Category: Jam Session

Farmington’s first hoop title still resonates 55 years later

By Mike Whaley

It’s the 55th anniversary of Farmington High School’s first state championship in basketball – the 1970 Class M boys crown. Their story is about as “Hoosiers”-esque as they come.

At the time, Farmington was a virtual basketball nobody. The Tigers had exactly one playoff win in their history (1957). They lost in the first round of the 1969 tournament to Inter-Lakes by a point. Despite their history, they did have a pretty good team in 1969-70. Their starting five had grown up playing basketball together: seniors Paul Moulton, Danny Reynolds, Alan Hagar, and Paul Bishop, and junior Tony Quinn. They were guided by third-year coach Art Parissi.

Farmington had a solid regular season, going 15-2 to earn the No. 3 seed in the tournament. Their losses had been to league rivals Newmarket and Oyster River. The talk of the tournament, however, centered around  No. 1 and unbeaten Woodsville, coached by the volatile legend John Bagonzi. The Engineers had beaten all comers in winning the 1969 crown in similar and perfect fashion, including Class I champion Littleton. In fact, Woodsville capped the previous season with a record-setting 97-41 win over Pittsfield in the final at the University of New Hampshire – records for championship game points scored by the winning team and winning margin that still stands as overall tournament records.

The Engineers were just getting going in a span that would see them win five state titles in nine years.

Tony Quinn drives to the basket in Farmington’s quarterfinal win over Conant.

The Tigers, led by 1,000-point scorers Moulton and Reynolds, drew a first-round bye and faced Conant in the quarterfinals at Bishop Brady High School in Concord. The Orioles hung with them into the second half before the Tigers pulled away to win 79-66. Moulton led a balanced attack with 24 points, followed by Reynolds (17), Hagar (16) and Quinn (13).

That set up a matchup at UNH against powerful Woodsville, whose winning streak now stretched to 40 games. David vs. Goliath. It looked like it was going to go like everyone thought it would as the Engineers darted out to a 10-1 lead to force a Farmington timeout. In the huddle, a slowdown approach was discussed and quickly discarded. Like Woodsville, the Tigers embraced a fast-paced style. “We wanted to play the only way we knew how,” said Moulton in 2020. The one change that coach Parissi made was to have his players dribble through the Engineers’ vaunted press versus using the pass, which just wasn’t working. The worm began to turn.

Farmington’s Danny Reynolds lays one up versus Woodsville in the semifinals.

By halftime, Farmington had found its groove and was up 46-41. Woodsville was getting into foul trouble (three players fouled out). The Engineers pulled to within three at one point, but no closer. As time was winding down, Woodsville did something it had not done in two years – it pulled off its press.

When the final buzzer sounded, the Tigers had stunned the New Hampshire basketball world with one of the greatest upsets in state high school tournament history, 90-81. All five starters reached double figures: Moulton and Hagar with 23 apiece, Quinn notched 16, Reynolds had 15, and Bishop collected 13.

Standing in the way between Farmington and championship glory was another underdog – No. 10 Merrimack. The Tomahawks were in the final after three upset wins. It was a track meet, but it was anticlimactic after the Woodsville game. The Tigers led 49-40 at the half, and stayed in control to win by 12 – 95-83. To this day it remains the overall most points scored (178) in a state championship game in N.H. history. Again there was great scoring balance led by tournament MVP Moulton with 30, Reynolds with 28, and Hagar and Bishop with 15 each. All five starters made the Class M All-Tournament Team and averaged in double figures, led by Moulton (25.7 ppg). The other four starters averaged between 12 and 20 points per game. The Iron Five scored every single one of Farmington’s 264 tournament points.

Head Coach Art Parissi is hoisted up in celebration following Farmington’s title game victory over Merrimack.

“It was fun,” said Moulton in 2020. “We were the heroes of the town – for the next 50 years, I guess.”

Although some of the players  – most notably Moulton, Hagar and Bishop – and coach Parissi have passed away, it is still hard to forget the 1970 champions. If you take a gander at this year’s Division III tournament program, the Tigers once again deserve a mention in the record section. And given how the game has slowed down, it could last, well, another 55 years.

Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

The best at both worlds: Nichols successfully navigated coaching both genders

By Mike Whaley

(This is the last in a series on the 2022 and 2024 inductees into the New Hampshire Basketball Coaches Organization’s Hall of Fame.)

Even in his 70s, Dave Nichols’ passion for coaching basketball remains as vibrant as ever. It has never waned. When he was a young man, Dave got ahead of himself, focusing on his passion while forsaking college until he realized he needed the latter to move forward at the former. Plus, one needs to make a living.

Dave coached multiple stints at Oyster River High School on both sides of the gender aisle for 24 years and over 40 years in total counting his time in Milford and Hanover as an assistant or sub varsity coach. He was the first, and still only, New Hampshire coach to guide both genders to a state championship – one in boys (1988) and three in girls (2003, 2006, 2009). He was an assistant coach with four other state champions. Dave was one of seven coaches inducted into the NHBCO Hall of Fame last November in Concord.

“I remember thinking, heading into Dave’s program, we were winners,” said Jill Friel, who played for the Bobcats from 2005 to 2009. “I wanted to be part of that.” She was a key member of two championship teams coached by Dave.

Hanover’s Dan O’Rourke has coached with and against Dave for over 20 years. “He had similar approaches to basketball as I had,” said O’Rourke when introducing Dave at the Hall of Fame. “It’s hard to read Dave sometimes. He has a poker face. I knew that his teams got better year by year and during the season. While we were heavily favored (in the 2005 championship game), I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and sure enough it was tied (going) into the fourth (quarter).” Hanover pulled out a 49-38 win.

Dave was never a predictable opponent. The opposition could never be sure what he had up his sleeve coming into a season. “You always coach to the talent that you have,” he said. “That dictates whether you’re going to be a running team or a set-up team or pressing team, zone team or a man-to-man team.” Some coaches have a set style and they stick to it. Not Dave. He wanted to see what he had for talent and then adapt to the strengths of that talent. Dave predictably made the most of the players he had.

In just his second year as head coach in 1980-81, Dave Nichols guided the Oyster River boys to the Class I championship game – an overtime loss to Timberlane. [Courtesy photo]

Dave grew up in Milford, played basketball for Milford High School where he graduated from in 1969. He did not take a conventional path into coaching.

After spending a year at a Kansas college, he returned to Milford and started dating a cheerleader at Milford HS, who later became his wife. He also started helping out with the basketball program. He decided not to go back to college. “I spent more time coaching basketball and arranging my schedule for basketball than I did arranging my education,” he said. “I would go to practice. I would scout. At away games, I did the scorebook.”

Dave went back to the Kansas college at the start of the 1971 school year. When he came home for the Christmas break, he noticed that Milford had a really good team. “I talked myself into not going back for the second semester,” he said. Milford was indeed good. The Spartans were a Class I school, but for just that season, they went up to Class L. They beat preseason favorite Manchester Central twice that winter – at a holiday tournament and for the Class L title. Milford won another title in 1975 in Class I.

By then Dave was on board as a freshman coach for a couple years and then the JV coach for several seasons. Still, a career path was on hold. Debbie, that cheerleader, was now his wife. They were both commuting to Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts to complete their education, graduating in 1979.

With a degree and coaching experience in hand, Dave began applying for jobs as a math teacher, while Debbie was looking to get a job as a first-grade teacher. “I was getting job interviews, but she wasn’t,” he recalled.

Dave Nichols is the only New Hampshire coach to have led a boys team and a girls team to a state basketball championship. [Foster’s Daily Democrat photo]

Dave interviewed in New Hampshire at Salem, Milford and Oyster River, as well as Biddeford, Maine. He had other opportunities to interview in Massachusetts and Vermont, but the feeling was they wanted to be in Maine or N.H. He decided to take the Oyster River job, which was to teach math and coach JV boys basketball. That changed pretty quickly.

It wasn’t even the first day of school when Dave was talking to Athletic Director Sam Clark in his office. In walks the current head coach, Dick Colprit, who Dave was introduced to. “He looks at me and Sam and says ‘You might as well be the varsity coach, I’m all done.’”

Dave said the main reason for Colprit’s resignation was that he felt Oyster River could not compete in Class I, which is where they were moving up to after a successful run in Class M.

Dave was taken aback. “I’m thinking there’s a 6-7 kid named Pat Galvin that I’d already met and several players that I had been told about,” he said. Clark told the principal about Colprit’s decision. He said they would sit on that for several days and think about it. A few days turned into a week, but the end result was that Dave was offered the varsity job.

Dave was hoping to be a head coach eventually, so he was ready in that regard. Had he stayed in Milford, the head job would eventually have been his. “I kind of wanted to get away from Milford,” he said. “I thought it would be good to get away for a while. I’m going to go to Oyster River for five years, which turns into 35 and then five more as a sub.”

As a first-year head coach, Dave was not intimidated at all by Class I. “That’s what I was familiar with,” he said. Dave had seen some of the kids play at a local youth center and been impressed with what he saw. “Geesh, we’ve got some players here,” he told himself. “Two years later, we’re in a championship game.”

In 2009, Dave Nichols coached the Oyster River girls to the Class I title with a 39-33 win over Hanover. [Foster’s Daily Democrat photo]

A big challenge facing Dave was that Oyster River had no feeder program. There were intramurals at the middle school level that picked all-stars at the end of the season to play several area schools. “At first, in the offseason, we scheduled something for Sunday nights and it kind of grew over the years,” he said. “Eventually we started camps and set up a whole summer schedule. That evolved. It had to be a consistent program at that level. I knew the coaches in Class I were pretty much having year-round programs and summer programs.”

Dave’s instincts were right about his early teams. His first year (1979-80), they made the Class I tournament, won a first-round game before losing in the quarterfinals to Lebanon, the eventual champion. The following year, the Bobcats made it all the way to the championship game before losing into overtime to Timberlane.

Dave had a big team with the 6-7 Galvin, two 6-4 forwards and a 6-3 guard. Their weakness was the lack of a solid point guard. Although a believer in man-to-man defense as something you always needed to have, with this team he focused on using their size and length with a 1-3-1 zone.

Timberlane coach Bucky Tardif told Dave this about that 1-3-1. “He mentioned he had to have an extra day of practice to go against Oyster River to get ready for that damn 1-3-1 defense.” Over the years, other coaches have said the same thing that they needed several days to prepare for Dave’s teams.

Matt Whaley was a 6-3 guard on Dave’s first two teams. “He did a pretty good job. He didn’t know anybody or the community,” Matt said. “It was a step up for us, for sure. He was a much harder worker (than previous coaches). He had a lot of ideas with offense. Defensively he did things.”

Matt respected Dave’s honesty. He was telling him what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear. “He told me I wasn’t a great ball handler. ‘You can score and rebound and do a lot of other things well.’ He was truthful.”

Dave Nichols gives his NHBCO Hall of Fame induction speech.

One thing Dave learned early on was that if you knew you had a good tournament team, you coached that team for the tournament all year long. “You just don’t do that the last couple days before the tournament,” he said. “You prepare them all year with your philosophy. I learned that myself.”

With his first teams, they would extend the 1-3-1 with a lot of traps and stuff. It still wasn’t ideal on a big court like the one at UNH. “But what could you do? You’ve got to coach what you have.”

After the success in ‘80-81, the program was down for a bit, operating with kids who were primarily soccer players and trying to get them to play basketball. Eventually a group led by John Freiermuth surfaced in 1985. The core was very good, but “unfortunately the expectations were higher than what the reality was,” Dave said. “You don’t win a championship with freshmen.”

But things did get better. A couple of those freshmen made varsity. The next year, Pat Casey came along, the linchpin as a point guard, even though at the time he was a “small forward.” Dave saw his potential as a point guard. Casey had good leadership qualities. He could handle the ball and pass, he could defend, he was tough, and as an added bonus, he could score. “He was determined enough,” Dave said. “We didn’t have one and I decided he was going to be one. His father was delighted. He saw the same thing I did.”

You could make the argument with little pushback that Casey was the greatest point guard to ever play for Oyster River. He scored over 1,000 points, and then went on to have a very good career at Middlebury College. “He was more concerned with defense, dishing out assists and running the game,” Dave said. But obviously he could score when needed, which added to his value at that position.

Dave said they slowly improved. They’d make the tournament and get knocked out in the first round. “The kids were fine,” Dave said. “They could see that we were progressing and getting better. We were playing a really good schedule. We got better and better every year.”

The summer before the 1988 championship, Dave coached an AAU team with Farmington’s Mike Lee and Winnacunnet’s Jack Ford. Casey and Freiermuth were on the team, which was made up mostly of players from Class L. The other Class I player was Lebanon’s Mike Joslin.

Dave Nichols gives his NHBCO Hall of Fame induction speech.

The three Class I guys hung around a lot together. Dave remembered they were playing in the AAU nationals in Arkansas. He was driving them from one gym to another. “At one point, Mike was bragging about how Lebanon was going to be state champs. Pat and John were giving it right back,” Dave said.

Finally, Dave chimed in, telling them what was going to happen. “Lebanon is going to go undefeated because they play a soft schedule,” he said. “They are going to go to the finals and when they play, hopefully us, we are going to knock them down. We’re going to play a really tough schedule like Merrimack Valley and Pembroke and Goffstown. We’ll all play each other and have 2-3 losses.” Winter comes and all that comes true. Lebanon goes undefeated. Oyster River made it past Merrimack Valley in the semis to meet Lebanon in the final.

Dave recalls that Lebanon had six limousines parked in front of UNH to take them back home after the championship to celebrate. “They can go home,” Dave offered. “I don’t know if they’re going to be celebrating.” They weren’t. The Bobcats knocked them off, 65-51.

Even winning a state title did not appease the parental naysayers of which there are usually many in Durham. “I got told ‘Well, Dave, why don’t you focus on just being the athletic director,’” Dave recalled. He was essentially being told to resign as a result of parental pressure. “I really wasn’t ready to do that. I finally got the School Board to overrule the principal and superintendent and give me back the job. Now I knew what it would be like if I actually did come back. Enough of that. I was offered the job and then I resigned.”

A common theme in some of these hall of fame stories has been when a door closes and window opens. Several years later, Dave’s daughter Kate started playing basketball. “That got me into girls basketball,” he said. “It opened up a whole new path.”

It was 1996. The current girls basketball coach had stepped down, which led to a search to fill the position. It was the fall. The search did not yield any good candidates. The recommendation was to hire Dave. The feeling was that Dave’s daughter, now a sophomore, was on the team and he had proven he can coach in the past. “They asked and I accepted,” he said. There wasn’t much basketball talent. But they were athletic with soccer and volleyball players. Dave talked a few other kids into playing. The Bobcats won four games in his first year and then five. In the third year they made the playoffs.

Since Dave was also the AD, it created a little upheaval as other administrators had to cover for him when his team was on the road. He was approached at the end of his third year coaching girls in 1999 with the suggestion that maybe it was a good idea to hire a new coach so he could totally focus on his AD duties. His second tour as a head coach was done.

Dave decided in 2000 to step down as the AD and return to teaching math full time. The AD position was half time, which meant he was also teaching math half time. “I would teach in the morning and be the AD in the afternoon and night,” he said. “It was unfair to students. It was hard to arrange extra help time.”

It worked out for Dave. He now had some free time to watch his daughter play for her college team in North Carolina. In 2001, the girls’ JV position opened up, and he was asked to take the position by the head coach. “My son was going to be a freshman,” said Dave, who talked to him about being the JV coach. He didn’t have a problem with it. “My wife smiled,” Dave said. “‘I think he has a crush on one of those girls. He’ll have an in if you’re coaching them.’” Dave took the job.

After that season, Dave said parents chased the head coach out. Dave was asked if he would take over from her. He wasn’t happy with the school letting the parents treat the coach like that so he said no. He told the coach, a young woman named Celeste Best, that he would not taek the job. She said, “I’d much rather you coach the team than have somebody from the outside come in.” Dave also saw some of the outside candidates and was not impressed. He said he’d think about it, and then he applied and interviewed. “They ended up offering me the job,” Dave said, which was for the 2002-03 season.

Dave knew right away he had a potentially very good team on his hands. He had a group of girls he had just coached as freshman (Kate Maurer, Hayley Janelle and Megan Wyand) combined with the seniors Brittney Cross and Lindsay Laughton. “This is a team that could go a long way,” he thought to himself. “Brittney and Lindsay were great leaders and really embraced those younger kids.”

The coaching changeover happened in the spring, so that allowed Dave the chance to coach the girls over the summer, which helped get ready for the season. They certainly didn’t talk about going undefeated. What they did talk about was playing 25 games, which was the maximum they could play if they played their full regular season and then went to the finals of the holiday and state tournaments. “We began chanting this thing – one down, 24 to go. Two down, 23 to go,” he said. 

The moment when the Bobcats truly realized they could win the Class I championship came during the Manchester holiday tournament semifinals against preseason Class L favorite Nashua. Dave felt his team could compete with Nashua. He did not expect to win. “We ended up beating them,” he said. “We got a good lead. The last minute and a half, Brittney pretty much dribbled out the clock. They fouled her and she made some foul shots and we won.” They won the championship game as well.

When the Class I tournament rolled around, OR was undefeated and No. 1. “I mentioned the pressure of the undefeated season,” Dave said. “When we started this, the idea was to play 25. It wasn’t to win 25.”

But win 25 they did. At the end of the road was John Stark in the final at Saint Anselm College. They beat them for the title, 50-41. A 25-0 season – the program’s first title in 25 years. Nashua won the Class L championship over Alvirne, 51-48. But since Oyster River had beaten them in the holiday tournament, the Bobcats could rightly claim they were the best team in New Hampshire, and Dave was the first Granite state coach to guide both boys and girls to a state championship.

“I didn’t want the season to end,” said Cross, who scored her 1,000th career point in the championship game and then played at the next level at the University of Vermont. “We wanted to get one more win each time so we could keep it going.”

Cross never recalls feeling any pressure with being undefeated as the season progressed. “He must have done a pretty good job with that,” she said. “Obviously we were aware we hadn’t lost. We were aware of what was at stake each game. I really just remember us just enjoying competing together and finding a way to win.”

Cross felt that Dave “had a lot of confidence and belief in us. I can remember that as an individual. I was kind of an undersized point guard. I wasn’t really getting recruited. I was probably lacking a little of the confidence I needed to get to the next level or to lead the team in the way I was capable of. Coach Nichols did a great job of instilling confidence and belief and expectation in me personally, and then as a result in the team that we could do it, to compete for a state title.”

Two years later with that strong group of sophomores now seniors – Janelle, Maurer and Wyand – the Bobcats lost in the championship to Hanover. They came back with a new team in 2005-06, lost one game in a holiday tournament, and went on to win the state title over Kearsarge, 45-33.

Jill Friel was a freshman on that team as the sixth man. She was the youngest of former University of New Hampshire men’s basketball coach Gerry Friel’s five basketball children. All played for Oyster River. All scored 1,000 points, and all went on to play Division I college basketball (Jill at UNH). She said she was fortunate to have some great seniors to look up to in Nicole Casimrio, Chelsea Evans and Sam Brown, as well as juniors Kelsey Cross and Emily Jasinski. “They all taught me the ropes,” she said.

Friel was particularly appreciative of how Dave handled her. “He treated me as an individual,” she said. “He acknowledged and was aware that my family had a reputation; that I would have eyes on me. He acknowledged that. But he treated me as an individual. What do I want to get out of being on the team? What did I want to get out of myself? Our relationship was about our team and how I would contribute to that team. It wasn’t about my family’s legacy or comparing or contrasting my siblings. He navigated that well.”

Fast forward to the 2008-09 season. Friel was now a senior. She was the centerpiece on the Bobcats along with sophomore center Danielle Walczak. In an early battle between top teams, Oyster River was hammered at home by defending champion Hanover, 71-39. After the game, Dave told the team, “I still have a lot of faith in you guys, but obviously we have a lot of things to get better at and things to work on. This is good that we can use this the rest of the season as motivation.”

Hanover coach Dan O’Rourke, who introduced Dave at the Hall of Fame ceremony, remembered that game. “When I went through the line to shake Dave’s hand, there was that face, a look of determination.” O’Rourke recalled the rest of the season, checking the NHIAA standings and seeing that Oyster River was winning and winning and winning. The Bobcats never lost another game.

Meanwhile, Friel recalls that early-season loss. “That was really the touchstone of the year,” she said. “The snapshot of it was if you want to be the best, you have to beat the best. We lost by 30. We got absolutely demolished. We knew how far we had to go. On the other hand, we knew we had strong centerpieces in myself and Danielle Walczak. It was also about how do we get the rest of the pieces to fit.”

One thing Dave did that Friel thought worked well with the team was to move the Hanover game into the rearview mirror and focus on being the best team in the Seacoast area, which had some very good teams in Portsmouth, St. Thomas Aquinas and Coe-Brown. “If we can dominate the Seacoast, we’re in a really good position; we’re demonstrating that we’re getting better and we at least have the capability to excel. It was mentally breaking it down into smaller goals. If we were making sure that we won our neighborhood that would progress us to eventually take down Hanover.”

When the dust settled on the Class I season, Oyster River and Hanover were the last two left standing in the championship game at Southern New Hampshire University. Hanover had everyone back from the previous year’s championship team, but there was a lot of fighting amongst themselves. They had several very good big players and an outstanding guard, although Dave felt Walczak was the best big player in the tournament, despite being only a sophomore. Friel, of course, was a top-notch guard.

“Sure enough, we met in the final,” said O’Routke. “Again we held them to 39 points, which was great. In my career, we only lost two or three times when we held a team under 40 points. That was always my goal (to hold the opposition under 40).

“Unfortunately, Dave’s team came out and played one of their best games. It was a defensive battle and they held us to 33 points and he won (39-33).”

A key part of the game was indeed defense. While Friel was held to four points (but also seven assists), she held Hanover star guard Lizzie BelBruno scoreless. Walczak had a monster game with a game-high 15 points and 11 rebounds.

“Everybody else stepped up. That was the biggest difference between losing by 30 early in the year versus so many different parts of the team we could lean on in those moments if they’re going to shut myself down,” said Friel.

Dave recalls at halftime the Bobcats were up 22-15. Friel was shooting around at halftime while Dave sat on the bench. Her brothers, Keith and Greg, called her over to offer advice. When she came back to the bench, he asked her what they talked about. She said they told her she needed to score if they were going to win. Dave looked up at the scoreboard, which showed a seven-point lead despite Friel not scoring. “I think we’re going pretty good,” he said. Friel shook her head up and down. “I think so, too,” she replied.

Hanover got as close as two points at 4:59 of the fourth quarter (26-24) before Friel fed a lob to Walczak for two points and the Bobcats were on their way to the win.

Friel said it helped that Dave trusted her, especially as she got older and became a captain. That was important. The idea that this was a collaborative effort. “He allowed me opportunities to be a leader without his voice and with his voice,” she said. “I’m really appreciative of that. I also feel that the most important thing he did was make me and all of us feel like we controlled our own destiny. Whether that’s how we lead or that’s how we play, we had a say in those things in how that looks.” 

Friel paused for a second, adding, “It comes down to him recognizing us as individuals and allowing that room. I think he had a preferred method of how he wanted us to play. But ultimately he was really flexible in leading the team to what we were capable of.” 

Dave coached through the 2012-13 season, although with far less talent at point guard, the Bobcats never achieved the success of those teams in the 2000s. He also saw the writing on the wall. Some administrators weren’t happy with him, so he decided not to fight it and moved on. That opened the door to new opportunities as a scout and an assistant coach. 

Two friends and opposing coaches, O’Rourke and Ed Tenney (Sunapee), asked him to scout for them during the 2013-14 season in the Seacoast area. So he went to Class I girls games for O’Rourke and Class S boys games for Tenney, who was now a boys coach after battling Dave as a Class I girls coach at Kearsarge.

That scouting evolved into an assistant coaching position at Hanover. Halfway through the Class I season, Dave said to O’Rourke, “I’ve done so much scouting and telling you how to beat these teams, but I don’t know your team very well.” O’Rourke invited Dave to come up and spend the night in Hanover. He went to a couple of practices and then a couple of games. Dave would sit in the bleachers and write up reports.

Eventually Dave was invited to sit on the bench with the team as a full fledged assistant in 2015. When he wasn’t scouting, he was at the games on the bench. “They had some really good teams,” said Dave, who has been involved with the Hanover team in some fashion for 12 seasons, including championships in 2019 and 2022 – 50 years after he was part of his first state title at Milford in 1972. “I would scout the toughest opponents and would show up (for those tough games).”

During the 2021-22 season, Dave scouted Bow seven times, Hanover’s eventual championship opponent. “I knew what they were going to do before they did it,” he said. “I knew them so well.”

There was a reason Dan O’Rourke wanted Dave as part of his Hanover staff. “Dave has found success wherever he’s coached. Most importantly, he’s done it the right way. He’s a man of integrity, high moral character. He’s done it with commitment, respect and he’s created the culture.” Like Jill Friel said when she came in as a freshman, his program was something you wanted to be part of because it was a winning program.

Looking back, Dave said as a head coach “I always felt kids needed to have fun. A lot of kids are getting pressured to focus year round on soccer, volleyball or whatever it is. I never wanted kids to focus year round on basketball. But I wanted them to play as much as they could. I always offered opportunities. I helped kids get on AAU teams. I talked to the coaches. I prepped them for tryouts.”

He ran local summer leagues, summer camps and held open gyms. That was something that struck Jill Friel. “Dave’s differential is that he always shows up,” she said. “He was always willing to put in the extra time. Summer leagues. Summer camps. That’s him volunteering for us to have the best possible experience. I find that even more remarkable as an adult that he continued to show up and invest in others.” The simple act of caring and then acting on it was a big part of who Dave Nichols was as a coach. He could see a player or group of players for who they were, adapt to their strengths and then mold them into a successful team that was having fun, while always making sure there were opportunties available to improve. That was a true hallmark of his coaching.

Mike Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

Nifty at 50: Oyster River’s ‘Rag Tag Bunch’ snared first title in 1975

By: Mike Whaley

When the Oyster River High School boys won their first state basketball championship 50 years ago this month, there was no indication that might even be possible until the second half of the Class M season.

The previous year had not gone particularly well due to a lack of cohesion. The Bobcats went an uninspiring 8-10 to make the tournament, and then were quickly bumped out by rival Newmarket.

Doug Sumner recalls in the spring of 1974, the returning players were playing pickup basketball in Dave Durkee’s driveway. It started getting a little chippy. Everyone stopped, recalled Sumner, and there was the realization that they needed to unite for their senior season and dispense with the division and backbiting that plagued the ‘73-74 campaign if they were to challenge for a state title “We had to all be moving in the same directions,” Sumner said.

Another factor that played into all of this is that half of the team was made up of soccer players, which was Oyster River’s primary sport. That spring talk Sumner referenced also pertained to soccer. The Bobcats went onto have a great season, losing their only game in the state championship to Kearsarge in overtime – on corner kicks no less when that was used as an unfortunate tiebreaker.

Despite that pact, senior-ladened OR, dubbed the “Rag Tag Bunch.” did nothing in the early going of the 1974-75 season to suggest that a magical run was in store. In fact, the Bobcats struggled through the first half of the season at 4-6, the low ebb coming in Milton to Nute High, a demoralizing 68-52 drubbing.

These six members of the 1975 champs gathered for a 50th reunion on March 8. From left are Phil Reilly, Bill Shackford, Doug Sumner, Mike Whaley, Randy Kinzly and Jim Murphy.

The biggest change that helped turn the season around was to move two talented, but underutilized, underclassmen into more prominent roles in the starting lineup: junior forward Bill Shackford and sophomore guard Randy Kinzly. From that point on, Oyster River blossomed. The Bobcats went a stellar 8-2 to finish the regular season at 12-8.

It is important to note that the Bobcats played a brutal schedule that season, which undoubtedly helped prepare them for the playoffs. Of their 20 games, 16 were against tournament teams, including six vs. Class I squads Somersworth, Timberlane and St. Thomas.  “We were never badly beaten and it certainly made us ‘play up’ to competition,” said Shackford. 

Other than the Nute debacle, no team handled OR. Although they lost twice each to Somersworth Timberlane and Pittsfield, they were in every game. Pittsfield ended the season with a perfect 20-0 mark. The Bobcats dropped their opener at Pittsfield, 51-50, and then lost to them a few games later at home, 69-61. However, in that game, OR was ahead when Sumner cracked heads with classmate Durkee, requiring five stitches over an eye. He missed the rest of the game and Pittsfield won.

Sumner and Durkee, a co-captain, were two starters in the forecourt at a solid 6-2 and 6-4, respectively, along with the six-foot Shackford, while Kinzly was at one guard in the backcourt with senior co-captain Jim Murphy. Senior Steve Grant, a 6-1 forward/guard, was the super sub off the bench to complete the rotation OR used for the most part during the remainder second half of the season, along with senior guard Chris Congdon who saw spot duty in the backcourt spelling Murphy and Kinzly.

Bill Shackford.

Other games of note: The 134-51 thrashing of Raymond. Although there are no official state records for the regular season, that 134 has to be in the running for the most points in a single game (that’s 4.2 points per minute). OR beat rival Newmarket at home in double overtime, 49-45. There were also two hard-fought wins over Class I St. Thomas, 77-74 and 74-69. After the embarrassing loss to Nute in December, the Bobcats came back to beat the Rams at home, 60-54.

When the tournament rolled around, the Bobcats were seeded fifth behind No. 1 Woodsville, No. 2 Pittsfield, No. 3 Hinsdale and No. 4 Newmarket. Also making the 12-team field from the old Southeastern League were Nute, Farmington and Epping.

Doug Sumner.

Oyster River opened up the tournament at Plymouth State University vs. No. 12 Epping, who they had defeated twice during the season by 20 and 17 points. Murphy led the way in this one-sided affair (73-40) with 17 points.

Murphy was a master entertainer and the clear team leader. His boombox blasted a mixed tape in the locker room and during bus trips with him in the back colorfully leading lively team singalongs. The playlist featured, among others, Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” “Elderberry Wins,”and “Benny and the Jets,” as well as Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” and “Chantilly Lace” by the Big Bopper.

Murphy was also the emotional spark plug. He fired up the Bobcats before each playoff game. The team would gather in the entryway to PSU’s Foley Gymnasium before they hit the floor. There Murphy would get everyone psyched up with his impassioned antics, pumping his fist and chanting with everyone joining in until the energized Bobcats were united as one before taking the floor for layups.

In the quarterfinals, the opponent was rival Newmarket, who had given the Bobcats one of their two second-half losses (66-58 in Newmarket). The season could have ended then and there. The Mules jumped out 14-4 after the first quarter, which would have been a death knell during the first part of the season. But one thing this OR team did well by that point in that season was not to get frazzled. They worked their way back into the game to trail 22-18 at the half. The second half was all Oyster River. Led by Murphy’s 14 points, OR took control 38-32 after three stops, en route to a 50-40 win. Shackford added nine points and Kinzly tossed in eight.

That set up a semifinal match with unbeaten Pittsfield (21-0), after Woodsville dispatched defending champion Hinsdale in the earlier semi, 42-37. One could make an argument that this was the championship. It was certainly worthy of being the nightcap on the semifinal card. At the end of regulation, nothing had been decided – tied at 42-all. Ditto after one overtime, 44-44. Led by Murphy and Kinzly, the Bobcats were finally able to get some separation in the second OT, outscoring the Panthers 13-6 to win, 57-50. Murphy and Kinzly each had 17 points, while Shackford chipped in with 10.

It was Oyster River’s third trip to a championship game. Previously, Bobcats teams had lost in two finals – in 1964 to Newmarket, 51-45; in 1967 to Tilton-Northfield, 64-59 OT.

Dave Durkee.

“Beating Pittsfield in the semis was like getting over a hump,” said Murphy. Sumner recalls going out for the second overtime and before the jump ball having a brief exchange with a Pittsfield guard who he had battled against for four years. “We shook hands and one of us, probably me because I don’t shut up, said ‘the winner is going to beat Woodsville.’ We looked each other in the eye and nodded.”

Woodsville, of course, was by then a Class M power coached by the legendary John Bagonzi. The Engineers had won titles in 1969, 1971 and 1973. The trademark of Bagonzi’s teams was their full court pressure, which unraveled unprepared teams and sometimes even prepared ones. “Even though Woodsville was well coached and very disciplined, we were a very athletic group, who could run, shoot, and were tough, especially on the boards,” said Shackford. “We just had to beat their press and we worked hard on it leading up to the finals.” That was the key. Oyster River was ready for the vaunted Woodsville pressure. It bothered them here and there. But mostly they broke it until it worked against the Engineers in the second half when foul trouble began to pile up. 

Woodsville came out fast to take a quick 6-0 lead. But the Bobcats caught their breath, regrouped and tied the game as Shackford dropped in three long jumpers from the left corner. It was a dogfight from there – until the fourth quarter. It was tied (10-10) after the first quarter. The Engineers led 26-24 at halftime, before Oyster River threatened to open the game up in the third when they surged to a 42-32 lead. Woodsville ended the quarter with a 10-2 run to cut the lead to 44-42 after three, and then sliced the lead to one to start the fourth. That was as close as they got. It was still a game with just under six minutes to play, 51-47. Then Murphy and Kinzly combined for 12 points during a 13-2 surge over the next four minutes that built the lead to 64-49 to put the game out of reach. At this point, OR was breaking Woodsville’s press with ease as the Engineers started fouling out, eventually losing four players. The Bobcats ended up scoring 32 points in the quarter to pull away for the convincing 76-56 victory – the first of five state titles for the boys and the only one in Class M/Division III. The other four (1988, 1992, 1995, 1996) were in Class I/D-II.

Jim Murphy, left, and Randy Kinzly.

It was a huge night for the Oyster River faithful. Everything went right in the end. As a team, the Bobcats shot 57-percent from the field (25 of 44) and 70-percent  from the foul line (26 of 37). Murphy led five players in double figures with 16 points, followed by Durkee (15), Shackford (14), Grant (13) and Kinzly (10).

Oyster River’s final record was 16-8, which included 12 wins in their final 14 games. The Bobcats’ eight losses is certainly one of the highest totals in state history for a champion, but it speaks to their difficult schedule and their ability to overcome adversity to finally come together at the right time. The Bobcats that people saw in December were a far cry from the honed outfit that hoisted the hardware in March. Fifty years later, the “Rag Tag Bunch” may not have the game they once had, but their championship status remains undeniable.

***

The Bobcats held a 50th reunion on March 8 in Portsmouth. Six former OR players were on hand. Sumner recounted this rather odd story. Last summer, a fellow on a motorcycle showed up at the Sumner house in Exeter. Sumner wasn’t home, and his wife told the guy as much, so he drove off. He returned several weeks later and this time Sumner was home. The guy, it turns out, had played for Pittsfield HS during the 1973-74 season. He did not play the following year on the undefeated team, he said, because he did not get along with the coach. Why was he at Sumner’s house? He wanted to tell Sumner that had he played in 1974-75, Pittsfield would have defeated Oyster River in that semifinal game. Talk about not letting something go.

Mike Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

The right approach: Maynard’s manner, efforts transformed Oyster River’s program

By: Mike Whaley

(This is the sixth 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.)

Don Maynard was all about coaching the right way. Winning was certainly part of it, but Maynard was really concerned about doing things the right way. If you won, well, then all the better. Jeremy Friel, one of three Friels to play for Don, summed up his former coach like this: “Coach Maynard is the epitome of what a high school basketball coach should be: Organized, prepared, caring and fair. It was never about him and always about the team. The amount of time he put into the youth programs on Saturday mornings or with his basketball camps in the summer, from scouting to (logging stats from) games from film by himself, from organizing coaches clinics to summer league, and doing this all with teaching and a family is impressive. Being a high school coach myself now, I have an even greater appreciation for all of his efforts and time spent trying to make Oyster River basketball as competitive as it could be year in and year out. We were lucky to have him as our coach and at Oyster River.”

Don coached basketball at Oyster River for 26 years – 21 as a head coach (boys, 20 years). His coaching record was 310-168, which included three Class I boys championships in 1992, 1995 and 1996. He also taught physical education and served as the school’s athletic director. Last November he was one of seven inductees into the NHBCO Hall of Fame in Concord.

“We always knew Coach Maynard was passionate about basketball and really cared about the team, the kids and the community,” said Keith Friel, the school’s all-time scoring leader (2,148 points) and key player on back-to-back championship teams in 1995 and 1996. “He always brought energy and was very positive, especially in tough situations.”

Oyster River’s Brad Taylor, left, and Keith Friel celebrated back-to-back Class I state championships in 1995 and 1996. [Foster’s Daily Democrat photo]

Don grew up in Chelsea, Vermont, and attended college at Norwich University. He played two years of basketball for old-school coach Ed Hockenbury. Don recalls not really thinking about grad school until he received an inter-campus memo from Hockenbury to see him. It changed Don’s life.

He certainly wanted to coach. After he got done playing basketball, Don spent two years coaching the JV team at his high school in Chelsea. Hockenbury’s proposition was enticing. If Don wanted to be a graduate assistant, all he had to do was pay for room and board, the cost to pursue his master’s degree would be covered if he was a grad assistant. “The best year of college I had was my graduate year,” he said.

Don lived off campus with another grad assistant, Keith Boucher, who was also pursuing his master’s. Boucher is now the long-time women’s coach at Keene State College.

This is how Don got to Oyster River. He was invited to Boucher’s wedding, and there he met his future wife, Cheryl. She was attending the University of New Hampshire and living in Lee. Don moved to the area to be with her and started looking for work. He got a job teaching PE in Somersworth, which he did for one year in 1984-85. Cheryl was working as a certified occupational therapist at the Rollinsford Elementary School where she met Debbie Nichols who worked there. One day before basketball season, the two women were chatting. It came up that Don had played and coached basketball a little bit. Debbie mentions that her husband, Dave Nichols, is the head coach at Oyster River and he needs some help. Dave called Don up, and he was Dave’s assistant coach for the 1984-85 season. His foot was in the door.

The following year he taught PE in Barrington/Strafford, and was hired by Oyster River to coach four teams – freshman and JV soccer, JV basketball and varsity softball.

Oyster River coach Don Maynard, center, chats with Keith Courtemanche while Greg Friel twirls the ball during the Bobcats’ great run in the mid 1990s. [Foster’s Daily Democrat photo]

The following year he got hired to teach PE at Oyster River and kept the four coaching positions. He gave up the two soccer positions the following year, stayed with JV basketball and was hired as varsity baseball coach in place of softball. He became the head basketball coach in 1988. He gave up the baseball post to focus on one sport.

When Don took over the boys’ program in 1988, the Bobcats were coming off a Class I state championship under Nichols. Parental pressure led to his removal, although Nichols fought it and was eventually reinstated. At that point he resigned on his own terms.

Don was excited to be heading his own program. “I had an idea of what I wanted to do for offseason stuff,” he said. He got to the point where he had kids doing basketball pretty much year round except for a six-week window in September and October.

Don started a local AAU program called the Renegades, which involved grades 3-4 right up to high school. That carried through from the spring into the summer when there was summer basketball. Oyster River had a JV and varsity team that played in the summer league and also went to a team camp in Providence, Rhode Island. Between the league and the camp, the teams played 30 or so games. That’s’ not even mentioning Oyster River’s own camp held at the high school and run by Don. By the time all that was ending, school was starting up.

“That’s how the coaching experience was for years and years,” Don said. “I loved it. I’d see kids in first and second grade and then they’re coming up through the ranks and I’m coaching them in high school. You know what I miss? Seeing them get into it. Seeing the little kids come to the high school games. Having them in the locker room; little kids sitting on the lockers for the pregame stuff. Then they’d go out and form a line for the varsity kids to run through on their way onto the court. That was pretty cool.”

Don Maynard, back left, guided Oyster River to three Class I state titles in the 1990s, including back-to-back crowns. [Courtesy photo]

Don feels when he started the AAU program it gave basketball legitimacy in Durham. It made parents realize basketball is a pretty big deal too in a town where soccer had long been king. “For some reason, in their heads, that made it more valued, I guess,” Don said of the parents’ way of thinking. “It was more of a real sport, if that makes sense.”

The program really started to roll. “Seeing all those kids playing AAU. We had kids all over town wearing Oyster basketball and camp stuff. We were giving away Oyster River basketballs at camp. Whatever it took to get them hooked. We had it going pretty good, or at least I thought so.”

Don’s first state title in 1992 kind of came out of nowhere due mainly to the late enrollment through an exchange program of a 6-foot-4 Irish kid named Allan Conlan. “What a wonderful kid,” Don said. “Hard worker. Great fit. No ego at all. None of the kids on that team had egos.”

As Don recalled the team, Bryan Rutland was the shooter, Scott Poteet the point guard, and Russ DeForrest the other guard. “It was by committee after that,” Don said. “They just played hard. But they really defended.”

Don Maynard is pictured with his wife, Cheryl, and their granddaughter, Laney. [Courtesy photo)

Oyster River came on Conlan’s radar during the summer of 1991 when he played for an Irish team at an international basketball festival in Portsmouth. When Conlan came over, the Irish team stayed with families in the Durham area. Evidently, said Don, he had a good experience.

The festival was in early July. Come mid August and Don started hearing that Conlan was coming to America and that he wanted to go to Oyster River. Long story short, Conlan went through a recognized exchange program that had him lined up to attend the high school with a place to live by the first day of school. “It ended up being a great situation,” Don said. “He stayed with a family called the Belands. They treated him like a son. It could not have worked out better for everyone. He loved them. He loved Oyster River. He loved the team. He was a great kid.” Conlan loved New Hampshire so much that he stayed and went to college at Plymouth State, having a Hall of Fame career for the Panthers.

It was, however, no love fest with Oyster River’s Class I opponents who had to try to match up with the formidable Conlan. Unsurprisingly, the Bobcats were able to make a run, finding themselves in the championship at UNH on the final day of the Class I season against ConVal.

“That game was crazy,” Don remembered. “We got behind 18-4. ‘Holy crap, what are we going to do? Are we going to embarrass ourselves here?’ From that point, we gave up 33 points. We played defense.” OR won the championship in overtime, 58-51.

Some detractors felt it was unfair that the Bobcats had won the title with an exceptional exchange player. But, as Don noted, ConVal had a pretty good exchange force of its own in James Reilly, a 6-7 inside presence who Conlan knew from Ireland.

Don Maynard coached both of his sons at Oyster River High School – Steven and Trevor. He also coached his daughter, Riley. [Courtesy photo]

One memorable story Don has involves an angry parent who showed up at the shootaround before the championship at the Oyster River gym. He was complaining about, shocking as it may seem, his son’s playing time. He was firmly told to leave.

“What’s crazy, we’re getting our ass kicked (in the first half),” Don recalled. “The parent’s kid was an OK guard. I put him in. The first two times he touched the ball he nailed 3s and that really turned the game around in the second quarter. Isn’t that something? Part of me wanted to leave the kid on the bench. I gave him a chance. He goes out there and hits two huge shots.”

Brad Taylor introduced Don at the NHBCO Hall of Fame event. He thought the 1992 championship game was one of his coach’s finest moments. Taylor was there watching the game with a bunch of fellow eighth-graders. “You never noticed coach Maynard. He was never the show,” said Taylor. “But how he calmed his team down (after they fell behind big early). … We were in total awe of that ConVal team, but then they (Oyster River) came back and won in overtime. We sat there and said ‘that’s a guy we’re ready to play for.” It was incredible coaching. They were so undermanned compared to that (ConVal) team.”

After the 1992 championship, Don’s next group to come along is the best in program history – led by Keith and Greg Friel, the sons of former University of New Hampshire men’s basketball coach, Gerry Friel, who guided the Wildcats from 1969 to 1989. Given Oyster River’s long history of meddlesome parents, you might think this was going to be a problem. The opposite, in fact, was true. “Gerry might have been the best parent I ever had the opportunity to interact with,” Don said. “He was so supportive. He wouldn’t hesitate to say, ‘If my kid steps out of line, kick his ass.’”

Don could sit down and talk with Gerry about anything. “He wanted his kids held accountable,” Don recalled. “He wanted them playing both ends of the court. He was interested in body language and how they conducted themselves.”

Don said Gerry was never critical of him unless he felt Don was letting his kids get away with something. “If I wasn’t holding them to a high standard, he would be disappointed,” Don said. “But that didn’t happen often. He was great.”

In fact, for three or four summers, Gerry invited Don along to a coaches’ summit in Durham at the home of Knobby Walsh, a respected retired high school coach from Providence, Rhode Island. “He was extremely knowledgeable and extremely old school,” said Don of Knobby. “He would come to a game when Greg and Keith were playing, and he would take notes. He’d hand me four pages the next day of stuff he saw or things we should be doing. Sometimes it was a little intimidating.”

Don recalls the coaches’ summit at Knobby’s place. Gerry was there, of course, as was Dartmouth College coach Dave Faucher and Fairfield coach Paul Cormier, and several other coaches. “There were at least a half dozen sharing thoughts and ideas,” Don said. “I’m sitting there with my jaw on the floor.” As if it wasn’t a wonderful experience already for Don, in addition Knobby was a wonderful gourmet chef. He would periodically bring in mouth-watering dishes while talk of basketball carried on between bites. “That left an impression,” Don said.

When Keith Friel was a freshman in 1992-93, the team struggled but you could see that something good was coming. The following year, the team started slow, but ended on a hot streak and looked to be a dangerous team in the playoffs. After a first-round win, the Bobcats were doing a walkthrough the day before their quarterfinal game against No. 1 Lebanon at UNH. Keith seriously rolled his ankle. He tried to play in the game, but he couldn’t. Still, as Don recalled, they gave Lebanon a game, losing by a handful of points. “If he’d been healthy, I think we would have won that game and might be talking about three state championships in a row,” Don said.

Keith was the most celebrated of the five Friels, all of whom scored over 1,000 points at Oyster River and later played NCAA Division I college basketball: Keith (Notre Dame/Virginia), Greg (Dartmouth), Jennifer (UNH), Jeremy (UNH) and Jill (UNH).

The 1994-95 season was a very good one with a mostly underclassmen team. It was actually after January when the lone senior was declared academically ineligible. The Bobcats were very good. You had the two Friels, who everyone knew about. But the supporting cast and even the bench were top notch. Scrappy guard Brad Taylor, 6-5 Dan Kowal and sharpshooting Keith Courtemanche rounded out an outstanding starting five. The first few guys off the bench would have started on any other team, according to Don. “Sometimes they would come into the game and there was very little drop off,” he said. “That’s something I always took some pride in. On my team, you’d have a kid come off the bench, the skill level might be different, but they knew what they were doing. So it was obvious every kid was coached, not just the so-called starters. It didn’t matter if you were the ninth, 10th, 11th player. Whatever. You were going to get on the court and you were going to play hard and know what to do.” 

Three key reserves during that two-year title stretch were Doug Pitman, Gordon Matthews and Tom Getz.

The biggest challenge with that team, especially in 1995-96, was playing time. Because the Bobcats were winning by large margins, the starters were lucky to play half the game. “It was tough because obviously the kids want to play,” Don said. “They’d get a big lead and the next thing you know I’ve got kids sitting on the bench. I want to get them in the game. Sometimes that was a little tricky. I want them to play too.”

Don had the respect of the players. “If there was a problem, we could always talk to him – ‘hey listen, we need to pick up the pace or whatever.’ He was open,” said Greg Friel. “He was a physical education teacher. He had a grip on the school. He knew what was going on. He knew what kids were doing what.”

Greg recalls before the 1995 championship game, all the players got Mohawk haircuts. Greg got the idea from Conlan when he shaved an Irish Shamrock on the back of his head before the 1992 championship game. Don even joined the team by shaving his head. “He was still young enough and hip enough. ‘All right  I can still do this. Let’s go.’”

Taylor remembers the Mohawk moment. In some ways it perfectly captured the loose and free-spirited nature of a team that Tayor said Don allowed “to be idiots 10 years before the Red Sox did. He let us be who we are.”

Taylor smiled, adding, “We thought on Gerry Friel’s homecourt we could embarrass our parents, our girlfriends, and everybody else as quickly as we could, and relax everybody. Lebanon didn’t know what was going on. We all looked like a band of idiots. We were misfits. But we were relaxed, chilled, and ready to go as massive underdogs in my opinion.”

The OR “misfits” did in fact beat Lebanon for the 1995 title, 55-52. As they got ready to defend its title, Don made sure that the Bobcats played the best competition. They played in the Queen City Invitational in Manchester over the Christmas break. They met Manchester Central in that championship before a huge crowd. “We absolutely got our asses kicked,” Don said. “It was a good experience. The kids realized they had to play defense to beat anyone. Central played defense. That was humbling.. But it had the kids’ attention the rest of the year.”

The season culminated with a repeat at UNH over Bishop Brady, 58-49 – avenging their only loss of the season to Brady in Concord. That’s another game Don remembers, not so much for the loss but for the fact that Brad Taylor nearly killed himself crashing into the stage. “He hit the stage head-on diving for a loose ball,” Don said. “I thought for certain he had broken his neck.”

Keith Friel said that Don “was always open to hearing and asking what we saw out there and what we thought and also being firm, too, for the most part. Like knowing when Greg needed to be kicked out of practice.”

The Friel boys were almost always matched up against each other in practice, which often became a volatile situation because they were so competitive. “He was constantly hacking me during every drill,” Keith recalled. “I’m like ‘Dude …’ I’v got him (Greg) chirping at me as we’re going head to head. I’m sure it was a lot to manage , but we were all very passionate about basketball.”  Of course, again, Don had the complete backing of the Friel parents, so any reasonable punishment was supported without question.

The Brady squad was no slouch with a core of excellent players, many of whom went on to play in college, including the Collins brothers and Marshall Crane. As Don recalled, the following season the Bobcats, with only Greg Friel back from the 1995-96 core, nearly pulled off a major upset over the heavily-favored Giants in the quarters at UNH. “It would have been the biggest upset of my coaching career,” Don said. “Instead, it’s one of my hardest losses.”

In the waning seconds of a tie game, Greg was fouled and stepped to the line to take two foul shots with two teammates back to defend. He hit the second one to give OR a one-point lead with 1.4 seconds to play. Brady’s Billy Collins quickly inbounded the ball after the make, throwing a baseball pass the length of the floor to Crane who somehow caught the ball under the basket with two defenders on him and was fouled trying to score. He made both foul shots for the win. “That was tough,” Don said. “To this day, I second guess that.”

It just went to show that you never know. Don mentioned a game just before the 1992 playoffs in which the Bobcats were throttled by Pembroke by almost 40 points. The Concord Monitor called it “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Two weeks later, OR beat the Spartans by one point in the semifinals. “I tell kids, you never know,” he said. “That’s why you play the game.”

Don continued to coach through 2008. He coached another Friel (Jeremy) and later his sons, Steven and Trevor, and even, as an assistant, coaching his daughter, Riley. He enjoyed that experience. “”The only rule I had was, I would not talk basketball at home or in the car after practice unless they brought it up,” he said. “In the gym, I was ‘Coach.’ Any other time I was their dad.”

Trevor Maynard loved playing for his dad. He still gets the odd comment about how playing for his dad must have been tough. He pushes right back. “No, I absolutely loved it,” Trevor said. “Looking back, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

Not that Trevor had it easy. He certainly felt at the time that because he was the coach’s kid he had “to justify my playing time and be good enough so that when he put me in and I was getting my minutes, there was no doubt in my mind or anybody else’s mind that I was playing because I deserved it and not because I was the coach’s kid.”

That’s why Trevor worked so hard. “I didn’t want anyone to go to him and say ‘why the hell are you playing your kid when my kid should be getting playing time over him?’ I always tried to take that upon myself. I need to be the best one out on the court, so that when I do play every minute or I play a majority of the minutes, no one’s going to question that. Parents could be really tough, and he always handled those conversations really well.”

Don acknowledged that while he enjoyed the experience of coaching his boys, it was also tougher for them. “They were the first ones to come out of the game. Maybe they were the ones that had to more than prove themselves,” he said. “That part was a little bit tough.”

But the positives by far outweigh the negatives. Don’s kids were around the game at a very young age and that meant being around the Oyster River program. “They were in the gym during basketball camp and they were in the gym during basketball practice,” he said. “I think every one of my kids ended up being in a backpack at practice at some point. That’s the way it was. They grew up around it.”

Don’s final year was 2007-08 with the boys team, although he would coach the girls as the head coach later on. It was a great year until the end. The Bobcats put together the program’s only undefeated regular season, but were upset at UNH by Pembroke in the quarterfinals. The Spartans had a quality player who missed a chunk of the season, but was ready for the playoffs to make them a much tougher nut to crack than their lower seeding suggested. Don recalls in the final 10 seconds down one, his point guard was knocked down at the top of the key by several Pembroke players. “Game over. The referees left the court. It was just over,” he said. At the time, the tournament was running three referees, which was not the case during the season. Don said the referees looked at each other like it was someone else’s call. “No call is ever made. The horn goes off. Game over. ‘Are you kidding me?’” he said. “It ended up being my last game in Trevor’s senior year.”

Looking back, Don recalls his practices which were always in motion with not much standing around. “We’d frequently start out with some ball control drills,” he said. “For 90 minutes I wanted my team moving. We didn’t do a lot of actual running or conditioning. I figured we had them going for 90 minutes. That was the conditioning.”

He also didn’t announce starters. “We’re a team,” Don said. “No one is going to have the title of starter. People would know. They’re part of the team. You’re not a bench warmer. You’re not a starter. You all have your own roles. We’re a team.”

In practice, Don would mix the players up. But at some point, he would make sure those who would be starting were playing together. “I just wanted every kid to feel like he had a role,” Don said.

The Oyster River experience was an excellent one for Don Maynard. “”I’m so appreciative of the quality of kids I had to work with,” he said. “I had so many kids who worked so hard. The older I get, the more I appreciate that.” And, of course, that appreciation works both ways, certainly more than the overly modest coach would ever care to admit. But it’s absolutely true.

Mike Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

Destination Buffalo: Great Bay embraces its journey to the nationals

By: Mike Whaley

A direct route to your final destination is not always the way it goes. How about the paths taken by four key players for the conference champion Great Bay Community College men’s basketball squad? Three started at other schools before winding up at GBCC, while a fourth began there fresh out of high school, left for two years, but now is back. All four are playing key roles as the Herons prepare for their second trip to the United State Collegiate Athletic Association (USCAA) Division II Tournament, set for March 11-15 in Buffalo, New York.

Great Bay is currently in the midst of the finest season in program history. On Sunday, the Herons captured their first Yankee Small College Conference playoff championship with a 71-55 win over VTSU-Randolph to improve to a school-record 22-5. No. 4 GBCC opens up the nationals on Wednesday, 10:30 p.m., in Buffalo against No. 5 Penn State Schuylkill in the Elite Eight.

Two years ago, the Herons barely qualified for their first national tournament as the 10th and final seed. But they made some noise with two upset wins to make the USCAA Final Four before they were eventually eliminated. Last year the team went 18-8 and lost in the conference semis.

All-Conference forward Theo Wolfe, a 6-5 senior, originally came to New England from Kissimmee, Florida, in 2019, spending a year at UMaine-Machias with some ex-AAU teammates. He returned to Florida when the school’s athletic programs were suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are still suspended. Junior Mpore “MP” Semuhoza went from Deering High School in Portland, Maine, to Central Maine CC, where he had a solid first year, but was looking for something else. Keith Landry, a 6-5 senior forward, graduated from Belmont High School in 2020, enrolled at Plymouth State University, but was cut from the basketball team. Ethan May headed to Great Bay in 2019 from Londonderry High School, played two years and then moved on with his life equipped with a welding certificate.

All four eventually ended up at, or back, at Great Bay. It is impossible to imagine the Herons’ current run of success without them – or without the deepest team in the conference. “We rotate 10 guys, so there’s plenty of contribution going on,” coach Alex Burt said. “Other (teams) might go 6, 7, 8 (deep), we generally go 10.”

May might just have been the missing piece on this year’s team as a quality secondary scorer and a veteran defensive stopper. He played two years at Great Bay (2019-20, 2021, 22), sandwiched around a missed Covid year. Once he had his welding credentials he felt he was ready to move on. It had been a difficult three years juggling a commuter school’s academic schedule, basketball and working full time. “It was hectic. I thought I was just ready for life,” he said.

It turns out he wasn’t. He was away for two years working, but his basketball passion was still there pulsating in the background. “I was coming to games,” May said. “I saw them get smacked by NHTI (in the 2024 conference semifinals, 95-78). I played pickup and stuff. I still kept relatively with it. It’s always been my first love. I’m a defensive guy. So (it was tough) to see them get smacked because of defense. I was in the stands rubbing my knees; like, man, I want to get out there.” He was convinced he needed to return to Great Bay.

Semuhoza, at 6-4 forward, went from high school to Central Maine CC. in 2022-23. He played 13 games, averaging a very solid 7.9 points and 5.8 rebounds per game as a freshman. He had some buyer’s remorse because Burt had recruited him out of high school. “I just felt like Great Bay would work better for my game,” he said. “I felt like I was something Great Bay needed at the time, like a spark. He (Burt) gave me a chance and I appreciate Coach for that.”

Landry went to Plymouth, but got cut from the team in 2020. “Burt reached out the next day asking if I wanted to come run with the team and see if I liked it here,” he said.

Burt said Landry “was a kid I had on my radar in the past. I didn’t care if I was Plan A or Plan B, for anyone really. I just know who I want and when they’re ready to come to me, I give them everything I’ve got. It’s been a long-term relationship.” Landry has played four years, which is allowed, even though Great Bay and many colleges in the YSCC are two-year institutions.

When Wolfe left UMaine-Machias after one season in 2020, he thought he was all done with basketball. “I put down the basketball and started pursuing some other things, pursuing photography,” he said. One of Wolfe’s old teammates returned north to play for Great Bay. He reached out to Wolfe and eventually Wolfe reached out to coach Burt. He remembered Great Bay from his Machias days. “I really admired the way they were moving the ball and the way they were playing as a team,” he said. After two years away from the game, Wolfe was ready for a comeback at Great Bay. “I gave up basketball and Coach kind of talked me back into it,” he said.

The impact of these four players this year has been evident. “Ethan May was the x-factor,” said Wolfe. “I wholeheartedly believe if it were not for Ethan May we would not be where we’re at.” Wolfe noted that in the championship game, May held Randolph star Jaylon Calvin to seven first-half points that allowed Great Bay to jump out to a 35-27 lead at the half and eventually pull away in the second half to claim their first conference championship.

“He’s definitely our hidden gem defensively,” coach Burt said of May. “He’s a winner at heart. He’s willing to do whatever it takes for the team. He was ready to dive back in and give a little more for the guys around him.”

May wasn’t initially sure if he was going to go back to Grreat Bay, and then when he did, he wasn’t sure what he would be able to bring to the table. He was part of a team reset that pulled the team together after an 0-2 start. “To see it unfold and everyone understand what they needed to bring,” May said. “It was amazing to see. We put our egos aside and did exactly what we needed to do.” The Herons rattled off 14 straight wins.

It took May a while to regain the old confidence. By mid January he started to see remnants of his former self. “It was tough getting that rhythm and flow back and feeling confident in my shot,” he said. “I was zero percent from 3 the first semester. It was good for myself to finally see that ball go in. I started to get more confident.” His stat line is quite tidy: 9.3 points, 4.5 rebounds, 4.2 assists, and 2.5 steals per game.

“He really painted the picture of what the program could be with us trying to be more defensive,” said Burt of May’s return to Great Bay, which came at a time when the team was switching its emphasis to defense. “Thankfully he was ready to go. He was guarding the best guards, the best wings, literally every single night. We were asking him to cover ridiculous tasks. He was just more than willing, more than able to do it.”

Semuhoza came in last year and had an immediate impact averaging 12.3 points and 5.4 rebounds per game. The Herons went 18-8, but lost in the conference semis. This year, he has been one of the main guys – second in scoring (15.6) and rebounding (8.6), which has helped to soften the blow of losing a pair of big scorers in All-American Kingsley Breen and Bryce Gibson. “I’m kind of an all-around guy and one of our leaders,” said Semuhoza, who was named All-YSCC Second Team.

“MP made a massive jump from last year to this year with his belief in what I was trying to do with the team,” said coach Burt. “He fit in with that.”

Landry has grown in his four years to the point he is now a veteran, a captain and one of the team’s key players. “I’m definitely more involved in the offense and I’m one of the primary defenders,” said Landry, who is averaging 7.7 points, 3.8 rebounds and 2.3 assists per game. “I definitely needed to space the floor for people like Theo and MP to make life easier for those guys.”

Wolfe has been a great three-year player for the Herons, scoring a school record 1,475 points. As good as his first two years were, this season he was even better. He led the nation and the YSCC in scoring (24.9 ppg), and was tops in the YSCC in rebounding (12.2) and second in the nation. He was named All-YSCC First Team. “We were a little motivated by that (losing in the semis last year),” he said. There was also a sense of urgency to find success because it was his last year.

Burt has seen Wolfe’s game expand in three years. “Theo has gained a stronger understanding of how to be effective,” the coach said. “There are times we need him inside, on the outside, off the ball, on the ball. He’s grown tremendously as a person and a player.”

All four were pivotal in Sunday’s championship win over Randolph. Wolfe led the way with 18 points and 13 rebounds. Landry sparked the Herons in the first half with 14 of his 17 points, making 5-of-8 3-pointers in the game. Semuhoza did not score in the first half, but he stayed composed and helped in the second half, ending with seven points and eight boards. May did a nice job defending Randolph’s Calvin, making him work for his 18 points. He also scored 12 points of his own, 10 coming in the second half. May and Semuhoza split eight points during a devastating late 13-0 run that built the lead to 71-50 in the final minute to put the game on ice.

Landry was laser focused on Sunday, especially after what happened in the semis last year against NHTI. It was personal. “It was my birthday,” he said. “I couldn’t lose on my birthday. I lost on my birthday last year to NHTI (by 18 points). I just couldn’t lose on my birthday again.” And by winning, Landry (and the Herons) got the best birthday basketball gift of all – a bid to the nationals.

Mike Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

Check out a full photo gallery of the YSCC title game by Michael Griffin…

Great Bay Men vs. VT Randolf (03.02.25) - Michael Griffin
Great Bay Men vs. VT Randolf (03.02.25) – Michael Griffin
110 photos

Buddy of the North: Trask established Colebrook’s winning tone and legacy

By Mike Whaley

(This is the fifth 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.)

It’s funny how things work out. In 1976 George H. “Buddy” Trask III and his future wife, Mary, were all set to throw caution to the wind. They were heading to Florida without a definite plan other than to try to find work as teachers and coaches.

It was Labor Day Weekend. Buddy was finishing out his job for the Mount Washington Cog Railway. The seasonal position ended in October and then Buddy and Mary were headed to the Sunshine State.

Both young Plymouth State University graduates tried to find teaching jobs but with no luck. The telephone situation at the Cog Railway wasn’t perfect. You didn’t get calls. You got messages. Sunday morning of that weekend, Buddy had a message from Mary Nugent, a teacher at Stratford High School in North Stratford, where Buddy went to school. He called her and was told that Stratford’s physical education teacher had left for another job. Could Buddy come in and substitute? Of course he could.

That phone call opened a door to teaching and coaching that spanned 45 years in the North Country. Buddy went on to teach physical education and coach soccer and basketball at Stratford and then Colebrook Academy. At the Academy, he was the force behind pushing the school’s athletic teams into the spotlight. When he got there in 1980, Colebrook had never won a state championship –  in any sport. When he retired for good in 2022, the state titles count was 12 under his watch (the girls hoop team added the school’s 13th in 2023). Three of those championships were for boys basketball coached by Buddy, including the school’s initial state title in any sport in 1997. He is one of five high school coaches in New Hampshire with 600 or more wins in basketball with 606, all for boys. The others? Dan Parr (704, 627 boys, 77 girls), Dave Smith (669 boys), Gary Jenness (641 girls), and John Fagula (624 girls).

The Colebrook gymnasium was renamed Trask Gymnasium in 2022 after Buddy and Mary, who have a combined 70-plus years of coaching and teaching between them.

In 1997, Buddy Trask coached the Colebrook Academy boys basketball team to the Class S championship, the school’s first-ever state title. [Courtesy photo]

In addition, Buddy was the perfect ambassador for the North Country, representing the northern schools on various New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA) committees for more than a quarter of a century. “The North Country got well represented,” said Jenness, who coached at Groveton and White Mountains.

Last November, Buddy was one of seven inductees into the New Hampshire Basketball Coaches Organization’s Hall of Fame in Concord. The NHBCO honored its 2022 and 2024 classes.

Back in 1976, of course, Buddy didn’t envision the longevity or the success. He was just trying to get going in life. The railway was accommodating when Buddy told them of his work opportunity at Stratford HS. “I was supposed to stay through the fall,” he said. “‘I might be back in a week. I’ve got to take this. They said ‘go ahead.’”

Monday he packed his stuff to head to Stratford where his mother still lived, so he had a place to stay. Tuesday he was sitting in a teacher’s meeting and Wednesday he was teaching. It was a good fit for Buddy. He had gone to school there, so he knew all the teachers. “I knew the system. I knew how the classes went,” he said. “I knew all that stuff. I wasn’t going in (blind). Except I wasn’t planning on teaching (there) two days before.”

A week later he was called into the office. They liked what he was doing. Did he want the job for the rest of the year? “I obviously said ‘Yes,’” Buddy chuckled. “Sometimes it comes down to luck. Who knows what would have happened if we ended up going to Florida? I have no idea what the deal would have been.”

Buddy Trask hoists the 1997 Class S championship plaque. [Courtesy photo]

His contract at the time was $5,200 for that school year. He was also asked to coach basketball and baseball. Within a month he added athletic director to his work load.  Ken Grimes, one of his old baseball coaches, approached him with a folder. “‘I know you want to be the athletic director,’” Grimes said. “‘Here’s the folder. I’ll go up to the office and tell the principal that you’re the new AD.”

Grimes and Larry Clough were the baseball co-coaches when Buddy was in high school. When he was a junior and a senior they let him and several other players do some coaching – making the lineup, coaching third base. “They wouldn’t let me go hog wild,” Buddy said. “But they kind of let me do stuff, which was very nice of them at the time. I guess they saw something in me that I didn’t see.”

You’re thinking that Buddy coached basketball for 45 years and won 606 games, so right out of the gate his teams were successful. Right? Wrong. “It was an experience. My first year we were 2-18,” he recalled. “Stratford was definitely in a downturn at the time.”

Buddy did not make it easy for the Stratford kids. “It was the Bobby Knight era,” he said. “There was a lot of running, a lot of discipline involved. A lot of ‘who’s the boss!’ This is how I’m going to do things. … Those kids hung tough. They stuck with it. I give them all the credit in the world. I was probably not the best person to get along with.”

Stratford certainly wasn’t winning games. Buddy’s close friend Dale Ramsay recalls he was home from Keene State College for an extended six-week winter break because of the energy crisis. The first thing words out of Buddy’s mouth when he saw Ramsay was hardly a greeting. It was a no-nonsense announcement: “‘You’re coaching the JV team.’ He didn’t ask me. He told me.” It was a whirlwind schedule. Buddy had scheduled 12 games in six weeks. “We went 1-11. It was a miracle we won one,” Ramsay said.

The one game on the schedule that presented itself as a possible win was Orford, which is no longer a school (it’s now part of an interstate school Rivendell Academy. It plays in Vermont with the Green Mountain State towns of Fairlee, West Fairlee and Vershire).

Colebrook Academy’s gymnasium is named for Buddy and Mary Trask. [Courtesy photo]

Ramsay and Buddy remembered the game. “We’ve got a chance,” Ramsay said. “We’re in the game. Buddy gets a technical to fire everyone up. We end up winning.”

Buddy remembers getting back to his house at midnight and he and Ramsay celebrated. “We stayed up until six in the morning because I didn’t know if I was going to win another game,” he recalled. “Fortunately, Orford came to our place.”

That was the inauspicious beginning. It got better. From two wins, his teams won 8, 10 and 11 games at Stratford. Jenness recalls reffing some of those Stratford games, which were hard to officiate. “They had some talent. They were quick,” he said. “I don’t know if he called it a scramble defense. I called it kamikaze because they were all over the place. Everywhere he coached he just made them better than they really were.”

Buddy had some good groups coming up at Stratford. He was getting excited and then in 1980 he got called into the office again. This time the news was not so good. His teaching job was being cut in half. That wasn’t going to work for Buddy, even if he was living at home.

As Buddy recalled, there were some Stratford teachers who lived in Colebrook and they really liked him. He wanted to see through the current Stratford group, but the pay was a problem. A job opened at Colebrook. He went in for an interview with the School Board, superintendent, principal and an elementary school teacher. “I go in for the interview. Every single question was about athletics,” he said. They weren’t having me there to teach. The teaching was a secondary job. Athletics was the job.”

Buddy pauses for a few seconds. “I got the job,” he said. “There I was for the next 40-something years.”

The job description was full. Not only did Buddy teach elementary PE, but he was also the athletic director and coached three high school sports: soccer, basketball and baseball. That didn’t last long. “We were Class M when I got there,” he said. “Sixty to 70 percent (of the athletes) played three sports. I kind of realized that come March, they’re probably sick of me and I’m sick of them.” He cut baseball loose after a year or two.

Buddy and Mary Trask are pictured with their two children, Corey and Kevin. [Courtesy photo]

But he was still very busy. In fact, once he married Mary and she got a job teaching PE  and coaching at Colebrook, they rarely saw each other for a 25-year span. Mary coached the girls soccer team, winning a state title in 2002 with their daughter Corey on the team. She was also an assistant coach with the girls’ hoop team.

Buddy remembers his third year was his first year going to the playoffs at Plymouth State as the Colebrook coach. They traveled down in limousines. “Well, this Colebrook thing isn’t bad,” he thought. “If we make the playoffs, we’re all going in limos. That apparently was a one-year deal.”

Those early years were a struggle for the most part. Class M was too big. Eventually they were able to get to Class S where they belonged. Another challenge Buddy had to contend with was established coaches at the younger levels who were doing their own thing. “My deal was I can always fix it when it gets to me,” he said. “After a while I knew that wasn’t happening. There had to be a revamp at some point, which would happen.”

What was concerning was that Buddy had several losing seasons in a row. What quite possibly held things in check was that he had better success at soccer, a sport where he had less experience. “The soccer was taking off so you didn’t hear much about basketball,” he said. He coached soccer for 27 years at Colebrook over two tours, winning 242 games and making 24 tournaments, including a trip to the final in 1994 (3-1 loss to Derryfield).

As the 1980s came to a close, Buddy was able to start making coaching changes at the younger levels. “By then I had been around long enough. I had some of my kids who had played for me involved in taking over the elementary program, etc. We were getting our basketball level up to par. Gradually we started to have some kids.” The good groups began to come.

Buddy always told his youth coaches that he wanted two to three new players every year to come up and help the team. If there were more, even better. “They didn’t have to be really good,” he said. “I wanted two or three people who were going to stay with the program. We run a hard program. They weren’t going to quit. They were going to be able to deal with the stuff we were throwing at them and stay. We gradually started to get that.”

Buddy Trask’s first year as a head basketball coach was in 1976-77 at Stratford High School. He was 22. [Courtesy photo]

Indeed Buddy was hard. He practiced six days a week, two and half to three hours a day in the preseason, and then two hours a practice once the season started. As he got older and smarter, he joked, he shortened the lengths, but the difficulty factor remained.

“Those kids had to be prepared mentally and physically,” he said. “Hey, when you come to our program and when you get done with our program, you know you’ve accomplished something. You’re going to be ready for anything in life that’s going to be thrown at you.”

The big thing with Buddy was no excuses. “That was a key word from day one. There are no excuses. I don’t want to hear anyone talking about the officials or a mistake anyone else made. We lost because we didn’t do the things we needed to do. We need to get better.” Which they did.

The first season Buddy noticed the turnaround in motion was 1989-90 when a team led by Dan Fournier made the quarterfinals. The following year they got to the finals against a strong Epping squad that was in the midst of a three-year title run in four years. The Blue Devils were a heavy favorite to win. Colebrook earned its berth by edging Orford (remember them?) in the semis by a point. “Once we got over the initial shock of being in the final, I was thinking I hope we score in the first quarter and don’t get embarrassed.”

Colebrook did not embarrass itself. Far from that, they made it a game. They were ahead of Epping at times in the first half. They ended up losing by a very respectable 62-54. They felt really good about the following year with a lot of their top players back. What Buddy did not factor in was the huge leadership void they lost when Quinn Hurlburt graduated. “You don’t realize it at the time. He was the leader on the floor.”

A proud moment for Buddy Trask was presenting his son Kevin with a game ball after he scored his 1,000th career point for Colebrook Academy. Kevin played for the Mohawks from 1997 to 2001. [Courtesy photo]

The following year the Mohawks had a very good season, earned a first round bye and played a less formidable Epping squad in the quarters with only two returning starters versus the four that Colebrook had. Epping blew them out by 15. “That was a huge downer,” Buddy said. “But we were on our way just the same.”

From 1993 to 2000, Colebrook was winning 80-percent of its games. Now they were getting to the semis or the finals almost every year. “We were there. Group after group was coming. Everything was clicking.”

Of course, Colebrook had its history still hanging over its head. The success was changing, but the number of championship banners remained the same – zero. Buddy knew one was coming.

That first championship group came in as freshmen in 1993-94, led by Lance Boire, Adam Martel and Travis Haynes, a strong core of three-sport athletes. They had excellent leaders that helped set the tone when they were younger.

By the time they were seniors, they were ready. They lost one game during a season in which they did not have a lot of close games. Profile provided the staunchest opposition, beating the Mohawks once and losing by a handful in the second. In the playoffs Colebrook stopped a tough Stratford squad in the quarters, and then overwhelmed high-scoring Nute in the semis by 20.

Their opponent in the final was surprising Alton, but Colebrook looked like it was going to get it done, carrying a double-figure lead into the fourth quarter. Buddy mentioned a big key is trying to win at the end of the quarter, and they did it three times. The Mohawks hit a 3-pointer at the end of the first, had a steal and layup to go into halftime, and another 3 to conclude the third, Eric Biron’s only hoop of the game.

Eight minutes to go. “Fourth quarter,” Buddy said. “Colebrook has never won a championship. Ever. In anything. That’s all these kids have heard about for years.”

Colebrook started to feel that pressure. Things began to unravel. They did things they didn’t normally do. When Alton slapped a press on, usually the Mohawks would have had no trouble with it. They turned the ball over. Alton hit some shots. Down to the final minute and it’s anybody’s game.

“We were playing conservatively,” Buddy recalled. “We were playing not to lose. Usually when you play not to lose, you lose.”

Colebrook had the ball in a tie game with under a minute to play. Twice they hit one foul shot to go up two points. Defense was huge. Always a zone guy up until that point, Buddy was convinced to go man-to-man with the help of his then assistant coach Tim Purrington. Man-to-man defense became especially necessary on the big floor at Plymouth where the season concluded. “With this group we changed to man,” he said. “Teams even then were learning to pull (the ball) out. At some point we’re going to need to be able to play man. We might as well be able to play it all the time.” 

With under 10 seconds to play, Alton had the ball on the end line under Colebrook’s basket. They had to go the length of the floor to tie or win it. “We were not going to lose to them,” Buddy said. “We were playing to win. We manned up; denied up, stole the ball and we won. … When push came to shove, they defended and they won.” Final score: Colebrook 52, Alton 50.

Bedlam. Euphoria. You name it. “The town of Colebrook went nuts,” Buddy said. “The line of cars, fire engines and stuff from Twin Mountain to Colebrook was like three miles long. When we got to town, they had fire alarms going off everywhere. It was an amazing, amazing scene. The gym was full – 600/700 people. The monkey was off.”

Colebrook was always in the mix for the next 15 years. Good groups kept coming. At that point, Buddy’s son, Kevin, was nearing the age when he could play for his dad. He played four years for the Mohawks, scoring a school-record 1,645 points. Buddy remembers that even as a freshman, Kevin was drawing specialty defenses to stop him. They had their moments too, but most of that was early on when Kevin incurred a case of “sophomore-itis” as a freshman (a know-it-all malady). They butted heads a little bit. It smoothed out as Kevin got older. He knew the drill. He knew what was expected. After Colebrook, Kevin went on to a Hall of Fame career across the Connecticut River at Vermont State University–Lyndon.

There were several losses in the semis and then Kevin’s senior year came around in 2000-01. It was Colebrook and Groveton as the favorites, and when the dust cleared on championship day, they were the last two standing. Buddy was going against his good friend, Mark Collins, who he had convinced to take the Groveton job in the late 1980s. Groveton to that point had Colebrook’s number. In fact, the Eagles were in the midst of an impressive run of success having won the last three titles.

“Our history is Mark Collins, the coach, and I are best friends,” Buddy said. “Our families are best friends. We grew up together. Our kids grew up together. We’re always at each other’s houses all the way up through. Now we’re in the final against each other. We’ve got that whole dynamic going. They were going for their fourth.” Another storyline was that in addition to Buddy’s son Kevin playing in his last game for Colebrook, Collins’ son Tod was suiting up for his final game for the Eagles.

Jenness recalls when Kevin and Tod were youngsters, they were fixtures at the after-game get-togethers at one house or the other. “They were funny when they were little. They had a little five-foot hoop and they would be playing basketball. ‘Colebrook’s better than Groveton.’ ‘Groveton’s better than Colebrook.’ They’d be dunking the ball. When they were little like that, when their father’s team lost, they would cry. It was good watching them grow up.” Tod sadly passed away at age 22 in 2005.

Except, of course, now the hoop was 10 feet high and there was an actual state championship on the line in a packed gym. Groveton ended up pulling out a 74-73 win in what Buddy feels is one of the best championship games in New Hampshire high school history. “You couldn’t ask for a better final,” he said. “As far as comeback, as far as drama, as far as excitement.”

Because of foul trouble and a game-ending injury to the indispensable Mike Porreca (broken collar bone), Buddy had to use several players who had not had any meaningful minutes all season. Plus, several key juniors had off games.

The defining moments came in the game’s final 30 seconds. Up one, Colebrook had the ball out of bounds and could not pass it into play. They lost it. They forced a Groveton turnover, but then missed the free throws. The Eagles came down the floor with less than 10 seconds to play, making a pass to a kid situated below the foul line. Buddy recalled the shot: “He turned around, threw up (a shot) underhanded and the ball went in the basket.” Groveton was up one.

Colebrook had five seconds to go the length of the floor to win it, but they couldn’t and they lost. “That was heartbreaking,” Buddy said. 

“We basically got the last shot. That’s why we won,” added Collins, who finished his 38th year at Groveton on Thursday with a loss in the tournament quarterfinals at Concord Christian. “It was a big game. We ended up winning that night.”

During that era, Colebrook-Groveton games were standing room only – the kind of crowds that screamed fire-code violation. “The lines started about two hours before the game to get into the gyms,” Collins said. “When that game was coming, that was the talk three days before. ‘Who’s going to win? Who’s going to do this? Who’s going to do that?’ Both teams were very good back then. That’s basically what it was. The place was packed.”

Coming off the 2001 heartbreak, Colebrook still had a very good team returning. Good enough, in fact, to get back to the final and against Groveton, who was now going for its fifth straight title.

Plus, of course, Groveton had Colebrook’s number. Well, at that point, everyone’s number. “They’ll let you know that they’re the champs, for sure,” Buddy said. He recalls the bus ride to Plymouth for the championship. Once they got near Groveton driving south, signs started popping up along the road – “Five in a row.” “One for the Thumb.” Buddy was shaking his head. “There was all this stuff – ‘Colebrook’s good until they get to Plymouth.’ It was like that all the way down. Our kids were looking at this all the way down.”

It wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, Buddy felt they were getting focused. “Not a word was said. The bus was dead quiet all the way down. Nothing,” he said. “I kind of knew we were ready to go.”

The key player that season for the Mohawks was senior point guard Seth Boutin, who had played poorly in the previous championship game. “He knew he was good and wasn’t afraid to say so at times,” Buddy said. Boutin would start running his chops during the season and Buddy would cut him off. “You’ve got to prove it when you get to Plymouth. We’ll see what happens when we get there,” the coach would say.

Buddy recalls before an early tournament game, Boutin did something dumb during a walkthrough. “I just ripped into him,” the coach said. “Ripped into him big time.”

The two knew each other. Once Buddy was finished with his evisceration, it was done and time to move on. As they were getting on the bus, Boutin offered Buddy a few pieces of candy from a big bag he always had with him, just to let him know they were good.

Boutin was absolutely immense in the tournament – the tourney MVP as far as Buddy was concerned. In all three playoff wins, he dominated the three big-time opposing point guards. Groveton and Colebrook had split a pair of tight games during the season, but at Plymouth it was all Mohawks. They rolled to a commanding 71-44 win. “We totally destroyed them,” Buddy said. “We could do nothing wrong. Everything was right there. It was good.”

Buddy felt bad for the kids who graduated the year before, including his son. “That was actually a better team,” he said. “That’s the breaks sometimes. We got the Groveton thing off our backs. We didn’t have to listen to that anymore.”

Colebrook kept it going. They made the tournament again and again, lost in the semis here, a final there. But Buddy knew another title was coming. Colebrook had this great class coming led by Ryan Call. Many were on the 2006 finalist squad as sophomores and a team that lost in the semis in 2007 as Lisbon’s run was coming to a close. The 2007-08 season had the potential to be big. In fact, the whole school year did. That class ended up leading Colebrook to the rare trifecta – championships in soccer, basketball and baseball.

The Mohawks lived up to the hype. They rolled through the regular season with one loss – an early-season setback at home to the other favorite Wilton-Lyndeborough, 78-70. They played the game straight up, not giving anything away. “It wasn’t a bad thing,” Buddy said. “They didn’t get full of themselves.” It certainly took care of the best team conversation. As far as Buddy was concerned, Wilton was the best team until someone beat them. He didn’t want to hear any talk about Colebrook being the best team. 

The tournament came. The Mohawks breezed their way to the final. Wilton was the opponent. “Now we release all our stuff,” he said. “All our doubles and different rotations off the ball. They got extremely frustrated.” Colebrook jumped out early and was in control en route to a commanding 68-52 win – their third title since 1997.

But the program was on borrowed time. The enrollment was starting to decline. Fewer boys came out for the team. The commitment level was not what it was. “We always had a core of kids we always told, ‘we don’t want you to be the best in Colebrook. We want you to be the best players in the division.’ That gradually started going down.”

As the talent pool decreased, Buddy felt that he and his staff were coaching at their best, getting every last ounce of effort from those groups in the 2010s. “We weren’t blessed with a whole lot of talent,” he said. “We got them to play. We did stuff we didn’t want to do.”

Up to that point, Buddy’s teams played like a buzz saw. “We’ve always been full court, man in your face, run and jump, double team, halfcourt trap stuff,” he said. “We gradually had to scale back and play a dreaded zone once in a while.”

The biggest change was to run a delay, which they uniquely ran off the high post. It was something no one else was doing. They ran this to keep the score close, to have a chance to catch up if they were behind. Essentially, they did it to have a chance to win.

It was not popular. “Sometimes the kids didn’t want to run it,” Buddy said. “Our fans certainly didn’t want to see it. You just about hear a groan. But if we don’t run this, we’re not winning. I’m here to win. I’m not here to run up and down and lose.”

If the kids did question the delay strategy, Buddy was pretty clear why it was being used. “We’re in a delay because we can’t score points. We can’t shoot. You don’t work (on your game) in the summer.”

That’s kind of how it played out. Buddy stopped teaching in 2016. His former player Ryan Call inherited that post and then took over as AD in 2019 when Buddy got done with that. Call then became the basketball coach when Buddy finally bid adieu to his most cherished position in ‘22. He coached in 2019-20, but took the following year off to deal with prostate cancer. He had 599 career wins. “My whole life I coached,” he said. “I never dreamed of not coaching. The year I took off, when it was all done, ‘Well, I’m alive.’ You know what? I missed it. But I didn’t miss it that much. I promised Ryan I would come back and I needed to come back. I was one win away from 600. I’m coming back.”

But, of course, it wasn’t the same. He didn’t have the same Buddy Trask passion. “It was starting to become a job for me,” he said. “I wasn’t having fun anymore. People said I’d miss it. No, I had my time. I could keep coaching. I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

He got his 600th win. He’d been around long enough that his alma mater, Stratford HS, the first school he coached and taught at back in the 1970s,  closed its doors in the 2000s. Its students now go to Groveton. His final Colebrook squad went 7-11 to get that win total to 606. He ended his last season like he began his first way back in 1976 – with a loss. It was to Pittsburg/Canaan who Colebrook had owned for the last quarter century or so. The game had additional juice in that the winner qualified for the Division IV playoffs and the loser stayed home. “It was at our place,” he said. “Everybody likes to go out on top. Losing my last game to Pittsburg/Canaan, that’s how things go. That’s athletics.” It sure is. Of his 45 seasons coaching basketball, his teams missed the pl;ayoffs just seven times – twice at Stratford and five times at Colebrook.

There are plenty of good memories with great players, assistant coaches, parents and principals. He has no regrets. One of his favorite memories outside of the Colebrook bubble was coaching the New Hampshire senior squad in the old Alhambra all-star game against Vermont with Lebanon coaching legend Lang Metcalf. In 1997, he got a call from the New Hampshire Basketball Coaches Organization asking him if he minded if Metcalf, who was retiring, coached with him. “No, I don’t,” was Buddy’s response. “Lang can do it. I’ll step down. I’d just be happy to spend some time with him.”

Metcalf wasn’t having it. He called Buddy and made it clear he was coming along as an assistant and that was that. “The stuff I learned from him,” Buddy said. “The jokes and stories. It was one of the best four days that I had coaching during that time, being around him.”

Kevin showed up for the practices the last couple days. Metcalf took a shine to him. He quizzed him, wondering if he was on the high school team. “Not yet,” was Kevin’s answer. Metcalf then asked if the Colebrook teams made it to the tournament in Plymouth. “We’re there every year” was Kevin’s reply. Metcalf said if they made it to Plymouth, he would come to the game or games to see Kevin play. And he did. “He might have missed one game,” Buddy said. “But he made a point to see him. I’ll never forget that. That was just amazing.”

Buddy left an imprint on the North Country and a legacy at Colebrook. His friend and rival coach Mark Collins admired Buddy’s “attention to the details.” He was also impressed with how Buddy’s former players came back to pay their respects to him. “Whether they played four years ago or 15 years ago, when they come back and see him it’s good to see,” Collins said. “You can just see how much they care about him.”

Collins added about Buddy: “You do it the right way or you don’t play for him pretty much. You do it right and (if you’re not doing it right) you keep doing it until you get it right.”

Buddy and Dale Ramsay have remained close friends 50-plus years later. Ramsay, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky, remembers growing up that even before he got to college it was pretty obvious Buddy was going to be a coach. “He just saw the game at a different level, even in high school. He was three or four plays ahead. It was clear what his path was going to be.”

Gary Jenness was in his first year at Groveton in 1975-76 when Buddy did his student teaching under him in the spring of ‘76. “He was a very good student teacher. He wasn’t very good on Monday morning because he’d go to Plymouth State on the weekend because his wife Mary was a student there and they’d go out. He’d be back around 9 on Monday. Buddy was excellent. You knew he was going to be a great teacher and good coach.”

What  struck Jenness about Buddy’s coaching was “he got more out of his kids over the years than many coaches I have seen. He would not have a very good team and they would be very competitive. The one thing he did when he went to Colebrook, he made them competitive. Anytime you played them, you knew you were in for a dogfight.”

Ramsay said when you walk into the Colebrook gym – now the Trask Gymnasium – you see all the banners. “That’s Buddy’s work. They won all those championships in all those sports boys and girls when he was athletic director. That’s saying something.”

Back in 1976, Ramsay and Buddy were watching the sun rise after a night of celebrating a young coach’s first career win at Orford. “All we could think about was that we won one game,” Ramsay said. “You knew, even then, he was going to be successful.”

Double Fun: Flashy Joe G. made it happen at ConVal and Conant

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.

Conant turned in an undefeated 2006-07 season, en route to the Division III State Championship.

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.

New Hampshire Basketball Coaches Organization Hall of Famer, Arthur “Joe” Giovannangeli Jr.

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.”

Conant took home the 2006 Division III State Championship, starting a run of five-straight titles.

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

Fresh Start: Williamson, Whitmore clear the slate this year at Trinity

By Mike Whaley

Albeit for different reasons, it’s been a renewal this season at Trinity College for first-year women’s basketball head coach Maria (Noucas) Williamson and junior forward Melissa Whitmore.

Williamson, a native of Portsmouth, comes to Trinity from the University of Chicago where she was the head coach for four seasons (53-24, NCAA Division III Sweet 16 in 2023). It’s a reunion of sorts for Williamson, who played in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) during a four-year career at Bowdoin (2005-09). While she was there, the Polar Bears made four trips to the NCAA tournament, including twice to the Elite 8. Williamson, when she was Maria Noucas, was a team captain as a senior, leading Bowdoin to a 24-5 record. She’s been a college basketball coach ever since – 11 years as an assistant at the U.S. Naval Academy, Dartmouth and Loyola-Chicago, before getting her first head job in 2020 at Chicago.

The slate is clean for Whitmore, who played at Hanover High School.  Her freshman year was spent on scholarship at NCAA Division I Stonehill College. She transferred to Trinity as a sophomore. Both seasons were discouraging for Whitmore. At Stonehill, she did not enjoy the culture, while last year at Trinity she suffered an early-season ankle sprain and never completely regained the coach’s confidence.

Trinity coach Maria Williamson talks with the team. The second player fromt he left is Melissa Whitmore. [Courtesy photo]

This year, under Williamson, she vowed to clear the board and start anew, putting forth her best effort to break into the starting lineup. It’s been a breakout season. The Bantams are 16-6 overall and 5-3 in the NESCAC. Whitmore has started all 22 games with an 8.2 scoring average, while pulling down 4.9 rebounds per game. She also has 56 assists.

It’s been a journey to find herself in a good spot. After leading Hanover HS to the 2022 New Hampshire Division II state title, she accepted a scholarship to Stonehill in Massachusetts. She made friends, but she did not enjoy the coaching. She did play quite a bit, especially during the second half of the season when a starter was injured. “But mentally it was not the best situation,” she said. Whitmore played in 20 games with 13 starts. She averaged 5.8 points and 2.8 rebounds per game.

“The school was OK academically,” she said. “I was looking for something more rigorous. So I decided to transfer and I found Trinity. The academics are high level and I really like it here. The basketball and the coaching was really what I was looking for. I was really looking for a coach that would truly care about me on and off the court because basketball comes and goes. You have good days. You have bad days. I wanted to make sure I really felt comfortable going to my coach, talking through things, if that was necessary. Or lifting me up on the good days as well. I really felt that coach (Emily) Garner, my previous coach, would really help me with that.”

Another question Whitmore asked herself was if she couldn’t play basketball could she still enjoy the school? “Would I thrive academically?” she asked herself. “Trinity is what I landed upon.”

Trinity coach Maria Williamson. [Courtesy photo]

She also liked the city setting in Hartford, Connecticut. “I was looking for a more urbanish environment, so I can kind of be connected to the community and have a lot of resources around me.”

Leaving her scholarship behind at Stonehill was difficult. “It was hard to leave that as well,” Whitmore said. “It’s such a big deal. Ultimately, my mental health comes first. I believed I could thrive elsewhere.”

Her first year at Trinity, from a basketball perspective, did not go quite as well as she would have liked. “I got hurt at the beginning of the year and it was difficult to come back from that,” she said. “

Whitmore sprained her ankle early in the season. That took her out of the mix in practice and games for a while. “That was a little frustrating,” she said. “Towards the end of the year, in practice, I started to feel better. I started two games, which made me feel good.”

But other than those two starts, her late-season playing time was minimal. “It was hard for me to come back in my coach’s eyes,” Whitmore said. “They also knew that ankle injuries can be nagging. I tried my best to make my way back in. It’s hard. It was a setback.” She played in 18 of the Bantams’ 27 games (19-8), averaging 2.8 points and 2.1 rebounds per game. Trinity lost to Bates in the NESCAC playoff semis.

The Bantams received a shock in the spring when coach Garner left the program to take the head job at Division I Cornell University. Whitmore liked Garner, but she saw it as a new opportunity with coach Williamson. “It’s a blank slate,” Whitmore said. “She (Williamson) doesn’t know anybody (although she in fact knew of Whitmore). The preseason was a really good time for us to show our skills and our ability. I sort of took that as a challenge. ‘OK, let me show what I can do because everyone’s in the same boat. I just thought it was really fun. I love coach Maria. I know her a little bit.”

Indeed, the two were familiar with each other when Williamson was an assistant at Dartmouth College (2013-16) and Whitmore was in elementary school. Whitmore knew of Williamson as an assistant coach, and Williamson knew of Whitmore through Whitmore’s dad who worked at Dartmouth. “She was young then,” Williamson said. “Her dad talked about her U11 or her U12 team. It’s kind of come full circle.”

In fact when Whitmore declared she was transferring from Stonehill, Williamson tried to get her to come to Chicago. “That was fun reconnecting,” the coach said. “At the end of the day, she wanted to stay in New England and the NESCAC and all that. Which is totally fine. We got pretty far along in the recruiting process. So it kind of felt like a gift to reunite here.”

Former Hanover HS star Melissa Whitmore is thriving this year at Trinity College. [Courtesy photo]

That it has. Williamson loves Whitmore’s presence on the Trinity team. “She’s a super talented player,” the coach said. “More than anything, she’s awesome. She’s really positive. She keeps it really light. She really cares about the team. She’s really stuck with it this year. She’s been trying to find her confidence and what that needs and looks like. She’s been so good. She’s playing her best basketball right now. There’s no doubt about it.”

Whitmore has bought into Williamson’s coaching style. “She’s very up front. She wanted to build all our confidence,” Whitmore said. “She wants to be there for us. It really showed. Especially when games started. She knows when to push us and she knows when to give us confidence. She knows when to be harder on us and also laughs with us at the same time. That atmosphere, I feel like I’ve been able to thrive here with Coach Maria.”

Whitmore feels like her confidence has grown this season. “Being a starter helps,” she said. “Knowing the coaches have my back is really important. If we make a mistake they obviously let me know how to move forward and know what to fix. But they are also – ‘You got the next one.’ Which has been very helpful. Everyone makes mistakes. No one’s perfect. Just knowing that in the back of my mind has been helpful.”

Probably the biggest gain for Whitmore is recognizing that her contribution can come from many different areas. “Knowing some days I might score. Some days I might not,” she said. “But I want to make an impact in some way. Play good defense one game. Having a lot of rebounds one game. Score one game. Doing something rather than just being a body on the court.”

At 6-2, Whitmore is a matchup problem because of her size. “She’s one of our best 3-point shooters,” coach Williamson said. “Now she’s starting to play inside a little bit more. She uses her length defensively to really impact shots. She’s become a really good rebounder. Those have been her big roles for us.”

With a grandfather, aunt and uncle who coached basketball, it seemed only natural that Williamson would want to coach the sport as well. “When I was in high school, I had a really good AAU coach – Kara Leary with the New England Crusaders. She kind of put the bug in my ear.”

Williamson started coaching an AAU team in high school and continued that in college. “I just really enjoyed it,” she said. “I like being around young people. I like helping them shape their lives and help them to be able to grow at basketball. Most of the environments I’ve been at have had high academics, which is something that has been near and dear to my heart too.”

Portsmouth’s Maria Williamson was a four-year performer at Bowdoin College (2005-09). [Courtesy photo]

When Williamson got her first head gig in 2020 at Chicago, it was a dream come true. Unfortunately it was in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, so it was not ideal. In fact, Chicago did not play any games during her first year. “We just practiced for like 11 weeks,” she said. “It was a coach’s dream, but for a team not so much of a dream. But we tried to keep it light. That’s a big part of who I am as a head coach. I’m really optimistic. I believe in positive coaching. It was really fun to finally do that at the University of Chicago. We had a lot of success there, too; just finding joy in every game and competing at a super high level. I really enjoyed being able to develop culture and enjoyed developing great teams and just enjoyed the journey through the whole season.”

Knowing that she had loved her experience at Bowdoin and the NESCAC, Williamson knew she wanted to come back to the conference in some way. There was a connection at Trinity with atheltic director Drew Galbraith, who she had known at Dartmouth. “When he reached out to me, it was kind of a no-brainer,” she said. “I could go back to a small community, a small college and then a program that’s been really, really good over the last five years or so. And then being back in the conference.”

Another big factor driving her decision was being back in New England to be closer to family. “I’m a big family person,” Williamson said. “My wife is a big family person. We now have an 18-month old son. Having him around, my parents and my wife;s parents. It’s been awesome. If you come to Trinity, you’ll probably see our whole family. On our side of the family are all boys under the age of 3. A lot of them come to most of our games. It’s a circus. Family is a huge part of it too.”

Because Williamson was hired so late, there was no recruiting for this season. The roster was set. It was just a matter of getting to know the team and understanding the Trinity culture. “We have a young team this year,” she said. “We have some good senior experience, but a lot of other people who are getting a lot of opportunities on the team are sophomores and juniors. It’s really been a journey of one game at a time.”

What Williamson likes about this team is that it’s learned big lessons from losses. “That doesn’t always happen with a team,” she said. “Teams are not as resilient over losses, but it usually leads to big success. It’s something that’s been really fun with our group. We keep saying our team is a happy team. We have fun together. We enjoy being around each other. Yes, we also want to be really good. That’s just been the story line.”

When she was trying to get to know the team, one thing that jumped out at her that all the women mentioned was a Trinity traditional pregame ritual. “They sing songs. Do some chants. They dance,” Williamson said. “The program has done it for a long time. It’s good to have that tradition. Any good winning culture has something like that.”

Because she was hired so late, another thing that Williamson wrestled with was how much do you change things. “At the end of the day, the biggest change or enhancement we made was we play faster,” she said. “That’s a style I really enjoy anyways. I think it’s really effective, really in any conference you play in.”

What Williamson likes about the Bantams is that if they get down 10 points, they can come back quickly. “That’s because of our style of play. … We shoot a ton of 3s because of that,” she said. “We have always had the ability to stay in games. That’s something we are going to latch onto no matter what.. We made some other adjustments. But that was the biggest thing.”

Melissa Whitmore has thrived this season for the Trinity Bantams. [Courtesy photo]

Returning to the NESCAC definitely brought back some memories for Williamson. She recalled the first conference game at Middlebury. “We struggled a little bit in tha game,” she said. “Part of it was the bus trip to Middlebury. It’s long. Halfway through the game, ‘Yeah, I remember that feeling watching my team out there. I totally know what their legs feel like right now.’ Stuff like that has popped up in every NESCAC game. It’s been fun memories more than anything – the little rivalries. I’ll be raring to go when we play Bowdoin (Saturday).”

The one thing she has been able to call on from her NESCAC experience as a player to help her team is the back-to-back games part of the schedule. For the most part, the conference plays its games on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. “What it really takes to win on Saturday (after a Friday game),” she said. “The mentality you need on Saturday to show up and grind it out and do whatever you need to do. Yeah I remember the familiarity of those and trying to help our team through that too. It’s been fun. That’s what makes the conference so unique, that quick turnaround.”

Speaking of a quick turnaround, that’s what the Bantams have in their final two games of the regular season tonight and Saturday at home against the top two teams in the conference – Colby (12-9, 6-2) and Bowdoin (22-0, 8-0). A sweep will secure home court for the first round of the NESCAC tournament on Feb. 22. A split could as well, but they will need some help. “We’re thrilled to be at home,” Williamson said. “And we’re just as thrilled to have our destiny in our control in some ways.”

Mike Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

Ball603’s Whaley releases book on forgotten small-college basketball division

“Floor Burns” captures the NAIA’s New England essence with many anecdotes, stories & photos

Ball603’s Mike Whaley, a veteran New Hampshire sportswriter, has written a colorful, intimate and sprawling book that celebrates small-college basketball in New England, centered around the lesser-known college sports organization – the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). Whaley’s book (620 pages, more than 190 photos) highlights all six New England states, starting in New Britain, Connecticut, in the 1940s and wrapping up in present-day Boston at tiny Fisher College.

“Floor Burns: A Wild Journey Across the Forgotten Backroads of NAIA Basketball in New England” has been published by Bondcliff Books in Littleton for $29.95 (plus S&H).

Whaley was a college player himself in Vermont, so the book is part memoir. Mostly, however, it’s a definitive chronicle of the NAIA in New England, rich with stories and anecdotes from 120-plus interviews, mostly with former and current players and coaches.

Glenn Theulen coached Keene State College to three NAIA district championships in the 1970s. [photo courtesy of Mike Theulen]

For New Hampshire hoop junkies there are stories on players and/or coaches from Franklin Pierce University, Keene State College and New England College, as well as defunct Nathaniel Hawthorne and Notre Dame colleges. It will be a stroll down memory lane recalling Bruce Kirsh, Greg Trotman, Bob Witts, Paul Trocki, Al Hicks, Glenn Theulen, Joe Yaris, Dave Morissette, Josh Lee, Phil Rowe, and others.

The book’s cover has some Granite State flavor. Featured is Franklin Pierce’s Larry Leach, who starred for the Ravens during their NAIA era from 1978 to 1982. He still holds the men’s career scoring record with 2,226 points. 

Franklin Pierce’s Greg Trotman, left, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Bob Witts eclipsed the 2,000-point scoring mark as the 1980-81 season came to a close. Witts also led the NAIA in scoring with a 35.4 average. [photo courtesy of Bob Witts]

There are National Basketball Association (NBA) connections with Stan Van Gundy, the former NBA coach with Miami, Orlando, Detroit and New Orleans who got his start as a head coach in Vermont at Castleton State; as well as ex-coach and current NBA executive, Steve Clifford, who cut his teeth as a player in the NAIA at the University of Maine at Farmington. The popular “Jungle Jim” Loscutoff retired from the pro ranks in 1964 after nine seasons and six NBA championships with the Boston Celtics. He quickly segued into coaching at old Boston State College (1964 to 1976), building the program into a regional NAIA power.

“Floor Burns” can be ordered online at www.shopball603.com or purchased at select bookstore locations (coming soon).

Whaley has been an award-winning sportswriter in Maine and New Hampshire since 1987, and has written for Ball603 since its inception in 2021. A two-time New Hampshire Sportswriter of the Year, he played basketball at Lyndon State College (now VTSU-Lyndon) in northern Vermont from 1979 to 1983 in the era of short shorts with no 3-pointer or shot clock. This is his second book. Whaley lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, Jill Rosenblum. You may contact him via email (whaleym25@gmail.com).


Dave Morissette, left, and Phil Rowe both coached in the NAIA in New Hampshire: Morissette at defunct Notre Dame College in the 1990s and Rowe at New England College in the early 1980s. [Mike Whaley photo]

Cloe’s Pembroke Path: Discipline, structure, relationships at heart of coach’s success

By Mike Whaley

(This is the third in a series on the 2022 and 2024 inductees into the New Hampshire Basketball Coaches Organization – NHBCO – Hall of Fame. The stories will run periodically during the winter season.)

Roy Annis was describing his friend and former coaching compatriot Ed Cloe’s style during last November’s New Hampshire Basketball Coaches Organization’s Hall of Fame ceremony in Concord. He smiled and said “immediately I eliminated cuddly and huggy. That’s not Ed. I would say he is best classified as old school.”

That was Cloe. An undeniable old school coaching force of nature during his 36 years, of which 34 were spent at Pembroke Academy. He had 543 coaching wins, guided PA teams to seven trips to the state finals and four championships. The Pembroke gymnasium now bears his name – Ed Cloe Court – where you can see his number of career wins emblazoned on the hardwood.

“He taught players to set goals,” said Annis, a long-time Cloe assistant. “He instilled in them the tenacity and the fortitude to see those goals accomplished. He taught them how to win with grace and even more importantly, lose with dignity. A great coach makes a difference in someone’s life. Ed did that.”

It didn’t start that way. When Ed spoke about his coaching career, noted that he didn’t immediately go into coaching and teaching out of college in 1962 after going to school and playing basketball at Champlain College, a two-year school in Burlington, Vermont. He tried numerous things, including brief stints with the Air National Guard and at a finance company. “I found out that my first love was obviously physical education,” he said. “I went back to Plymouth (State) and got my degree there and started coaching at Colebrook (Academy) in 1968.”

It was a great place to start. “Those small towns, they were so pleased to get somebody up there that would put in the time,” said Ed, who lives in retirement outside of Sarasota, Florida. “A lot of people simply didn’t want to go that far north. It’s a great town. I still have a lot of friends I stay in touch with. That’s the beauty of working in a small town.”

Ed Cloe spent 34 of his 36 years coaching high school basketball at Pembroke Academy, guiding the Spartans to four state titles. [Photo courtesy: Ed Cloe]

Ed taught PE and coached basketball at Colebrook, as well as soccer for a year. “I just loved the sport,” he said of basketball. “It’s exciting. Basically back in the ‘60s, the choice was either baseball or basketball. They were the ones I enjoyed the most. … But basketball was always a thing for me.”

While at Colebrook, Ed struck up a good working relationship with a veteran sporting goods guy from Bristol by the name of Chet Wells. “He’d come up and visit,” Ed said. “I’d buy a few things. I didn’t have a big budget. He kind of liked me.”

Wells gave Ed’s name to Bill Marston, the principal at Pembroke Academy. “I applied down there,” Ed recalled. Marston liked Ed. He also received a good recommendation from one of his opposing counterparts in the North Country, Woodsville’s John Bagonzi, who was inducted in the same Hall of Fame class. “Basically, I went down, interviewed with Bill Marston and got the job,” Ed said. The job was to teach high school physical education and coach the boys basketball team, starting in the fall of 1970.

It was a big jump from a Class M/Division III school in the relative anonymity of the North Country to a higher profiled Class I/D-II school. “They had great expectations at Pembroke,” Ed said. “They always had for basketball.” When he got there in 1970, the Spartans were two years removed from the program’s first state title. 

“The fans really expected to win there,” he added. “It was interesting. I accepted the challenge.”

A pivotal period for Ed came in his second year. The team had gone 8-12 the previous season. They just made the playoffs as the 12th and final seed, tied with Franklin but getting the nod because they had a Class L team on their schedule. “But that wasn’t satisfactory,” Ed said. “They had come off a championship two years before. I was a little stressed with the losses. Things have got to change in a hurry if I’m going to keep up this tradition.”

At the beginning of that second year in 1971, Ed contacted Littleton coach Richard Bouley for a preseason scrimmage against the two-time defending Class I champs. “So we got in the van and went to Littleton and got our asses whacked by 25-30 points,” he recalled. The Crusaders had tremendous size with a pair of 6-foot-7 players in future major league pitcher Rich Gale and Dennis Sargent. Both later played basketball at the University of New Hampshire. They also had a pair of very good guards.

Ed Cloe, center, guided Pembroke Academy to the Class I championship in 1972 in just his second year as head coach. Cloe, before he started sporting his trademark mustache, is pictured with co-captains George Gordon, left, and Craig Keeler. [Photo courtesy: Ed Cloe]

That poor preseason followed the Spartans into the season where they didn’t play particularly well early on. At one point they were a middle-of-the-pack 8-6. Pembroke played an uptempo style. They pressed. They had a 2-2-1 zone press that they used most of the time. “It was OK,” Ed said. “But we needed to get a little more out of it. We put the two big kids up front.” The two big kids were Mark Yeaton and Craig Keeler, both an agile 6-foot-3.

“It was unbelievable how things just turned around,” Ed said. “I lay it to that one change in our defensive strategy. The big kids were hard to get around. The guards were in the second row of the 2-2-1. We just sparked from there.”

The first time Ed put that change in was at home against a very good Monadnock team that had beaten Pembroke on the road. The Spartans blew them out of the water, winning by 40 or so points. “And basically it was the press,” Ed said. “A lot of times you don’t know what to point your finger at. But a change here and there, and getting a little confidence. We never lost another game. It wasn’t even close, most of them.”

Fast forward to the Class I state tournament semifinals at UNH against Littleton, the colossus from the North Country. Pembroke was a far different squad from the one that the Crusaders had manhandled back in November. “We slowed them down,” Ed said. “They had two extremely good guards. We slowed them down and pulled them out on the floor a little bit from the basket. It took away a little from their inside game.”

While the Pembroke press didn’t create a bunch of turnovers, it helped to keep the control of the game in Pembroke’s favor. It allowed Keeler and Yeaton more room to operate inside. Keeler scored 41 points, which at the time was a tournament record. The Spartans shocked Littleton, 94-85. They shot extremely well, building a 50-34 lead at the half. Littleton did cut the lead to two at one juncture late in the second half before the Spartans regrouped. “I tell people, if we had played the next night, we might not have won,” he said. “They were that good. I’m not going to say we were superior on a daily basis.”

It was a landmark game for Ed and for New Hampshire basketball. Pembroke came out in the championship, which had to be anticlimactic after the semis, and handled Fall Mountain, 87-71. Fifty-three years later, that 1972 team’s incredible run remains etched in the Class I/D-II record books with 11 records. Most notable are Keeler’s 122 points scored in one tournament, Yeaton’s 36 points in the championship (shared with Fall Mountain’s Pat Aumand) and the team’s 357 points scored in four games – the most not only in the division but also in the state.

Ed Cloe looked up at the scoreboard at UNH as the final seconds tick off before Pembroke was able to celebrate the 1978 Class I championship. No. 20 is Mike Keeler. [Photo courtesy: Ed Cloe]

A few years later, Ed went into the local Concord radio station, WKXL, which had carried the Littleton playoff game. There on a different matter, he looked into the office of broadcaster Jim Jeannotte, who had called the game. “I stuck my head in because I was talking to somebody else,” Ed said. “‘I see you still have that Littleton game on the shelf there.’ Jeannotte responded, ‘that’s staying on the shelf. We don’t (normally) keep those games, but this one is marked forever.’”

That was Ed’s fourth year as a head coach. He remembers it being stressful. “We’re going to work hard and put in the time,” he said. “What will be, will be. We’re going to do it my way and we’re going to work hard. It’s either going to be a success or not. … That was a good starting point. Had I screwed up that ‘72 season, who knows how long I would have been there. … I kind of bought into that expectation. I expected to win as well. It kind of went hand in hand at that point.”

Ed embraced all of it and because of that, Pembroke kept winning. They won the 1978 championship with another Keeler (Mike) and Yeaton (Jeff). Keeler went on to play at UNH. Sandwiched around that title were runners-up finishes in 1977 and 1979, and then another second-place plaque in 1984.  In 1985, he won his third title with his son, Tim, on the team. Although it was special, it was not easy. “I told him right away, ‘it’s kind of a hotbed here,’” Ed said. “‘They expect you to go in and they expect you to play well. I have to tell you, you have to be a hair better than some of those other kids because I can’t give you a break. It just won’t work.’ They were waiting in the stands to see that happen (Ed favoring his son).” Ed would not budge on that.

“There were times that he’d come home and fire his duffle bag in the corner before I got there,” said Ed, noting that the Cloes lived a mile from the school. “He understood and he appreciates it today. He was a pretty good rebounder – actually the best rebounder we had in ‘84-85. It’s an experience a lot of coaches shy away from. There’s a negative to it. But I’m glad I did it. It worked out well. It’s something to look back at. It’s always something you did with your son and had some success.”

Ed Cloe’s last state title came in 1991 as Pembroke was led by one of the state’s greatest players, Matt Alosa. [Photo courtesy: Ed Cloe]

Ed’s final title came in 1991, led by Pembroke’s greatest player, Matt Alosa, who is one of the most prolific scorers in the state with 2,575 career points. A phenom before he got to high school, Ed knew, before Alosa even put on a Pembroke uniform, that he would be starting as a freshman. There was no doubt in Alosa’s mind that he would be playing for the Spartans and Ed Cloe. The Alosas had a house in Concord and a condominium in Pembroke, so he had a pick of the two schools. One big point that worked against Concord was at the time, as Alosa and Ed recalled, was the school had a rule that freshmen could not play on the varsity team. “That was a little bit of the deciding factor,” said Alosa. “I didn’t want to go to Concord High. I wanted to go to Pembroke all along anyways because I knew of Cloe and how good of a coach he was. And the school at Pembroke in general, we just liked the community.”

“Matt played four years for me,” said Ed. “He never missed a practice. He worked hard. He was good with the other players. He was a good leader out there. I have nothing negative to say. He was excellent. He helped bring the other kids along on the floor.”

Although there was no real drama over Alosa coming in and playing for Pembroke as a freshman, Ed does recall a funny story where he had to convince at least one player that Alosa was the guy who was going to be playing point guard. It was a senior who had reservations about Alosa. Pembroke was scrimmaging at Trinity and Ed sat Alosa at the beginning and let this other player start at point guard. Obviously, Ed brought in Alosa off the bench not long after that. He recalls getting a call from Alosa’s dad, Frank, after the scrimmage, wondering if there was anything wrong because his son did not start. “Everybody knew he was good,” Ed said of Alosa. “The person I started in front of him – nobody expected that. He was a senior. I let him play himself out of the position. Matt took over from there, of course.” It suddenly dawned on Frank, “‘Oh, I see what you’re doing.’”

Ed added, “It was nothing that Matt did. I wanted to clear up this idea in everybody’s mind that this kid was going to be better than Matt. He proved it himself and that was it. I didn’t have any problem with that.”

Alosa remembers that scrimmage being the moment when the starting point guard position became his. But he added it was not given to him. It was something he had to earn. “In practice leading up to that point, I had not started on the first team in practice,” he said. “I would start on the second team and sometimes switch over during practice. After that scrimmage where I think it was evident I was going to be the starter, we switched and it went on from there. You had to earn everything in practice.”

It was a special era for basketball in the Capitol City area. Pembroke had Alosa and neighboring Merrimack Valley had Scott Drapeau, a talented 6-foot-8 forward who led MV to the 1989 and 1990 Class I titles. It was an intense rivalry that drew big crowds. Ed recalled dominating the series during the regular season, but MV was the one celebrating from the podium after the tournament. The 1990 semis was a particularly difficult pill to swallow, an overtime setback at UNH. “That was devastating,” Ed said. “We came back and won it next year (1991, 79-61 over Valley). It was standing room only that night at Lundholm.” Both Alosa and Drapeau started elsewhere for their college careers, but ended up together at UNH as all-conference performers.

Hard work and discipline were Alosa’s two big takeaways from Ed as a coach. “He came up with a game plan and then came at us to make us work and develop to try to execute on the plan that he had for whatever game or whatever season or whatever team. … You had to earn everything in our practices, from respect to hard work to the starting lineup. You had to earn all that. People respected him for that.”

An interesting sidenote: Alosa went on to coach at Pembroke after Ed left, guiding the program for 10 years and two state titles.

Ed Cloe gives his acceptance speech at the 2024 NHBCO Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Concord. [Photo courtesy: KJ Cardinal]

Ed said over time he learned to adapt his style as the culture changed. “I was still a disciplinarian and structured in my practices,” he said. “Very structured in practice, in how it was set up. I didn’t change that. I felt like I needed to be a little more lenient in my relationships with the players. It doesn’t mean you let them get away with anything. You have to be a little bit more available and be a little more understanding. And not be quite so my way or the highway. You shared a little bit of the highway with them without giving away your coaching philosophy.”

Ed said kids were different in the ‘60s and ‘70s, especially in the North Country. “I have no doubt that parents would have backed me 120 percent or whatever percent you want,” he said. “I don’t find that today. That changed throughout my coaching. You’d have more time when you would talk with parents. They wanted their son to be successful, obviously. But they were not as supportive as they were back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, particularly, as I said, in the smaller community.”

Hard work and discipline in practice was not going to change. “Kids had so many different things coming at them in the ‘90s and 2000s,” he said. “Different programs. Different ways to have your attention taken away from basketball. You had to deal with that stuff.”

While wins and losses were part of the journey, as time went on Ed grew to appreciate the relationships with other coaches. One in particular was a long-time friendship with Lebanon legend Lang Metcalf. “He’d say to me ‘Why do you drive all the way to Lebanon when you can play somebody closer?’ It was a measuring stick. Lebanon is always going to be very good under Lang Metcalf. He felt the same way (about my teams), I think. So we always played two games.”

Ed chuckled remembering Lang, who died in 2006 at age 73. “You’d get a guy like that who has a good program. We’d have overtime games. I think we had a triple overtime game once. He’d come up afterwards. He was a nice guy. He’d have that cheshire cat grin. He had that big mustache – much like Ed had his own. ‘Well Eddie, we had a good one tonight, didn’t we?’” said Ed, mimicking Lang’s distinctive drawl. “That’s the way he talked. It’s a camaraderie. I’m wondering if they have that today. I’m not sure they do. I don’t think they stay long enough.”

Ed planned to retire after the 2001-02 school year from both coaching and as athletic director. But Pembroke’s enrollment numbers rose and they were moved up to the state’s largest class (Class L/Division I). He decided to stay for that two-year cycle just to coach basketball. “I’ve got to tell you, my ass is still sore from getting kicked,” he said. “That was two great years in Class L. There were some outstanding teams. We were pretty good. If we were back in I for those two years we’d have been at the top of the pack. The teams were loaded. I never felt once that anyone was running up the score or anything. They were just that good.”

Why did Ed stay for those two years? “I didn’t expect it was going to be easy,” he said. “I didn’t think it was fair to throw a new coach into that situation. I didn’t want to let the kids down, so I stayed for two years and I retired in 2004.” He now lives in Sarasota, Florida, near his son Tim. Joanna, his wife of 58 years, passed away last April. Annis described her as the “foundation of Ed’s success.”

Ed Cloe has no regrets about the path he took. “Being a teacher/coach, honestly, where can you find relationships that keep on growing,” he said. “I can’t think of another occupation that has those kinds of relationships.”

Each of his teams had their own unique personality. “That’s what makes it,” he said. “If they were all the same, it wouldn’t be any fun.” He also remembered fondly the bus rides to Durham for the state tournaments at UNH. “There were a lot of trips to Durham and the pleasure we got out of them.”

Alosa said “to have a culture and to have a tradition, it doesn’t just happen. To build, that takes someone in charge that leads that program to whatever that ends up being. I just think in Ed’s case, his hard work, dedication and discipline over years and years and years, (led) to have that aura with that legacy and those banners. It’s a long tradition and he put a lot of dedication and hard work into that. That’s what I take away from the whole thing and that’s how I coached. It helped me throughout my career. So I appreciate everything Ed did.”

Indicative of that tradition that Ed helped to build at Pembroke, Annis had this to say as he wrapped his words about his friend at the NHBCO Hall of Fame event: “Boston Garden had Red Auerbach and when Red lit up his cigar, you knew the game was over. For any fans of Pembroke, they knew that when Ed got up and yelled ‘Blue,” the game was over. We were going to stall the ball and hold it for the victory. He did that for so many years.”

At the conclusion of his Hall of Fame speech, Ed recalled attending a long ago clinic run by NBA coach Hubie Brown. In summation, Brown said, “‘I’ve got one more thought to tell you. Important advice. Move on from your current position before your 11th and 12th man become school board members.’ That always stuck with me. I didn’t move on.” Pembroke Academy was all the better for it.

Mike Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com