By: Mike Whaley
(This is the fourth in a series on the 2022 and 2024 inductees into the New Hampshire Basketball Coaches Organization’s Hall of Fame. The stories will run periodically during the winter season.)
Arthur “Joe” Giovannangeli Jr. had two distinct careers that spanned nearly 40 years as a colorful high school basketball coach in New Hampshire. The first 24 years (1968 to 1992) were spent coaching various levels at Peterborough High School and then Contoocook Valley Regional High School (ConVal). He was fired in ‘92 from the ConVal job after 20 years as the head coach, even though the program was at the top of its game in Class I/Division II. Did that slow Joe down? Hardly. He was fortunate to find a second career waiting for him 10 miles down the road in Jaffrey at Conant High School. He guided the Orioles for 15 seasons, making them into a Class M/D-III power. They won six state titles. His teams captured seven overall between the two schools and appeared in another four state finals. He was a chemistry teacher at ConVal for 30-plus years, staying there even when he was coaching Conant.
Joe was one of six inductees into the NHBCO Hall of Fame last November in Concord. Now living outside of Houston, Texas, he was unable to attend the event.
It seemed only natural that Joe would go into education and coaching. His father, Arthur Sr., taught science at Keene State College for 42 years while his Aunt Clara served as the KSC bursar for 44 years. Joe and his dad are the only father/son combo to have been inducted into KSC’s Sports Hall of Fame. Arthur Sr. was part of the inaugural class, honored for his basketball and baseball exploits, while Joe was inducted in 2001 for golf and basketball. He still holds the KSC men’s single-game scoring record with 50 points against Castleton State in 1966.
“I liked it,” he said of education and coaching. “I wanted to be a coach.” He was hired in 1968 to teach science and coach freshman boys basketball in 1968 at Peterborough Consolidated School. Two years later ConVal was built and he was soon the head coach of the boys team. He also started a golf program, winning a state title in 1985. In addition, he coached girls softball for 13 seasons.
Joe made ConVal into a regular basketball tournament participant and eventually a contender in Class I. He said an integral factor was that when the regional school was built, it welcomed several blue-collar communities, Antrim and Bennington – grittier areas compared to privileged Peterborough. “Those kids were tough. They played hard,” Joe said. “I played a lot of those kids. Some of the doctors’ kids (in Peterborough) were pretty good athletes. They didn’t really work hard. That’s where the sh*t started.” Eventually an angry parents group forced out Joe despite the fact he coached the Cougars to the state final in that final season.
“We worked hard,” he said of his teams. “We ran the ball like (John) Bagonzi (the Woodsville legend). I coached against Bagonzi (in Christmas tournaments) a couple of times. We became friends.”
Joe added: “I was hard, but I was very fair. If you worked hard in practice, you played. If you didn’t, you would still play a little.” Joe’s willingness to play the hard-working boys from the surrounding villages over some of the Peterborough kids became a sticking point.
Joe recalls winning ConVal’s first state title in 1986, light years after old Peterborough High School captured the last of five small school state titles in 1941. The unlikely hero was the unassuming Clinton Burgess, one of three brothers to play for the Cougars. In a game that was headed to the wire, Clinton Burgess stepped up and hit six straight foul shots to secure a 52-48 win over Fall Mountain. “He was a good player, but he was not that athletic,” Joe said. Burgess, of course, didn’t need to be talented, he just needed to be mentally cool enough to step to the foul line to drain those six shots, which he clearly was.
Joe lit up the sideline with flamboyant outfits – bright colors and plaids – a calculated ploy to draw the referees’ attention to him and away from his team. “I enjoyed it,” Joe said. “I was a vocal coach and I wanted the refs to see who was talking. I told my team, ‘I get all the Ts (technical fouls).’ I’ll complain for them. As a team, we got very few Ts. My wife, Judie, made most of my outfits dealing with hoops. She was a great seamstress, even making most of my sports coats, and sweatshirts I wore to practice.”
Joe recalled the story about two elderly women approaching him in a Jaffrey grocery store. They told Joe they came early to the Conant games so they could get seats. “We love the way your teams play,” they told him. “They work hard and are unselfish, and therefore are fun to watch. To be completely true, we also come to see what you are wearing.”
Then assistant coach Eric Saucier remembers Joe’s lively persona and loud outfits. “I think Joe’s personality and his outgoing nature were summed up in his legendary flashy outfits,” said Saucier, who was an assistant from 2005 to 2008 and then the head coach from 2008 to 2024 (five state crowns). “That is what most coaches remember Joe for. During Christmas, it was the red pants and bright green jacket. During the season it was the plaid pants or plaid jacket. Everyone always knew when Joe walked in the door.”
Mike Lee coached against Joe at the end of his own career in Farmington, which spanned 1977 to 1998. “Colorful is the best way of describing him,” Lee said. “Your first impression was ‘Who is this?’ Your second impression was ‘I know who this is.’ He was very outgoing. Flamboyant. He had charisma.”
After Joe was fired as the coach at ConVal, he was out of the game for a year, although he remained at ConVal as a teacher into the new millennium. When he lost the ConVal basketball coaching job, the school intended to retain his services to coach golf and softball, but he resigned from both posts. The school’s logic escaped him. They had a problem with his basketball coaching, but not with how he coached golf and softball. It didn’t make sense. Then the head boys basketball position opened up next door at Conant. The principal there knew him. He got word to Joe to apply for the job. He knew a little about the school through some golf buddies from the Jaffey area.
At the time Conant’s program was in decline after some very good success in the 1980s – a runners-up in 1984 and a state title in 1985. But by the early 1990s, the Orioles were losing. The coach was fired after back-to-back winless seasons. “I applied and I got the job,” Joe said.
His first season in 1993-94, the Orioles went .500. The next year they made the state final. “We had a couple of good years and then we got hot,” he said. “We had some good kids coming up and we won a bunch.” At one stretch under Joe, Conant won six titles in 11 years and two more after he left as part of a streak of five from 2006 to 2010.
“We had some great times at Conant,” Joe said. “The kids worked hard. It was a lot smaller. It was Class M. The gym was always packed. It meant something to them, I had kids who really wanted to work.”
With The Orioles, Joe ran the ball all the time. “We pressed you a thousand ways,” he said. “We dropped back into a zone. We worked on the defense. The kids at Conant were a little quicker. They would hit you harder. They were tough kids.”
Because Conant didn’t have football, Joe felt that made a difference in helping those types of tough kids to focus on basketball. “If there’s no football, what are you going to work for?” He said. “We had the one good sport, let’s work on that.”
Joe remembers his first group at Conant. The team hadn’t won in a while. They got to the ‘95 championship game against Newfound. “They had a prom the night before,” he said. “They didn’t know. They never did that again. I’m not saying that’s the reason we lost. We lost to a very good team.”
Several years later they got it right, winning the 1998 title behind 6-foot-4 Craig Griffin, who Joe said was the best overall player he ever coached. The Orioles handled Coe-Brown in the final, 72-51. But the key to the whole thing might have been the defensive effort on Farmington star Tim Lee in a 50-38 semifinal win. Conant limited the high-scoring Lee to 12 points after he had tied a tournament record with a 45-point explosion in a quarterfinal victory over Gilford. “We were on him when he was out of bounds,” Joe said. “We were next to him.”
It was coach Mike Lee’s final game. He recalls the defensive effort on his son – a withering box-and-one: “There were no good first-half looks. None.”
Griffin was the Orioles big star. He went on to an outstanding career at Merrimack College where he scored 1,454 points and pulled down 854 rebounds (second all-time). Joe recalls when Griffin went to Bridgton Academy in Maine for a post graduate year, the coach told his dad he might not get much playing time. Joe said Griffin would be starting after three practices. “I was incorrect. He started after two practices,” he said with a laugh. “What a worker.” The Merrimack College coaches told Joe that had Griffin (6-5 in college) been 6-7, he could have made the NBA.
Coach Lee recalled working a senior all-star game with Joe. “He was there to have fun and I was honored that he selected me,” Lee said. “The whole concept with him there was not to worry about the offense. He knew kids had been doing that forever. Let’s go out and win every ball. That’s kind of the approach he took. And from there, it was just run and have fun.”
Saucier said this of Joe: “Joe was very passionate about the game and coaching. He was always prepared, and his energy was unmatched. He was very driven to win, and to get the most out of his players, he never let them give anything less than their best. Players knew if you were going to play for Joe you had to play hard.” Saucier is now the head boys hoop coach at Bow High School.
When Conant won back-to-back championships in 2001 and 2002, Joe recalled that the second championship season did not begin so well. “We had most of (the kids) back, so we should be good,” he said. “They were a little out of shape and we started the year kind of bummy.” After losing at Monadnock, Joe told the team in the locker room, “You’re good enough to win this. But you’ve got to step it up in practice. It’s up to you guys. I can holler at you as much as I want but it doesn’t do any good. You guys have got to want to do it.”
The team got together on its own for a meeting shortly after that and effectively refocused. “We just crushed people,” Joe said. “We won every game.” Conant, led by Justen Nagle and Jared Van Dyke, capped the season with a 58-44 win over Hillsboro-Deering in the championship, avenging a loss to the Hillcats in its season opener.
In the 2007 championship game against Gilford, the Orioles were up two with 90 seconds to play. “Who wants to shoot these foul shots?” Joe asked the team. A little guard by the name of Trevor Young confidently quipped “‘Don’t worry coach, I’ll make these.’ I said ‘OK’ and every out of bounds we got the ball to Trevor. He made six in a row.” Conant won the title, 53-49.
The most emotional win was his last one in 2008. The Orioles had won the previous two championships and were on their way to a third when their best player, Stephen Record, was killed in an automobile accident just after Christmas. “They held together,” Joe recalled. “We had two freshmen who could play. We were lucky to win that one.” Newmarket pushed the championship to overtime, but Conant was able to pull away at the end, 55-49. Center Kyle Todd was instrumental in all three of those championship wins.
It was Conant’s third championship in a row with more on the horizon with good players coming back and others in the pipeline. Joe decided to go in a different direction. Having spent his summers growing up on Kennebunk Beach in Maine, it seemed like a good place to make a move when the Kennebunk High School boys basketball position opened up. “To me, that’s where I wanted to be,” he said. “Or so I thought. This came up. I’m retired. I’m just coaching. I’m doing science chemistry labs at Franklin Pierce University. I talked to my wife. ‘Do what you want. But you’re leaving a pretty good place (in Conant),’” she said.
“‘I know, but we might find a place over there and I could still coach a little longer,’” was his response. They decided to give it a try. They stayed for the year, but they could not find the house they wanted. They came back to Keene and Joe made the biggest mistake of his life – he accepted the Keene High boys hoop job. “That was the worst experience I ever had in basketball,” he said. “I was happy to get out of there after one year.”
What Joe and Judie really wanted to do was move to Houston to be near their son and his family. “That made it easy,” Joe said. They moved there in 2010 and Joe has lived there ever since. Judie passed away in 2017. She was a ConVal physical education teacher for 35 years.
Looking back, Joe can see how fortunate he was. He built ConVal into a tournament contender and guided the school to its first title before things went bad. And then he got lucky after a year off when the Conant job opened up – and that allowed him to coach the sport he loved and have even greater success. This was Judie’s assessment: “God closes a door and opens a window.” Conant was a picture window for Joe.
Mike Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com