketeer.

"I'm going to miss it, all the sports stuff, going to games, the bus rides - well, maybe not those," said Howard. "I'm ready to move on."

PETER GOBIS may be contacted at 508-236-0375 or via e-mail at pgobis@thesunchronicle.com