Peter Cooper of Fairfield may be retired as a coach, but he showed he is still plugged in to football in Maine.

Cooper, the retired coach at Lawrence High School, posted a 17-3 mark last week in the NEWS Football Forecast to tie Don Perryman of Belfast for the lead among the guest predicters.

High school specialist Andrew Neff jumped to the front of the staff ranks by posting a season’s best 18-2 record. He leads Pete Warner by a game. Warner, Deirdre Fleming, Joe McLaughlin, and John Holyoke also turned in fine 17-3 weeks.

The Week 4 guest is John Rice, a contractor from South Portland who graduated from Bangor High in 1970, where he played basketball for three years and football for two.

The ’75 Maine Maritime grad and his wife, the former Cindy Loud, have four daughters, Lindsay, the freshman backup goalie for the UMaine field hockey team; Abigail, a junior field hockey goalie at South Portland High; Molly, a middle school field hockey player; and 9-year-old Jackie.