Category: Jam Session

Motivated to win: Pembroke never wavered from its championship goal

By Mike Whaley

(This is the sixth in a series on the 2025 NHIAA state championship basketball teams.)

While winning a state championship is the ultimate goal for any high school basketball team, most coaches will tell you that they’d like to approach the season one game at a time so as not to get caught looking too far ahead.

Pembroke Academy boys coach Mike Donnell did not have that luxury. The team was pretty adamant since losing in the 2024 semifinals that this season it was “championship or bust.” It was a no-choice adjustment for the coach. “I don’t like coaching that way,” he said. “I like to take it the old-school way – one game at a time. Not these guys. They wanted this ’ship badly enough. We had been so close three years in a row. They wanted to do what the other teams couldn’t do and that was to finish.”

Senior Devin Riel recalls he and classmate Evan Berkeley meeting with coach Donnell before the season to discuss goals. “We told him it was ‘win or bust.’” Riel said. “We either were going to win the state championship or it was going to be a bust.”

While it was an adjustment for Donnell and his staff, they did use it to their advantage. “Every time they got a little lazy at practice, we’d whip them back into shape and say ‘you’re the guys who want a championship. You’re the guys saying ‘championship or bust.’ So let’s go.”

Well, the Spartans did just that. They went through the regular season 16-2 to earn the top seed, and then swept their three playoff games. In the final, they stopped Sanborn, 63-54, to capture the program’s ninth Division II state championship, the most in the division.

Pembroke has a rich basketball tradition going back to the 1960s when it won its first state title in old Class I, a 56-52 win over Littleton. Pete Kaligian was the coach. Hall of Fame coach Ed Cloe guided Spartan teams to four crowns in 1972, 1978, 1985 and 1991 during a 30-plus year run, and his former star, Matt Alosa, carried on the tradition with back-to-back titles in 2013 and 2014. Rich Otis led the team to the 2019 championship, and Donnell was at the helm this past year. Donnell has been part of the last four titles as either a head or assistant coach.

There was some heartbreak before Pembroke got to the pinnacle in 2025. Donnell took over as head coach half way through the 2021-22 season when Otis resigned amid pressure from a group of parents. The Spartans lost in the quarterfinals that year, followed by a loss in the 2023 championship to Pelham, and last year’s painful defeat in the semis to Hanover.

“The bar was set from the moment we lost last year,” said Riel of the 49-43 loss in the semis to Hanover. “A lot of guys wanted it a lot more. We knew we couldn’t let that happen again watching the seniors cry. It was probably the worst bus ride I’ve ever been a part of. It was sad. It was depressing. It was a feeling I never wanted to feel again. That’s why our bar was so high.”

Berkeley agreed, saying, “Our main focus was having that last bus ride home from UNH and being all excited that we won the championship.”

Now it was just a matter of getting there and getting it done. Berkeley and Riel were the senior anchors along with classmate Owen Stewart. They were joined by a solid junior class with Zac Bemis, Colin Dube and Javien Sinclair, and talented sophomore Andrew Fitzgerald. It was a small team with the key players all in the 5-9 to 6-0 range with the exception of Sinclair (6-foot-3).

Berkeley and Riel took vastly different journeys to the varsity team. Berkeley grew up playing basketball. He was on the junior varsity as a freshman, swinging up to the varsity at the end of the season. As a sophomore, he was the second man off the bench, getting 10 or so minutes per game. As a junior, his role expanded to starting point guard and the team’s second leading scorer behind senior Joe Fitzgerald, Andrew’s older brother. “I had to take control of the floor and start running the offense,” he said. “I knew the work I had put in. I knew I would be the right person for the job.”

Riel didn’t focus on basketball until he got to high school. He was a baseball-only player before that. Knowing that Pembroke is a basketball town, he decided to give that sport a shot. He played with the freshmen team his first year, swinging with the JV squad as well. As he started getting better and showing more interest, his role expanded. He was the JV captain as a sophomore. Between his sophomore and junior year was when everything took off. He had a big growth spurt, going from 5-8 to 5-11, and he took offseason training and what the coaches said more seriously. As a junior, he became one of the three main guys with Berkeley and Joe Fitzgerald. “I really started to buy into my role,” he said. “My role was a lot more on the defensive side. I would guard the best player. I would do all the dirty work. I started to love and accept that role. Whatever I had to do to win, that’s what I was going to do.”

As if it wasn’t hard enough to focus on getting better at basketball, the team also had to deal with some emotional trauma: Coach Donnell’s cancer diagnosis in the spring of 2024. “That was a season I never thought I would coach again,” said Donnell, who has coached in Massachusetts and New Hampshire since the late 1970s. Most recently, he coached under Alosa at Pembroke for three years and two championships, guiding teams at Epping and Franklin, before returning to Pembroke to work under Otis in ‘21. “I didn’t even know if I was going to live.”

Donnell said he had a colonoscopy in April of 2024. His doctor came in and said he had colon cancer. He was operated on in June of that year to remove a five centimeter tumor and 14 inches of his colon. From that point until November leading into the season, Donnell followed an intensified regimen to battle the cancer, taking 14 chemo pills a day and infusions.

“Six days after my surgery, my doctor told me to take at least a month, a month and a half off from school. To take it easy,” said Donnell, who has taught at Pembroke since 2012, currently as a transition lab teacher, helping freshmen to survive four years of high school. “When you have cancer and you have my type of personality, sitting down in a chair just makes your mind go in so many bad places and thinking of the negative side. My goal was to try to feel normal. I was back in school within six days of my surgery.”

Donnell received pushback from his athletic director, who felt he should be home resting, so that he would be good to go when the season started in November. But the school ultimately backed his decision to return. “They were all very supportive of when I needed to leave, I could just go,” he said. “The support from the school and the community was amazing.”

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the cancer was telling his players and trying to keep their emotions in check. “It’s a tough pill to swallow,” Donnell. “I am not a closed book. I am very open. I share everything with my kids. We talk about lots of life lessons. I think that’s very valuable in coaching. We had a get-together and I told them what the situation was. I wouldn’t be around much during the summer if I was sick. If I was well enough, I would be there.”

Donnell recalls one day being approached by Riel in the weight room while working out. “I was just sitting there and not being very comfortable,” Donnell said. “He (Riel) came up to me and said ‘Coach, I want you to remember something. You told me and the boys if you want some done (badly) enough, you’ve got to fight for it. Coach, this is your fight. This is your championship. You’ve got to beat this and we’ve got your back.’”

That was a game-changer for Donnell. “I think from that day, my attitude about everything changed,” he said. If it wasn’t for the assistant coaches, I don’t know what would have happened. I didn’t have much energy. It takes a little over a year to get fully back from it. I’m still dealing with a few little things. My assistant coaches (Jim Cilley, Julia Labrecque and Corey Nelson) just carried the torch. They kept telling me to relax. I pretty much sat back in a chair and watched what was going on. I talked as little as I could, They pretty much ran all our summer and fall ball (programs), which was huge for us.”

The strength of the players through the whole cancer experience was amazing in Donnell’s eyes. “I know that Andrew Fitzgerald had lost his grandfather (to cancer) shortly before my episode,” Donnell said. He went up to his grandmother (a Pembroke teacher): ‘Is Coach Donnell going to die?’ So they were really concerned about me. I can’t count the amount of hugs, the words, the affection, these kids showed to me. I think it was extremely important to my healing process.”

Riel said it was a tough time for the players as well. “It hurt a lot,” he said. “We know he’s a big people person. He’s good with the community. He’s good with kids. He’s good with us. He knows how to talk with us. Like a family, he knows how to keep us close. It was a big hit for the program. We took it well though. We have strong faith in Jesus Christ. We all go to church together. We all prayed for him. He was able to get through it. He wasn’t going to fight it alone. We were going to be right there with him.”

“We knew it would be a tough battle,” Berkeley said. “Cancer is never easy. We knew Coach had the strength and the courage to do it. We were definitely riding behind him through it all. Just staying confident, praying to the man above, and loving each other and enjoying the moment.”

The Spartans started the season with four straight wins, including three over tournament teams from Manchester West, Hanover and Hollis-Brookline. Then they ran into Pelham on the road – the two-time defending state champions. Berkeley got in foul trouble and the Pythons just played better, claiming a 64-53 victory.

“I think a lot of kids put the weight on their shoulders and they had to do it (all) themselves,” Donnell said. “When you do that, you make mistakes. Instead of looking for the best shot, we were shooting the first shot. We were getting a little weak on defense, a little weak in rebounding. When you do those things (poorly) especially against a great team like Pelham, you’re not going to win.”

In the locker room after the game, the players were down. Several were crying. Donnell said he snapped. “I said, ‘Hey listen, we’re not going to have an undefeated season. You guys said you were playing to win a championship. This is one game with many more to go. Get your heads out of your butt and let’s move forward.’ From that point I think the kids bought in at practice about the ‘we over me.’ They really came together as a unit and had a very great season.”

It was a wake-up call for Fitzgerald. He played quite a bit as a freshman, giving the Spartans an offensive boost as one of the first players off the bench. But as good a scorer as he was, he was starting to realize that he needed to expand his game if he wanted to play in college, especially on defense where at times he was a liability. The Pelham game was the first game where it dawned on him that “I need to play defense. I was getting beat full court. I was getting beat off the dribble a lot. I wasn’t getting a lot of rebounds. It was the kind of realization.”

The coaches kept on him to focus on his defense. He started taking it personally. “It really motivated me to play better,” Fitzgerald said. “It looked bad on my part and it made us look bad. It was actually a little embarrassing because I was (often) a detriment (on defense).”

Pembroke did not lose again until late in the season to Coe-Brown, a 67-61 setback to end a nine-game winning streak. “The tough part is they came into our house and gave us our first (home) loss in over two years,” said Donnell. “I think after that loss in the locker room the boys were pretty adamant that they would not lose again.”

Riel recalls that loss. “We kind of overlooked them and came out sloppy,” he said. “They played a really good game. They hit their shots. We were kind of falling apart on defense. Coach Cilley, our defensive coach, got on us the next day. We watched film. He made us work. We got better at our zone. We got better at our man.”

Riel felt that loss helped the Spartans to regain focus. “I think that one fueled us a little bit more,” he said. “That one stung a little more. We got a little more fuel and that one motivated us.”

Pembroke won its final two regular season games over Merrimack Valley and Milford to improve to 16-2 and earn the top seed for the D-II tournament. With it came a first-round bye. Donnell did not like that. “Having a week off for a high school team is not good,” he said. “You practice five days that week without a game. Things get a little long.”

Not everyone felt that way. “The bye could definitely hurt some teams,” Riel said. “But it didn’t hurt us. It was a chance to rest and get our bodies back to 100 percent and ready for our first playoff game.”

The quarterfinal game was against No. 8 Bow, a team they had played and beaten on three previous occasions during the regular season and in the holiday tournament. Two of the wins were close, including the last game at Bow in overtime. The law of averages was against them, but Pembroke was not going to let that get in the way. “Our boys would not be denied,” Donnell said. “We won all four games. That was very rewarding.” The playoff win before a full house at home was by a score of 74-60. Riel and Berkeley led the way with 22 and 21 points, respectively.

For the third year, the Spartans were back in the semis. Their opponent? Pelham – their recent nemesis that had beaten them earlier in the season as well as in the 2023 championship game. “As soon as we hit the tournament, our attitude was very simple,” Donnell said. “It was ‘win or go home.’ That’s how it was. It was real.”

Donnell has always been able to read his players, so he can get a feel for them during warmups. “Just watching their actions and reactions, their shooting, what kind of energy they have,” he said. “We went into that playoff game (against Pelham) with an extreme amount of energy. I just felt really good about that game.”

His “feeling” was justified. The Spartans vaunted transition game kicked in to open up a 29-20 lead at the half. After the Pythons closed the lead to two after three stops (36-34), Pembroke regrouped in the fourth quarter to pull away for the 57-42 victory. Fitzgerald led the way with 18 points. Berkeley added 13 and Bemis and Riel split 16. “That loss (during the regular season), everything happens for a reason,” Riel said. “I think that loss is the reason we were able to win in the final four.”

Now it was on to the final at UNH. In the way was Sanborn, making its first-ever championship appearance against a program that had won the most D-II titles (eight).

The key to this game in Donnell’s mind was to shut down one of Sanborn’s two big scorers – Chase Frizzell and Dylan Rego. “I thought if we could shut one player down, our chances would be extremely good to win the championship,” the coach said.

It proved to be a sound strategy. Sinclair defended Rego, holding him to four points, all in the first half. “Whenever the ball was below the free-throw line, we just had Javien get in contact with Rego and he completely shut him down.”

Frizzell did score a team-high 22 points, but Donnell felt he had to shoot more and do more to make up for Rego, and that was an advantage for the Spartans.

The second key was that Fitzgerald went off for a career-high 26 points, 19 of those in the first half. He scored 44 points in the semis and championship combined. “I was just able to play in the flow of the game,” he said. “I let the game come to me. The shots were just coming.” Fitzgerald remembered his dismal performance in the 2024 semis against Hanover, his final game of that season. “I actually kind of folded under the pressure,” he said. “I think that was a really good lesson for me at the time. I just had to trust the work that I put in.” Trusting his work led to big scoring nights in the two most important games of the season on the biggest stage in the state.

It was tied after the first quarter and Pembroke had a two-point lead at the half. “The game got close a couple of times, but I think honestly we were in control the entire game,” Donnell said. Berkeley was a factor late in the game making foul shots (he was 9 of 12 from the line and scored 15 points). The Spartans finally pulled away to win 63-54.

The beauty of Pembroke’s approach to offense was that they didn’t care who did the scoring. When Fitzgerald heated up later in the tournament, Riel said it was simply a matter of embracing the words of Coach Donnell: “Coach talked about it. Whoever’s hot, get them the ball. We kept feeding him (Fitzgerald) the ball and he kept showing up every possession.”

The Spartans’ final record was 22-2, which included three wins to capture the Capital City Holiday Tournament title. The postseason honors also rolled in. Berkeley was named D-II Player of the Year and made First Team All-State. He has been recruited to play at Plymouth State next year. Riel was selected to the D-II Second Team and Fitzgerald was honorable mention. Labrecque was named Subvarsity Coach of the Year.

After losing in the 2024 semis, Pembroke was on a mission. As a unit, they joined a local gym to work out together. “That became the new hang-out spot,” said Berkeley. “We played at the gym with the guys and (were) going hard and going at each other. But also loving each other at the same time. You can’t be fighting with the guy you’re trying to win with. We knew we just had to buy in together and love each other and be confident in each other and that would end up working out.” Lo and behold, it did.

Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

Worth the wait: Milford girls back on the podium after 46 years

By Mike Whaley

(This is the fifth in a series on the 2025 NHIAA state championship basketball teams.)

When Mike Davidson took over as head coach of the Milford High School girls varsity basketball team in 2019, there was very little in the way of recent success. In fact, the Spartans were nearly 40 years removed from their glory days in the 1970s. Back then, Milford was a power, winning three state titles in four years, including back-to-back Class I championships in 1978 and 1979. But that, as they say, was years ago.

When Davidson was hired after 16 years coaching in neighboring Massachusetts, the three previous Milford seasons weren’t good: 5-13, 3-15, 3-15. After he took the job, Davidson got the full skinny on the state of the program from then athletic director Marc Maurais. “There were some decent kids and a good freshman class,” Davidson recalled being told. “There were some seniors, but they were probably not going to play basketball anymore. That’s because it was a really losing team for a long time.”

Although there was the potential for a brighter future, Davidson’s first two seasons were difficult. The Spartans played 34 games and lost all of them. “The girls who were there worked hard,” he said. “There wasn’t a ton of talent.”

All that changed in 2021 with the arrival of a promising group of freshmen – Avery Fuller, Claire Cote, Ellie Nassy and Lulu Maguire. Four years later, that now senior core, coupled with junior point guard Shea Hansen and sophomore guard Lexi Bausha, led Milford to the Division II summit – a 43-36 win over Oyster River in the D-II championship at the University of New Hampshire. The long wait was finally over.

Davidson singles out Shea’s older sister, Kate Hansen, and Bailey Johnson as the ones who helped turn the program around when the freshmen came in in 2021. They had weathered the two winless seasons. “They got the ball rolling,” he said. “They could have given up on basketball, but they didn’t. They stayed with it.” 

Led by the elder Hansen and Johnson, the Spartans made the 2022 D-II playoffs with a 9-9 record, losing in the first round at No. 5 Laconia, 61-35.

The following year, Milford really broke out. They went 14-4 to earn the No. 6 seed in the playoffs. In the first round they handled No. 11 Derryfield, 42-27, before getting routed in the quarterfinals by No. 3 Pelham. It was still a big step in the right direction.

“We started to get to know each other and bond,” Fuller said. “We won a little more – the Nashua holiday tournament. We started to spark. We made a name for ourselves that year.”

Shea Hansen came in as a freshman that year and quickly established herself as the Spartans’ point guard. “Shea is everything you need a point guard to be,” Davidson said. “She wants the ball all the time. She never wants to come out of the game. She never turns the ball over.” Hansen had just 39 turnovers in 23 games. She definitely helped the Spartans make the jump to the next level.

Which brings us to last season where Milford saw the potential to move to the top tier of the division. It all came crashing down during the holiday tournament in Nashua. Maguire, the team’s leading scorer, went down with a severe ACL injury and was lost for the season. The Spartans struggled for the rest of the season to recover.

“We were in shock,” said Fuller. “It took us time to adjust. We rotated the lineup almost every single game. It took us a while to click with that group. That’s why our record went downhill.” The Spartans went 8-10, but still made the D-II tournament, but were out in one game, a 61-46 setback at No. 4 John Stark.

“The ACL (injury) really set her back,” said coach Davidson of Maguire’s injury. “That put a screeching halt on anything we were expecting to do that year.”

Maguire’s injury changed the team’s dynamic since she would never be the player she once was. That blow was softened over the summer when assistant coach Dennis Claire, Claire Cote’s grandfather, approached Davidson about picking up a player from Wilton for the summer league team. Davidson figured that you could never have enough players during the summer when the kids had other commitments and weren’t always available. That’s how Lexi Bausha first joined the team, as a summer-league teammate, and eventually as a high school teammate when she transferred to Milford.

“That was a nice early Christmas present,” Davidson said with a chuckle. “She had scored almost 300 points as a freshman at Wilton-Lyndeborough. Having her onboard was a home run. Lulu was still on the shelf. We needed that fifth starter. It was nice to have her there.That’s when it rounded into shape and we became a very competitive team. We had a solid top six. We felt really good about everything.” 

Going into the 2024-25 season, everyone was back (once Maguire was able to play) with the addition of Bausha. There was plenty of potential there. Davidson felt good about what he had. In the division, people knew Milford was going to be pretty good. They weren’t going to sneak up on anybody. Even so, with all they had, the Spartans had won just one playoff game in the three previous playoff trips. “Once we had Lulu back in the lineup, we knew we were going to be pretty good,” he said. “I don’t think anybody thought we would do what we did – except us.”

Milford definitely felt it could win the championship. Davidson recalls it being talked about during the preseason. “We had meetings,” he said. “The only thing they wanted to talk about – ‘We’re going for the state title, coach.’”

Fuller remembers the team making that collective preseason prediction. “Our goal at the beginning of this season, we all wanted to win it.”

“I feel like we had two trophies we wanted to get: the Christmas tournament and the state championship,” Hansen said. “Just knowing we could work towards that and it was in the picture, it pushed us to a whole other level.”

Fuller would go on to make D-II First Team All-State and the All-Defensive Team. Davidson said she was really difficult to guard inside and difficult to keep off the boards. At 5-foot-10, her length on defense was a huge asset. “She’s very, very good around the basket.”

As for Fuller’s classmates, Cote was described by Davidson as the player “that does everything that nobody notices – sets the right screen, positions herself correctly for an offensive or defensive rebound. She clears a path so the other kids can get to the rim and score.” He said, she’s on the back of the press watching everything unfold before her and communicating where the ball was. Nassy was a solid scorer, like Cote, whose strength was on defense with her length. She led the team in deflections and was among the leaders in steals. “She just had a real nose for where the ball was going to be,” the coach said. As for Maguire, she was not the player she once was because of the injury, but she could still fill it up, giving the Spartans a respectable long-range shooter on the other side of the court.

The postseason awards also rolled in for Fuller’s teammates. Hansen was named Second Team All-State and received the Jack Ford Award. Nassy was All-State honorable mention.

Now the Spartans needed to deliver. The regular season was a success with Milford going 15-3 in the division and 17-3 overall after capturing the the Nashua holiday tournament with a pair of wins. All three losses were good learning moments. The first was to preseason favorite Laconia at home, 50-35. Milford changed up its defense from zone to man-to-man and it backfired. Fuller felt they were less effective and that Laconia was able to get by them easier.

In late January, Oyster River came to town and Maguire returned 13 months after her injury. Although the Spartans lost by five, 63-58, Maguire showed she could be a factor, hitting a trio of 3-pointers for nine points in limited minutes. Milford’s rotation was now complete.

Milford’s final loss came on Feb. 7 at Bow without Fuller, who had the flu and could not play. They lost by two points, 50-48, but certainly felt had they had Fuller, they would have won the game. They never lost again.

They won their final six games of the regular season, including quality victories over Coe-Brown, Derryfield and Pembroke. The win over Pembroke in the last game by a score of 47-35 bolstered the Spartans’ growing confidence. “That made everybody look at each other in the locker room after the game and say ‘we’re ready,’” Davidson recalled. “‘We can do this now in the playoffs.’” Their 15-3 record earned them the No. 2 seed in the tournament and a bye to the second round.

Davidson knew the quarterfinal game at home with No. 10 Coe-Bown would be difficult. They’re a team that is hard to shake. “You have an 11- or 13-point lead and then you look up in the fourth quarter and they’re back within four points,” he said. “They’re one of those teams. Fortunately, we had a nice little run in the fourth quarter that put our stamp on the game.” The final score was 55-42 with Hansen leading a well-balanced attack with 14 points. Fuller added 12, while Cote and Maguire had nine apiece.

There was definitely a playoff-type atmosphere in the Milford gym, an unusual occurrence in recent years. “We had the home crowd behind us,” Davidson said. “There were a ton of students. It really energized the team.”

Milford now found itself in recently uncharted territory in the D-II semis at Pinkerton Academy. They were one win away from returning to the championship game, where they had not been since losing in the 1981 Class L final. Their opponent? No. 3 Derryfield.

Davidson knew that the deeper you got into the playoffs, the more defense played a role. “Don’t rely on outscoring them,” he told his team. “You’re going to have to shut them down defensively. It was easily our most remarkable defensive effort of the year.”

Derryfield had no answer for the Milford defense. They generated a little bit of offensive life with some corner 3-pointers, but they could not get to the rim. “They just couldn’t get it inside,” Davidson said. “That’s all due to Avery and Ellie. We just did a great job of not allowing them to get it inside. That made the difference.” The Spartans pulled out a 37-29 win to head for the championship at UNH. Cote led the offense with 11 points, while Bausha added eight and Fuller had seven.

Defense definitely made Milford go. They played a combination halfcourt and fullcourt zones that constantly pressured the opposition. It made it hard to score inside against them, sparked by Fuller and Nassy’s length, which clogged up passing lanes, causing deflections and steals. When that defense was clicking, the Spartans could then kick their effective transition game into gear.

No. 4 Oyster River upset No. 1 Laconia in the other semifinal, 39-36, to set up the final. Milford knew if it won its semifnal vs. Derryfield that it would be playing a team that had beaten them during the season.

The Bobcats were going to be a difficult opponent. They had set a tournament record with 14 3-pointers as a team in a 66-48 quarterfinal win over No. 5 Pembroke. “We knew we couldn’t let them get comfortable at the 3-point line,” Davidson said. “That’s where they do most of their damage. We put a lot of effort into making sure shooters were uncomfortable.”

Milford was able to hold two of OR’s top long-range shooters down, allowing three 3-pointers between them. Their best 3 shooter, Vivian O’Quinn, made all three, but Davidson figured she needed to sink six to help the Bobcats win. As it was, it still went down to the wire.

In fact, Oyster River came out on fire, hitting a trio of treys in the first several minutes to go up 9-3. “We didn’t expect them to come out that strong,” Fuller said. “They were shooting behind the college line. We didn’t expect them to be shooting that far back. I remember Vivian O’Quinn hitting a basket from the logo that was a real wakeup call for us. We knew we really had to start going out on the shooters.”

Milford regrouped and got back in the game, actually taking an 11-10 lead late in the first frame. They trailed 12-11 after the first quarter and 20-17 at the half.

Davidson said at the half “We always look at the third quarter as our quarter. We feel like if we can come out and be the aggressor and win the quarter then that’s going to set us up for winning the game.” That’s just what the Spartans did. Led by Bausha, who scored 19 of her game-high 21 points in the first three quarters, they surged in the third (14-7) to take the lead for good, 31-27.

The strength of Milford was in its impressive balance. You could not look at its lineup and zone on one or two players who were putting up big numbers. They didn’t have those kinds of scorers. They’re primary six players were tightly grouped together averaging at the low end (Maguire, 7.2 points per game) to 11.9 ppg at the high end with Fuller. There were no big numbers staring anyone in the face. “That was the hallmark of this team,” Davidson said. “If you’re the opposing team and you’re talking in your practices about playing Milford. You’ve got to shut down Avery. You’ve got to shut down Shea Hansen from outside. Somebody else is going to get you. If you looked up and down our games this year, different people came up big throughout the season. It wasn’t one or two kids doing it all. … It just turned out that in that championship game it was Lexi’s turn. She was the one getting all the lanes to the basket. She got fouled a ton. (She made a championship record 8-of-9 foul shots). She just killed it, getting inside and scoring on layups.”

Once Milford got its transition game going, it was just a matter of Hansen finding someone at the end of her passes to get the baskets. That was Bausha. “Once Lexi started running, I could just keep hitting her and obviously she wanted the ball and was ready to put it in the hoop.”

In the fourth quarter, Oyster River cut the lead to three on three occasions, the last time coming with 26 seconds to play on a foul shot by Olivia Andersen, 39-36. The next sequence proved to be a decisive one in the Milford victory. Fuller was fouled at 23 seconds, but missed both foul shots. Nassy, at 5-9, rebounded the second miss, drew her own foul and then made both freebies to ice the win. Fuller added a layup to pad the final tally, 43-36.

“I kind of felt a little pressure on me. If I missed them both then we could have lost the game,” Fuller recalled. “When I missed that (second) foul shot, Ellie grabbed the rebound. I was really happy. I was really happy she got fouled on that and sank both of the foul shots. It was redemption to get those points back.” 

Bausha led the Spartans with her season-high 21 points. Fuller added 10 and Hansen tossed in seven. O’Quinn led OR with 13 points.

Milford’s team-first, unselfish approach had been rewarded, ending a 40-plus year championship drought with an overall 20-3 mark. “Nobody for Milford cared who scored the points,” Davidson explained. “They just didn’t care. ‘OK, it’s Lexi’s day today. Fine. I’ll sacrifice my points to keep the ball in Lexi’s hands.’ It was like that all year long. Nobody cared who scored. That’s ultimately from an offensive standpoint what got us over the top. That selfless thing; whoever is open, you score.”

Davidson recalls talking to Maguire after the team banquet, mentioning how sorry he was that she did not score a point in the championship game. Her response epitomized everything about Milford this season. “‘You know, Coach, I knew I wasn’t going to be making any shots in that game early (on),’” he recalled her saying. “‘I’m just going to get it done on defense.’ And if you watch the video on the game, she was really, really good on defense. She made the opposing guards have a hard time. That’s the kind of team we had. ‘I’m not scoring. I’ll do it this way instead.’”

Davidson said having two veteran assistants played a major role in Milford’s success. Cote’s grandfather, Dennis Claire, a coaching legend from nearby Wilton-Lyndeborough, and Joe Bibbo “were really, really important to me,” said Davidson, referring to the nearly 100 years of coaching experience that melded whenever the three were together. “Just talking things through on the way to a game or in the gym in practice,” he said. “‘How are we going to stop this team from doing their thing?’ They were really, really good at helping the team to be a state champion.”

The emotion erupted when the final buzzer sounded. “The first person I hugged was Lulu,” said Fuller, who will attend and play basketball next year at Plymouth State. “I was really proud of her. She went through so much in a year. She had so many ups and downs through her ACL surgery and recovery. I remember both of us had tears in our eyes.”

Davidson was touched by the community support. “I’ve coached a lot in Massachusetts,” he said. “I’ve never seen a community rally around a team the way the Milford community did. When we walked out on that court to warm up at UNH, I was dumbfounded at the number of people that were in the stands on the Milford side.”

It certainly has been quite a journey from Davidson’s first years and the struggles the Spartans had. “Coming from six years ago when parents were dropping off their kids at games and not staying to watch them play and two winless seasons,” he said, “to see the support of an hour and a half away from Milford, it was really special. The way the police and the fire (departments) took us around the oval in Milford after we won. The number of people that were there holding signs and cheering for us, while we were getting the escort, it was really something. It really made it a memorable day.” That was well worth the wait.

Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

Fantastic First: Belmont boys finally exploded to inaugural crown

By Mike Whaley

(This is the fourth in a series on the 2025 NHIAA state championship basketball teams.)

It’s no secret that Belmont High School has a long, painful history of playing second fiddle when it comes to its boys basketball program. Well, that was until this past season. The Raiders finally reached the championship summit in March with a 49-43 win over Kearsarge in the Division III title game at Keene State College. It was the school’s first basketball title in four tries (the three previous runners-up were in Class S dating back to the N.H. basketball Dark Ages: 1970, 1950 and 1949).

Coach Tony Martinez can laugh and joke now, but when he took the job three years ago, he knew a substantial task was ahead of him to make Belmont into something it had never been. “For me, coming from my background in Pittsfield,” he said, “I wanted to make it a basketball town. I knew we’d have to start sustaining some winning seasons and ultimately the goal is to bring a championship home. I was really lucky over those first couple of years to get these guys to really buy into it, and we were able to do that this year.”

Over the years, going back to the 1940s, Belmont has had some good teams and great players: Verne Bryant, Ronald Smock, Cliff Greenwood, Chris Lockwood, Nathan Roach, Michael Messier, Sean Newman and Trevor Hunt were just a few of the names to light it up for the Raiders. But team success has been fleeting. “They never really got over the hump to the point where you heard community people saying ‘this is not a basketball town.’” Martinez wanted to change all that.

Although he left his mark in nearby Pittsfield and at Plymouth State, Tony was certainly familiar with Belmont and its basketball history. His mom attended the high school and his uncle was an athlete there in the 1970s.

Two big factors in the Raiders’ eventual success were exactly that – big. When Keegan Martinez and Anakin Underhill came in as freshmen, they already had size and a clue or two about how to use it. They were also very familiar with each other having been teammates since they were in fifth grade. By the time they were seniors, they were the centerpieces on not only the biggest team in the division, but the squad with the strongest defense and most explosive offense. Underhill will take his 6-foot-6 frame to NCAA Division I Sacred Heart University next year as a baseball pitcher, while the 6-5 Martinez will follow in his father’s footsteps and play basketball at Plymouth State University.

When Tony Martinez replaced Jim Cilley in 2022 as the head coach, he knew he had his son and Underhill as experienced sophomores along with a talented senior class. But he still had a lot to learn.

“As a rookie coach, my first year I came in with the mentality, I’m going to teach them how I played,” said Tony, who was a star player at Pittsfield High School and Plymouth State, scoring more than 1,000 points at both schools. “I’m going to change these guys. We’re going to play this style. It wasn’t that I did it on purpose. I was kind of close-minded to what we had for individual skill.”

Tony got some great advice from close friend and Pittsfield coach Jay Darrah. “When I got the job, he said ‘Tony, one of the biggest things you’ve got to understand as a head coach especially with your playing background, is the kids these days aren’t going to see the game the way you did.’”

It took a while for Darrah’s words to sink in. “That first year I kind of coached it, I wanted the team built in my style, rather than looking at them and taking them at what they could offer and putting it together.”

The team didn’t improve or come together. “We had some injuries and typical things that teams face,” he said. “But we weren’t built to face adversity yet. Even me as the coach. I wasn’t built to face adversity yet.”

A big learning curve for Tony was coming in as a new coach who had inherited seven or eight seniors. “They had come off a couple of up and down seasons and I was trying to get them in that winning mindset,” he said. So here was Tony with his new ideas and you had a group of seniors who were winding up their high school careers and thinking about their futures. “When I first took the job, I never understood how a player could think that,” he said. “Now I can see it and understand it. It’s hard to get them to buy in.”

Tony did not have a problem with the seniors as people. He thought they were fantastic. He is still in touch with all of them. “It was hard to put it all together in the time frame we had. One thing I tell that senior class is I wish I had two more seasons with you. If we had two more seasons together, I think that team would have been the one to put the banner up.”

That first year the Raiders started strong, but didn’t end that way. They went 9-9, earned the No. 9 seed in the D-III tournament, losing in the first round at Conant, 56-44.

“Those guys were older,” said Underhill of the seniors. “Me and Keegan were younger. Those guys were in their own separate group. I was friends with most of the guys. It wasn’t super tight like it is now.”

After that first season, Tony sat down and wrote out what the strengths of the team were. “Obviously it was no secret to anybody, we needed to build the team around Keegan and Anakin,” he said. “They were our two bigs. They were our two best players at the time. I knew we had other good returning juniors, players like Michael Collette and Brady Thurber. We had some other sophomores: Wyatt Carroll and Brady Fysh. I knew we could build something solid around those guys. We had a really good freshmen class coming in with Brody Ennis, Owen Viar and Wyatt Bamford. I knew we had a lot of talent, a lot of pieces. It was just going to be up to us to find a way to put it all together. It was rough at first. I refused to call it a rebuilding year, even though it was.”

The Raiders took their lumps early, starting the 2023-24 season with a 3-4 record. “We started hearing those questions. ‘Is this the right lineup?’” Tony recalled. “All the stuff that happens when things aren’t looking great. I knew that we were kind of pointed in the right direction. But we were going to take our hits.”

The turning point came in game number seven at Saint Thomas Aquinas, a 68-35 waxing. “We had some infighting and stuff like that,” Tony said. “We were down in the locker room at the end of the game, and I lost my mind. I basically told the guys how I felt in a colorful way.”

Immediately after he finished his tirade, Tony thought: “Oh boy, I don’t know if I’m going to be here next week.”

There was a senior on the team named Hutch Haskins. Tony said he wasn’t the most talented player, but he gave it his all. “He was probably one of the greatest high school leaders I’ve ever seen in anything he’s done,” Tony said. “I remember it was kind of somber after that. Everybody was processing what I had just said, including myself. I’m walking out of Saint Thomas and I see Hutch standing on the staircase before the bus. He comes up to me and gets right in front of me. ‘Coach, I’ve got your back. We needed to hear that.’ I was immediately like ‘wow.’ That’s amazing. I knew with him (Hutch) he would relay to the guys or any guys who might be on the fence about it. From that point we really began to understand the work that needed to be done and what we had to do with our attitudes and everything to start turning the corner.”

Belmont went on a huge run from there, winning eight of their final 11 games to end the season at 11-7. In the last game of the regular season, they won a huge game at Gilford, 50-34, with a bunch of playoff implications on the line. It was the first time in a half dozen years or so since Belmont had won at Gilford. “It was crazy,” Tony said. “I remember us celebrating like we had won the state championship. That’s when I knew we were taking a step forward to win a game with all those implications before a packed house with all those young players.”

The Raiders earned the No. 7 seed, which meant a first-round playoff game at home. There they beat No. 10 Fall Mountain, 52-36, to advance to the quarterfinals for the first time since 2017. The season ended at eventual champion Saint Thomas, 67-50, a game that was separated by one point at the half. “I remember the Saint Thomas game, specifically,” Underhill said. “They were really good. They’ve been in those situations. We really weren’t that experienced. I wasn’t ready for that level of basketball.”

Still, for Tony, it was a step forward. “I knew after that with everyone we had coming back, we had an opportunity to make this season special if we could put the work in,” Tony said.

Another factor that would come seriously into play going into the ‘24-25 season was the  return of junior Treshawn Ray, a guard with some serious upside. Looking back, Tony regrets how he handled Ray during his first year. “One of the biggest mistakes I made with Tre as a freshman, I tried to change his style of play and make it more conservative,” Tony said. “As a freshman, I thought I was doing him a favor.” Tony recalls calling Ray over and going “‘No, Tre, you’ve got to do this. No, you’ve got to do it this way.’ I think I kind of handcuffed him and made him not comfortable in the way he played.”

Ray is from a split family. In 2023, he moved in with his dad in Boston and played part of his sophomore season at Reason Prep before leaving the team and eventually coming back to Belmont to live with his mom. His intent was to return to the team to play for his junior year. “When I coached him this year, I don’t know how many times I called him over this season: ‘Go do your thing. Go play your game.’”

Tony remembers Ray reaching out to him at the end of last summer, saying he wanted to come back and get back on track. Ray was homeschooled, so that piece had to be ironed out in conjunction with him playing sports for Belmont. It eventually was.

Tony recalls a conference call with Ray and his mom, Keegan, Tony and assistant coach Scott Ennis. “To sum it up, I told Tre exactly what I expected – the dedication, the commitment to the team, the leadership” Tony said. 

Ray was glad to have everything out on the table and glad to build a bond with his coach and his team. He said that conversation allowed him and Tony to “build a bond off the basketball court so that when we get to the basketball court we already have a good feeling about each other. Before the season started, we’d text, we’d talk, we’d keep it short. We really built the connection.”

Before Ray returned, Tony figured the team was one guard away from being a serious contender. “I had a younger guy, but he wasn’t quite ready,” the coach said. “(Tre) was the final piece to the puzzle. We had size, wings and rebounding. I knew we could play defense. We just needed that one extra piece. When he came in, he fit right into that.”

What really caught Tony’s eye was how the Belmont players reacted to Ray’s return. In choosing captains, Tony had a rollover captain, which was Keegan, and then had the team vote for the other two captains. They voted for Underhill and Ray. “His turnaround in maturity from his freshman year to the time coming in here this year, it was night and day,” said Tony. “The guys saw that and voted for him. I think it was a unanimous vote. It showed me and my staff just how valuable a leader he was because the guys believed in him already.” Belmont now had everything in place, on paper, to make its run. The question remained, would they be able to do it?

The Raiders came out ready. In their second game they hosted and beat Gilford (61-45) in a big rivalry game before a packed house. “It was a playoff atmosphere,” Tony said. “For us to win that, that was the first benchmark. That we could win a big game early, that showed me that we had big-game capability.”

The next challenge was the Mike Lee Holiday Basketball Bash in Farmington. There is the potential to play a lot of basketball. “If you’re a good team, you play five games in five days,” Tony said. “I wanted that for this team. We needed to keep building that experience.” 

The Raiders ended up playing a very competitive schedule. Their first four wins were over Raymond, a top-10 playoff team in D-III; a solid D-II squad in Kennett; eventual D-II runners-up Sanborn and a strong D-IV team in Portsmouth Christian. “We were seeing some different defenses and some different things that were kind of exposing us,” Tony said. “For me as a coach, I was seeing what we had to work on.”

In the championship, Belmont faced a very solid Division II playoff team in Coe-Brown, coached by the legendary Dave Smith, who had coached against Tony when he played for Pittsfield HS in the 1990s. “You’re never going to see a more disciplined or better-coached team than a Coe-Brown team with him at the helm,” Tony said. The Raiders played without Underhill who had an arm injury. With a baseball future looming in college, they did not want to risk further injury, so the big guy had to sit. It gave Belmont the chance to play some younger guys in a big game before a packed house. Coe-Brown won in overtime, 66-64.

Tony was ecstatic. “I went into the locker room and for the first time in my coaching/playing career, I wasn’t upset (after a loss),” he said. “I wasn’t sad. I looked at the team. They were really upset. I was really taken with how the team valued a Christmas tournament championship.”

Tony then asked the team a simple question. “Do you want to feel this feeling again? And they are all like ‘No. Not at all.’ … I said I would rather see you feel this way now – all of us feel this now – than on March 1. They all bought into that. That was one of the first steps in us taking that giant step forward.”

The Raiders came back from the holiday break, adding four more wins to their perfect D-III mark to improve to 7-0. Then they lost at Campbell by nine points, 69-60, 10 days after beating the Cougars by 19. “It was our worst game of the season,” Tony said. “We had like 24 turnovers.” Campbell hit Belmont with a zone and it totally stumped them. It was another good lesson learned. “OK, now we know what everyone is going to do against us,” the coach said. “I know as a coach that every coach in Division III was going to be on (coach) Justin (DeBenedetto’s) email that night. ‘Can I have your film?’ I knew we were not going to see man-to-man the rest of the season.” It’s worth noting that Belmont allowed 60 or more points only twice all season – both losses.

Underhill recalls a conversation he had with his dad before the season even began. His dad essentially said it was very hard to go undefeated and if you did there was a big target on your backs. “‘You guys need to lose one game and that will take some pressure off you guys,’” Underhill recalls his dad’s words. “‘And that will help you win the championship.’”

Underhill felt there was merit to those words, although he added, “I didn’t plan for us to lose. I wasn’t afraid of losing because I knew guys had to learn and I had to learn too, and we could do better from that.”

Belmont had little time to lick their wounds as Saint Thomas was due in town two days later. Tony admitted he was nervous. “It’s hard for high school kids to have an emotional loss and have two practices and then go right into another big emotional game against the defending state champs with arguably the best player in the division (Cole McClure).”

Heading into the fourth quarter, the Raiders found themselves down nine points. They came back and won by two, 50-48. “This showed me how much desire these guys had and how much they wanted to win a championship,” Tony said. “They were willing to do what it took to win.”

Belmont finally had complete buy-in from everyone. “Up until that point, I had a few guys that had more significant roles the season before and were playing less,” the coach said. “They weren’t causing a problem, but they were doing ‘Hey coach, what am I doing wrong?’ We got a lot of that. We had to do a lot of open explanations of what we were doing to players. After that Saint Thomas game, I rarely had to talk to players about their roles. They started accepting everything.”

Underhill remembers during the season people coming up to him and mentioning how great the team was doing and not to mess it up. “In my mind, I would say ‘four quarters at a time and we’ll see what happens,’” he said. “We can’t say anything now. We’ll just play our hardest and see what happens.”

The Raiders wrapped up the season with a 17-1 record to earn what was believed to be the first No. 1 seed in program history. Going back to the summer, Belmont had adopted the term “stacking” from assistant coach Scott Ennis. “We wanted to stack our positives,” Tony said. “Learn from our mistakes, stack our positives. Stacking the positives, you keep building towards your goal.”

What Tony took from stacking was to take each game and break it down into pieces. “I used baseball a lot as an analogy because I had a lot of baseball guys on the team,” he said. “One batter. One strike. One inning. We kind of looked at games from the tail end of the season in preparation for the playoffs. OK, each game is four eight-minute games. We’re going to look at each quarter as its own eight-minute game. We’re going to win each eight-minute game. You win each eight-minute game, you win that night. We started getting the guys really mentally prepared that way. Don’t worry about what’s two quarters ahead or what’s behind you. It’s kind of a variation of one (minute, quarter, game) at a time.”

If the games were close, they would break those quarters down to minutes. They used that time element in practice. “When we started practicing, we really went live and put time on the clock and we practiced what we needed to do in those situations. We knew that if we needed to do something in a game, being down or being up, we knew what to do and to understand the game and time and score. We really focused on that as we prepared for Fall Mountain in the playoff run.”

The Raiders earned a first-round bye, which meant they would host a quarterfinal game against the Fall-Mountain/Raymond winner, which was Fall Mountain. Tony would have preferred to play a first-round game instead of having the week off. “You hear all the time that the week off is difficult,” Tony said. “No matter how good your team is, how talented they are and how prepared (they are). Not having that live action in the middle of that is tough.”

Underhill agreed. “That bye week wasn’t settling well with any of us,” he said. “We really just wanted to play. I remember that week. It was torture.”

Sure enough, Belmont came out flat. It took a little while to shake the cobwebs off, but they eventually did win going away, 72-50. Four players reached double figures, led by Ray and Keegan with 18 and 17 points, respectively, while Thurber (11) and Underhill (10) also chipped in.

That meant the Raiders were making a rare trip to the semifinals against the defending state champs from Saint Thomas at Bow High School. “The guys were generally excited about it,” Tony said. “They were not nervous. We’re going to be OK. We’re going to be fine.”

Until they weren’t. At halftime, Belmont found itself down by nine points. It was tied at 23-all, but the Saints went on a 10-1 surge to end the frame up 33-24 – the same margin they had led by during the regular season after three quarters. Tony recalls the team was gathered in a classroom and Tre, Annakin and Keegan were all there. “They were so positive. ‘We got this. We’re going to be fine.’ We’ve got 16 more minutes. Two eight-minute games.,” the coach said.

Belmont knew they weren’t going to shut down McClure, the two-time D-III Player of the Year. Instead, they focused on limiting STA’s next two top scorers in Anthony Settineri and Finley De Tolla. The two had combined for 33 points in a 74-66 win over Campbell in the quarterfinals while McClure tossed in 32.

“Look, shut them down,” Tony told his team. “Don’t let them get anything easy.” It paid off as the defense held the duo to 15 points between them. McClure had 34, but he had to work for them. One adjustment Belmont made at the half was to double McClure on the inbounds pass after a made basket. The Raiders learned that if McClure was allowed to walk the ball up the floor unchallenged, eight out of 10 times something good happened for Saint Thomas. “So the little trick was to make McClure work for it to get it on the inbounds pass. That was it.”

Tony said: “Just a little change. We were the best defensive team in Division III along with the best offensive team. During the season we gave up under 100 second-chance points with our rebounding capabilities. To me that’s one of my favorite stats. We did not let any other teams get any second-chance looks. For the most part it was one and done.”

Belmont outscored the Saints 21-8 in the third quarter to take the lead for good going into the fourth, 45-41. They had all the momentum after Ray hit a long 3-pointer at the buzzer to end the third. The final score was 69-53. Keegan and Ray led the attack with 23 and 22 points, respectively, and Underhill added 12.

The Raiders were on the threshold of history. They were playing in their first championship game in 55 years looking for the program’s first title. “Now we turned our focus,” Tony said. “Let’s win this thing. Let’s put the cap on it that we want to put on it.”

Their opponent in the final at Keene State was deceptive No. 3 seed Kearsarge, coached by one of the division’s grand masters – Nate Camp. “He puts much effort into watching film and studying games,” Tony said. “His coaching staff is excellent. They put a lot of effort into preparing their team.”

The one thing about Kearsarge is they were not big, which could make you overlook them. “I was underwhelmed with Kearsarge’s size,” Underhill said. “It showed that these guys were beating up on some teams and they’re not really that big. We’re getting into the game and these guys are crafty. They were better than I thought they would be. ‘Wow, this is going to be a dogfight.’”

Keegan felt Kearsarge was very physical. “I remember cutting to the hoop and there would be two guys bumping me off my cuts every time,” he said. “They were just a scrappy team. Theyworked very hard. We just had to match their physicality with getting rebounds and boxing out.”

Tony added this about the Cougars: “They are tough. They don’t give up. They don’t quit. They are crafty in what they do. They hit shots. How did they hit that? They deserved to be there. I can see why.”

Belmont started strong and took a comfortable lead into the locker room at the half, 30-19. “I was thinking we can really blow the lid off this thing,” Tony said. 

But that was not the case. Ray got the lead to 13 (32-19) at the outset of the third. However, Keaarsarge’s full court press gave Belmont some trouble, more so than it should have. The Cougars worked their way back into the game, also getting help from the Raiders’ inability to hit foul shots (2-for-14 in the second half). Eventually they cut the lead to 44-41 with 2:35 to play. Key putbacks by Underhill and Keegan helped Belmont to hold off the Cougars to secure the program’s first state title, 49-43. Keegan ended with 15 points and 17 boards, while Ray had 15 points and five assists. Underhill added 12 points and 10 rebounds. The Raiders enjoyed a 35-22 advantage on the glass. According to Tony that was the difference in the game. They limited Kearsarge to one second-chance bucket. Eli Whipple paced the Cougars with 15 points.

“I had a coach tell me when I was little, two things win basketball games: Rebounding and free throws. Thank god we could rebound,” Tony said.

It was no surprise that Belmont’s Big Three led the team during its playoff run: Keegan and Ray averaged 18.3 points per game during the playoffs, while Underhill tossed in 11.3 ppg. It was a  similar story during the regular season. Keegan was tops at 18.2 ppg, followed by Underhill (14.8) and Ray (11.7). All told, counting the regular season, the holiday and state tournaments, the Raiders went 24-2. Keegan and Underhill were named to the D-III All-State First Team, Ray made the second team, and 6-3 sophomore Brody Ennis was picked to the All-Defensive Team. Tony was named D-III Coach of the Year.

It was the ultimate coaching joy, winning a program’s first-ever title and doing so with your son. “I was lucky to be on the bench with Jay Darrah when he won it with Pittsfield in 2018 (the Panthers’ first title),” Tony said. “I got to see him win one with his son (Cam). And then I win with Keegan. It’s something that I’ll have forever.”

The father/son dynamic is not something that always works when it comes to coach/player, but like the Darrahs, Tony and Keegan made it work. It helped that Tony had coached his son before on AAU teams. Tony also felt it was integral that Keegan had played as a freshman so that when Tony took over during his sophomore year, he was already established as one of the team’s better players. “With Keegan I always knew that he was going to do what he needed to do to be the player that he needed to be,” Tony said. “I never questioned that. Was I sometimes harder on him than other players? Yeah. I don’t care what coach talks to you and tells you differently. You’re always going to be a little harder on your kid. That’s just the way it is. There’s no sugar coating it. Even at times that I didn’t want to be, I’d say something. It’s the way it is. Keegan also knew that.”

There were times early on in his coaching tenure that Tony would tell Keegan beforehand that he was going to be getting on him at practice. “I need guys to see that you’re not going to be handed anything,” Tony said. “I never handed him anything. Keegan, honestly, earned everything he got.”

By the time he was a senior, Keegan had developed his game to the point where he was more physical, which allowed him to do more things. “”I was getting in the post to make moves on guys,” he said. “I was able to body people to get those second-chance points. I feel my 3-point and mid-range shot got a lot better.” As a captain, he became more engaged as a respected leader of the team.

Because the dynamic of the team changed with the return of Ray and the emergence of sophomore Brody Ennis, some of the older players saw their playing time diminish. Tony tipped his hat to Carroll, Colette and Fysh. “I was so proud of them as players and young men for accepting their roles,” Tony said. “Because not many guys can take a step backwards and be OK with it. All those guys took steps back minutes-wise because their roles changed. … For them to be positive and to accept the things that they accepted and play the way they played, we don’t win a championship without those three players.” The proof is, indeed, in the pudding.

Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

Saint Dominance: STA established a supreme hold on Division III

By Mike Whaley

(This is the third in a series on the eight 2025 NHIAA state championship basketball teams.)

We’ll get to the Saint Thomas Aquinas High School girls basketball team’s commanding run to the Division III state championship this past March. First, the back story.

The major motivation for the Saints was tied to the end of last season. Saint Thomas lost its first game of the 2023-24 campaign before rattling off 17 consecutive wins to earn the top seed in the D-III tournament. That earned them a bye to the quarterfinal round at home. There the Saints made short work of No. 8 White Mountains, 56-27. In the semis, semifinals, their season came to a sudden end to No. 4 Kearsarge, 52-44.

“It was a big disappointment,” said 6-foot-3 senior center Emilie von der Linden. “We really wanted to win that game. Since we lost that game last year, it really did fire us up this year.”

“I think we thought no one could beat us,” said six-foot senior guard Genna Bolduc. “We were a little too cocky. I think we weren’t as well prepared. We definitely let things get in our heads.”

The Saints also had a subpar shooting night, according to coach Kevin Giannino. “For some reason the ball would not go through the basket,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many missed shots and layups and opportunities we had. It was really frustrating to see what happened. To watch a team that had scored in a number of games, 58, 63, 65 points, we just could not make a basket.”

That loss motivated Saint Thomas to regroup and get ready for the following season. As Gianinno recalled, the players said to him “‘Coach, let’s practice tomorrow and get back out there. We can’t wait to get back at it.’ That really fueled them.”

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

Bolduc said that loss changed the team’s mindset. “We went into every game this year thinking we could lose,” she said. “We could lose, so let’s play as hard as we can, no matter who the team is – even the lower-ranked teams. We went out and played our hardest, got an early lead and just worked really hard.”

One could not argue with the end result. When the Saints walked off the court after the Division III championship game at Keene State College on March 1, they had won, strictly by the numbers, the most one-sided game in D-III championship history, 72-35. They set or tied three championship-game records: margin of victory (37 points), most team 3s (10) and most 3s by a player (Bolduc, 6), tied with Fall Mountain’s Sophie Bardis (2020). That completed their season at a perfect 22-0, counting three holiday tournament victories. It was STA’s first state title since winning the old Class M crown in 1981.

Coming into the 2024-25 season, the Saints were laser-focused on their goal to avoid a repeat of the previous season. It was also the final year for a trio of seniors who had been varsity players since they were freshmen – Bolduc, von der Linden and Amelia Anderson, a 5-11 forward. Add in lightning-quick junior guard Emma Toriello and 5-foot senior point guard Lila Anthony, a transfer from Newburyport High School in Massachusetts, and there was definitely a sense of determined urgency in the air.

While the Saints knew they could score points, Giannino said there was also a realization that defense had to become more of a priority. “The call was out to play defense,” he said. “The girls put a big poster together – ‘Tenacious D’. We signed that after every game. We just talked about our defense. That was what we thought would carry us all the way through.”

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

During the regular season there were two significant stretches that helped define who the Saints were. The first came at the Oyster River holiday tournament where they won three games in convincing fashion over bigger schools. In the first two rounds, STA beat Division I Spaulding, 73-41, and Keene, 42-33. In the championship, they vanquished host Oyster River, 61-48. OR went on to advance to the D-II championship. The Keene win was the only time this season that a team came within single digits of the Saints. The two other closest games were 10-point wins over Prospect Mountain and Monadnock (in the D-III semis). Everything else was by 21 or more points with 14 wins by 30 or more. Saint Thomas scored 50-plus points in 21 of their 22 games, and allowed the opposition to score 40 or more in just six games. In 22 games, the Saints averaged nearly 63 points per game, while allowing 29 points per contest.

Von der Linden recalls being in the locker room after winning the Oyster River tournament. “Our coach said ‘we were able to get this one, let’s go get another one (D-III title) later in the season.’ It was a boost to our confidence.”

The second significant span came in late January after they had played a stretch of games against some of the weaker teams in D-III – all blowout wins. Then came a five-game run against quality tournament teams. The first was Hopkinton at home, a team that had lost one game to that point. “I didn’t have to say one word to get the team ready for the Hopkinton game,” coach Giannino said. “They came out of the locker room and they were just flying. That was their opportunity to just make a statement. There was a big crowd at home. New Hampshire Sports Page was there. We’re a good team, but that night was special.” The Saints rolled over Hopkinton, 69-28, led by Toriello’s 20 points and 14 and 12, respectively, from von der Linden and Bolduc.

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

STA followed that up with quality wins over Prospect, 58-30; Berlin, 61-29, and Gilford, 60-27, in which they scored the first 21 points of the game. “I was just beside myself,” said Giannino. “I just couldn’t believe how well we had played; just answering any challenge that was put before us.”

The biggest test, however, was just around the corner. After winning those four games, the Saints had a rare six-day layoff leading into a Monday night game at Prospect, a trap game if ever there was one. “I thought that would be a good test for us,” Giannino said. “Sure enough, we went up to Prospect. They were ready for us.”

Despite being a little rusty, the Saints jumped out to a 17-point lead early, but the Timberwolves forged back into the game. Prospect got as close as six points in the fourth quarter before STA was able to get some breathing room and win, 50-40. “It was the first time we had seen any type of a challenge,” the coach said. “We got into foul trouble. It was the first time we had to use our bench. We probably didn’t react as well as we probably could have.”

Von der Linden recalled it as “just a rusty Monday night game.” Bolduc remembered there was some sickness going through the team, so they weren’t at their sharpest. “Going into that gym is always hard,” she said. “Their student section is really chirpy. It’s good for them. We had some mistakes on defense and then we couldn’t get our shots to fall.”

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

All season long, the Saints rode their outstanding starting five of Bolduc, Von Der Linden, Anthony, Anderson and Toriello. In fact, the trio of Bolduc, von der Linden and Toriello gave Saint Thomas one of the best scoring trios in the state regardless of division. Clearly, the Saints could have challenged for the D-II title and even been a top-tier playoff team in D-I. During that five-game span that threesome scored in double figures in every game. Versus Prospect, Bolduc and Toriello led the way with 15 points apiece, while Von Der Linden added 13. The season scoring balance was quite striking. Bolduc (8.7 rebounds, 2.6 steals and 2.6 assists per game) and Toriello led the way, each averaging 15 points per game, while von der Linden put up a double-double – 14 ppg and 12.3 rpg. Von der Linden said some reporters referred to the scoring trio as a “three-headed monster.” She said the team had their own term for it: “‘Pick your poison.’ If I’m getting shut down, Genna and Emma will go light it up from the 3-point line and vice versa. You really couldn’t pick the right option. We have trust in one another that if one of us is hot we will keep feeding them the ball. I think it goes back to playing team ball this year.”

Anderson was a tremendous complementary player, noted Giannino. “Amelia was our glue guy,”
he said. “She’s an extremely smart player. She gave up some offense to do the things we needed her to do. She was a good rebounder, great defender. She’d help break the press. She’d hit the open person with one more pass; just a solid, all-around player.” Case and point was the championship game where Anderson’s contribution impacted the game in a variety of ways. She scored six points with 11 rebounds, three blocks, three assists and three steals. In addition, she limited Fall Mountain’s All-State forward Clara Stewart to one field goal and 10 points. “What a way to cap off an excellent career with her best game on the biggest stage,” Giannino said.

Toriello was “tough as nails,” according to Giannino. “She spends half her time on the floor. She’s all out all the time. I can’t believe how fast she is. She’s the fastest guard in our league. She would just blow by people. She was a devil in transition. She’d kill you one way or another.” In addition to her impressive scoring numbers, Toriello had 3.9 steals and 3.7 assists per game.

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

Anthony (4.8 ppg, 3.5 apg, 2.5 spg) transferred to STA as a junior. Giannino said she came with excellent ball skills and was a top-notch on-ball defender. “She is a very knowledgeable player,” he said. “Her dad was a big-time coach in Connecticut. You can tell she was coached by her dad. She developed a good chemistry with Toriello. They had backdoor and highlight passes. We put her on the other team’s best player, often a point guard. She really stepped up.”

The unsung bench could have started on most other teams. It included junior forward Charlotte De Tolla, who was on championship teams in three different sports (basketball, soccer, lacrosse); and sophomore guards Mallory Baker and Julianne Stowell.

Bolduc and Von Der Linden came in as freshmen with Anderson, but did not play a lot on the varsity. Von Der Linden was still pretty raw as a post player and needed to get more aggressive. Bolduc was a player in transition. She had some size that had kept her role around the basket. That changed when she was moved away from the basket so as not to clog up the paint with Von Der Linden and, more to the point, to take advantage of her exceptional 3-point shooting skill. Both girls started taking basketball seriously. They joined AAU teams and began working harder on their games. By the time they were juniors, they were legitimate players in Division III. The Saints went from being just a mid-pack playoff team to a bonafide contender.

Saint Thomas ended the regular season with convincing wins over two of the division’s lesser teams to improve to 16-0 and earn the top seed for the tournament. That was another challenge for them, playing nine games against six teams at the bottom of the standings with a combined record of 20-80. It would have been easy to lose focus.

“I think we definitely had the discipline,” said Bolduc. “We were making sure that no matter what the score, we were still playing our best basketball. We played as if it was a close game, no matter what.”

The top seed meant a first-round bye to the quarterfinals, which in this case meant another game against a strong Hopkinton squad, led by all-state guard Shaylee Murdough. Leading up to that game, Saint Thomas had spent the week recovering from sickness. “If we had played in the first round, I don’t know if we could have fielded a team,” Giannino said. “It would have been Toriello and four JVs at that point.”

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

Although the Saints ended up beating Hopkinton, 70-44, it was a game in the fourth quarter. STA led 22-18 in the second quarter, but ended the frame on a 22-0 run to widen the gap to 44-18 at the break. The lead stayed pretty much the same after three, 50-25. Even so, Giannino had a feeling Hopkinton wasn’t done. “We were waiting for them to make a run,” he said.

Sure enough, the Hawks started the fourth quarter with a 10-0 spurt to close the gap to 50-35. “At that point, I looked at my girls. We were just barely hanging on,” Giannino said. “We were drained. We were sick all week.” Despite a big quarter by Murdough (she scored 16 of her game-high 30 in the fourth), the Saints regrouped and ended the quarter on a 20-9 run to win going away. Toriello led the offense with 18 points, Bolduc added 13 and Von Der Linden hit for 12. Again, despite adversity, STA was able to find another gear to win and move on.

The big moment was now at hand – the semifinals. Here was the round that had been their 2024 Waterloo. Their opponent at Sanborn Regional High School was a potentially difficult fifth seed in Monadnock, who had just blown past No. 4 Gilford in the quarters, 65-27. “This was the game we’ve been pointing to,” Giannino said. “This is the game we lost last year. At the beginning of the year, we sort of pinpointed Monadnock. We thought they were going to be a really good test for us. Sure enough they were.”

Monadnock’s defense made the Saints work. They did a good job of denying the post pass into Von Der Linden. “They put tremendous ball pressure on Lila Anthony – the point guard – and denied Bolduc and Toriello on the wings,” the coach said. “It was just outstanding defensive play.”

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

It was a tight game into the second quarter. With the Huskies up 27-26, STA went on a quarter-ending 14-0 run to get some breathing room at the break, 40-27. Monadnock cut the margin to 46-37 after three quarters, and then scored the first five points of the fourth quarter to slice the margin to 46-42. They could draw no closer. Saint Thomas was still up 54-48 with several minutes to play, but was able to hold off the Huskies to win, 63-53. Toriello and Von Der Linden paced the attack with 20 and 18 points, respectively. Bolduc was held to eight, but it was not enough to pull off the upset. Bailee Soucia led Monadnock with 18 points, while Shaylee Branon chipped in with 15.

“My mentality going into that game was I’m definitely not losing again here,” said Bolduc. “Losing in the semifinals and the championship (which Bolduc has experienced in both basketball and soccer) is one of the worst feelings because you were so close. You were just a little bit short. I definitely did not want to lose again when I’m this close to achieving something I’ve wanted.” Bolduc was also an all-state goalie for the Saint Thomas girls soccer team that won two D-III state championships in 2023 and 2024.

After the season, Giannino coached a senior all-star team. He recalls Keene HS boys coach Ray Boulay coming up to him and congratulating him on a fine season. Giannino did the same as Keene had come within a point of winning the D-I title.
“I thought we had you,” Boulay said, catching the STA coach off guard.
“What are you saying?” Giannino responded.
Boulay laughed. “Well, I’m best friends with (Monadnock coach Eric) Fazio. We were game-planning for you all week.”
“If I knew that was the case,” Giannino said, “I wouldn’t have been rooting for you guys.”

In any case, the Saints were off to the finals for the first time in 18 years (34-23 loss to Lebanon in 2007 Class I final). Their opponent? No. 2 Fall Mountain, who easily dispatched tournament dark horse, No. 14 Stevens, 61-24. Giannino was impressed with the Wildcats. “They can put five girls on the floor who can hit from 3-point land,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a big test.”

[📸 Todd Grzywacz]

At the same time, Giannino knew the Saints had yet to play their best game. “The entire year, I saw the potential in this team,” he said. “I just thought we could play a little bit better. I told the girls ‘you played a great game tonight. But do you think we could play a little bit better?’ They all said ‘absolutely, we can play better than this.’ I challenged them to play better. I was really pushing them to play their best game.”

When the championship game rolled around at Keene State, Giannino’s high expectations were finally met. “I probably couldn’t say ‘could we play better?’” he said. “Because that was the best game we played all year. I know people think maybe it was a lopsided game and they weren’t a quality opponent. They were a very, very good team. We just played out of our minds.”

Von Der Linden admitted to being nervous. Part of that, of course, was playing in the state championship. She also had additional emotions churning around inside since this was the same court where her dad, Eric Von Der Linden, had played his college ball back in the 1990s. “It’s a long bus ride to Keene,” she said. “We were all singing and dancing to our music up until we got into the locker room. We all had a shared understanding. This is our last game. Let’s make it our best. That’s what really made it click.”

Saint Thomas jumped out to a 17-7 lead after the first quarter and headed into the locker room at the half up 30-18. With Fall Mountain still within striking distance, Bolduc sparked a huge third-quarter outburst that put the game away. She made three of her six record-tying 3-pointers as STA widened its lead to 47-21, eventually winning, 72-35. Bolduc led all scorers with 24 points (18 in the second half), while Toriello had 15 and Von Der Linden tossed in 12 with 19 rebounds. Here are more examples of STA’s dominance: Advantage in rebounding (40-18), points in paint (30-6) and second-chance points (28-2). The numbers told the story.

Fired up after a discouraging loss in the 2024 semifinals, the Saints regrouped, refocused and made a point of coming back with a mission to have a definitively positive season. The championship win was the culmination of that mission. When the postseason awards were handed out, STA was at the top of the list. Bolduc was named the D-III Player of the Year and joined Von Der Linden on the All-State First Team. Toriello was named to the Second Team. Von Der Linden was also selected to the All-Defensive Team. In addition, Bolduc received the D-III Jack Ford Award, which honors a player for equal parts basketball performance, academics and citizenship/community service.

“Coming in as a freshman, I knew we would improve,” said Bolduc, who will attend and play basketball next year at Plymouth State University. Von Der Linden will follow the same path at Bridgewater State in Massachusetts. “I didn’t know it would result in a championship. Especially the past few years, our division has been so good. There have always been teams that have been exceptional. I never thought we’d be the exceptional team. I always thought we’d be good, that we’d get better. Winning it was a dream. You come so close with the girls on the team. This year was one of the closest teams I’ve ever been on. It was just nice to do it with a group of girls I care so much about and I love so much.” Perfect, you might say.

Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

 

Unexpectedly Perfect: Woodsville’s chemistry led to fourth D-IV title in five years

By Mike Whaley

(This is the second in a series on the eight 2025 NHIAA state championship basketball teams.)

To say Jamie Walker is low key might be an understatement. But you could hear his normally even-toned voice rise a few octaves when he was asked about his team’s undefeated Division IV state championship basketball season – Woodsville’s fourth title in five years. “I did think we would be competitive,” he said. “I would have told you you were crazy if you told me we were going to go undefeated and win a state championship. That would have never entered my mind.”

Indeed, the Engineers ran the table with a 22-0 record, which included a nail biting 51-48 overtime win against North Country rival Littleton in the championship at Colby-Sawyer College.

Woodsville’s previous season ended with a semifinal loss to Littleton. From that team, four of the first six players graduated, leaving coach Walker with some positions to fill. The good news? The Engineers returned two of the best players in the division in his son, junior point guard Ryan Walker, and 6-foot-3 senior forward Landon Kingsbury. The key, however, was surrounding that duo with a complementary supporting cast. Coach Walker was able to do that.

After the Engineers lost in the 2024 semis, Walker knew he had his son and Kingsbury returning. “We didn’t know what we had around them,” he said. He figured senior Jacob Putnam and junior Cowan Kimball would be solid. Although both had played sparingly in big games, they did get quality minutes in the semis when one starter was too sick to play and another, Connor Houston, incurred an ankle injury that prevented him from playing in the second half.

Ryan Walker. [📸 KJ Cardinal]

The possible fifth starter was 6-2 senior Devin Sabina, who had spent three years as a JV point guard. “I had a conversation with his mother back in May (of 2024) and I said ‘I think Devin can help us next year, but he’s got to start playing now and continue on throughout the year.’” Sabina made the commitment. He played AAU ball with Kingsbury and Ryan Walker, and did all the summer stuff. He also had to embrace a new position inside as a forward since there was no way he was supplanting Ryan Walker at point guard.

The first guy off the bench turned out to be senior Owen McClintock, who did not play as a junior. He was a kid who could shoot the basketball. When coach Walker got wind that McClintock was thinking about playing, he asked his son to nudge McClintock into making the summer commitment, which he did. He became a valuable asset as the first player off the bench. “As the season progressed, I told him ‘your job is to come down and get your feet set, find a place you like, and somebody will find you and you’ll get the 3s,’” coach Walker said. “He hit 3s all year long for us.”

Eventually that group of six became the rotation and it turned out to be a very good one, certainly better than anyone could have predicted. Kingsbury noted that Woodsville used the summer to try to build chemistry with its new lineup. “Chemistry was the big thing,” he said. 

It took the rest of Division IV some time to catch up with what Woodsville had going on. Early on, Kingsbury and Ryan Walker received a lot of attention. “They pretty much said those two aren’t going to score,” coach Walker recalled. “And then everybody else started scoring. They thought ‘well there is a little bit more there than Ryan and Landon.’”

The big “coming out game” was the first Littleton contest on Dec. 19 at home – a 58-38 win. Walker and Kingsbury were held to six points each, but Sabina and Kimball stepped up big time with 21 and 15 points, respectively. “They were left wide open and made shots,” coach Walker said. That revelation made the Engineers even stronger as teams now had to respect the shooting ability of their secondary players.

Landon Kingsbury. [📸 KJ Cardinal]

Still it took a while for the offense to get into sync with the new players learning how to play with the veterans and vice versa. While the offense was a work in progress, Woodsville put its nose to the grindstone and focused on defense. “We figured if we play defense, we’ll get the turnovers and that leads to baskets and that’s always good,” coach Walker said. 

In coach Walker’s mind there was no clear favorite in the north. He wasn’t as sure about the south, but in the north “I didn’t think there was anyone heads and shoulders better than us,” he said. “I thought it was a pretty competitive year for the top five, six, seven teams.”

By the second half of the season Woodsville was still undefeated. The schedule tightened up as the Engineers started seeing some teams for a second time. In their final nine games, five games were decided by seven points or fewer and two others were competitive wins of 11 and 13 points. It didn’t come easy. “We always found a way to win,” said Ryan Walker. “We always had someone step up and push us over the other team and win the game.”

The beauty of it was that Woodsville was getting contributions from everybody. They weren’t just relying on Kingsbury and Ryan Walker. Putnam hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to win at Profile, 42-39. McClintock’s late shot beat Littleton at their place by three, 61-58. “I’ve told a ton of people this,” said coach Walker. “They were just a good team that enjoyed playing together and knew each other. They knew what their strengths were. They knew what they didn’t do well. They all played a role in us winning.” 

Ryan Walker was the glue that held it all together. It was not a surprise that he was the Division IV Player of the Year and the top point guard in the division. “The reason we don’t look rattled in close games is because he’s pretty calm out there with the ball in his hands,” said the coach. “That takes a lot of pressure off everybody else on the team. … He doesn’t turn it over. Turnovers are key in close games, big games. He gets us into our offense. That’s very, very important.” Bottom line in Division IV, nobody had what Woodsville had at the point.

“I kind of let the game come to me,” said Ryan Walker. “Everyone on the team could score, so I knew that kind of takes a little pressure off me. I just try to get everyone involved.”

Jacob Putnam. [📸 KJ Cardinal]

Kingsbury’s evolution as a player was also important. A four-year varsity member who played on championship squads as a freshman and sophomore, he was primarily a scorer before this year. “This year he started doing the little things,” said coach Walker. “Defensively he was taking charges and getting steals. He was rebounding offensively and defensively. He started to round out his game. He wasn’t just a scorer anymore.” Kingsbury still scored, of course, averaging a shade under 20 points per game to lead the team, hitting the 1,000-point plateau, and earning D-IV First Team All-State honors. Next year he plans to attend and play basketball at Central Maine Community College.

Kingsbury knew that as the team’s biggest guy on the floor, he had to take more of a big man role. “I realized I had to start playing a little bit better defense,” he said. I have to try to get more rebounds and try to help my team out with more than just scoring.”

Ryan Walker could also score, providing 16.9 ppg, while Sabina (8.2), Kimball (7.8), Putnam (6.1) and McClintock (3.4) chipped in. Kimball and Putnam (a D-IV All-Defensive pick) were the stoppers on defense.

When the regular-season dust settled, Woodsville looked around and found itself at the top of the D-IV heap with an 18-0 record. 

“If you came to any of our practices, you never heard the word undefeated,” said coach Walker. “I’m not sure we ever discussed what our record was. We just focused on the next game. The kids might have been talking about it. I never heard it in practice. Everybody in the back of their mind knows they have a target on their back. Everyone wants to be the one that beats you.”

The Engineers opened at home in the first round vs. No. 16 Lin-Wood, who they had beaten by 38 points during the regular season. It was close to start, but Woodsville was able to get it into double figures by the second quarter and keep it there in a 61-46 win. Kingsbury led the way with 21 points, while Walker added 12, and Sabina and Putnam split 19.

Devin Sabina. [📸 KJ Cardinal]

A tough game with No. 8 Farmington never unfolded because their top player, Demery Hadges, got injured in their first-round game and was not close to full strength in the quarters. The Engineers played their best first half of the season, leading 18-3 after the first quarter and 36-9 at the half en route to the 57-40 win. Kingsbury and Sabina each had 14 points, while Walker added 11.

The semis was against No. 5 Gorham, who Woodsville had beaten twice during the season. This proved to be the perfect time for the Engineers to play their finest defensive game of the season to hold in check the Huskies high-scoring duo of Isaac Langlois and Jack Saladino to 14 points between them in a convincing 43-27 victory. Putnam slowed down Saladino and Kimball limited Langlois, the division’s top scorer. “I tried to force him left and keep him out of the paint,” Putnam said of his Saladino assignment. “I was up on him all night.”

“We knew what we had to do,” said Kimball, who held Langlois to a season-low nine points. “Keep the ball out of Isaac’s hands.” Those words were stressed by coach Walker. “Stay on him. Don’t help out. Wherever he goes, you go.”

Walker led the offense with 17 points. Kingsbury and Kimball added 11 and 10, respectively.

That set up an all-North Country championship at Colby-Sawyer College with No. 3 Littleton. The Crusaders had vanquished the division’s other undefeated team in the semis, Concord Christian, by a 64-51 score. This was the third meeting between the two rivals, both won by the Engineers (58-38, 61-58). “Littleton had just knocked off Concord Christian,” recalled coach Walker. “I’m sure they were saying ‘we just knocked off one undefeated team, let’s beat the other one.’”

The Gorham win came with some potentially crippling news. Late in the game, Ryan Walker severely rolled his ankle. “I tried to jump a passing lane and I landed on someone’s foot,” he said. “I rolled my ankle. It happened with a minute to play in the game. I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

As Walker recalled, the ankle was pretty swollen. There was no way, as far as he was concerned, that he wasn’t going to play. “I just wanted to rest it and get it to be as good as it could be,” he said.

Jamie Walker. [📸 KJ Cardinal]

The silver lining, if there was one, was that the semifinal game was played on a Monday, so he had four days to recover. “I iced it a lot,” Walker said. “I really didn’t do much on it. As the days went by, I was walking fine. On Friday, I didn’t practice or anything. I just shot around a bit and it felt a little bit better. I just wasn’t sure what it was going to feel like come game time.”

On the ride home from the Friday practice, coach Walker could see an improvement in his son. “He was positive in his talk. ‘He seemed a little upbeat,’ I said to myself. ‘OK, this is a little different than the guy limping around for three days.’ I kind of thought he was OK.”

That being said, even though the tape job made the ankle feel good, Walker hadn’t done anything on it since Monday. “He hadn’t been running up and down the floor,” his dad said. “He hadn’t cut right to left.” He definitely wasn’t 100 percent. There were times in the championship when he looked like his old self. “He looked quicker and could get by people whenever he wanted,” said his dad. “But there were (also) times when he looked a little hobbled.”

Coach Walker wasn’t sure what percentage to put his son at. “He wasn’t 100, but he was certainly closer to 100 than he was to 50.”

Woodsville was fortunate that the semifinal game was played on Monday. Had it been played on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, his dad said he would not have played in the championship. “There’s no way,” coach Walker said. “He was limping pretty bad for two days after. You really couldn’t see his ankle until Thursday or Friday when the swelling finally went down.”

Ryan Walker recalls warming up before the championship and he felt at that point he was probably at 60 percent. “Once the game came around and the adrenalin was flowing, I was probably higher than that,” he said. “I tried not to be aggressive around the rim and land on anyone’s feet. I was playing away from the rim and fading away, when I usually go towards it.”

A third meeting with Littleton was certainly going to be a tough nut to crack for Woodsville. Walker expected it to be similar to the three-point second game. “They’re a tough team to defend,” he said. “No matter what five are on the floor, they can all dribble and shoot. There’s no leaving someone alone on that team.”

The game was as good as advertised. Littleton jumped out to a 10-point lead in the first quarter, but the Engineers battled back to take a three-point lead at the break on McClintock’s 3-pointer at the buzzer. Predictably, it was a game that came down to the final seconds.

The Engineers didn’t help themselves as time was winding down. With the game tied at 43-all, they called timeout with 18 seconds to play. But they then turned the ball over on the inbounds pass. Littleton went ahead 47-45 when Marcus Hampson made both foul shots after being fouled driving for a layup at 15 seconds. Down two, coach Walker signaled not to take a timeout. His son took the ball the length of the court, drew three defenders and then hit Sabina for the game tying layup that forced overtime. “Devin was right where he was supposed to be,” said coach Walker. “When someone drives to the basket, I want you opposite them. I don’t want you on the same block. Then your defender is right there. Always get opposite to the guy driving to the basket. Where did he go? Opposite and he got the layup.”

 In OT, Putnam scored his only points on a corner trey at 2:30 to give the Engineers a three-point lead (50-47) and an eventual 51-48 championship win to complete the season at 22-0 – the only undefeated boys team in New Hampshire.

Putnam recalled his game-winning shot. Walker drove to the basket and drew Putnam’s defender. “You’ve got to know it’s coming when he has two or three defenders on him,” Putnam said. “I just try to give him a good angle because he’s got two people on him; help him out and catch the ball and shoot. It was like the exact same shot that I hit against Profile. No problem. No hesitation.”

Despite the injury, Ryan Walker played a great game. His teammates were concerned during the week that he might not be able to play or that if he did play, he wouldn’t be himself. “I was nervous because we hadn’t played without him all year,” Kimball said. “He’s our biggest contributor on the floor. I was a little worried and I was a little worried for him. I know he likes to drive and get into the paint. There are a lot of feet down there. I was a little worried that he would roll it again.”

It all worked out. “He played great,” Kimball added. “I thought he played one of his better games. He looked normal to me.” Walker led all scorers with 19 points and paced Woodsville in playoff scoring with 60 points in four games. Kingsbury and Sabina added eight points apiece, and Kimball had seven. Sam Reagey led Littleton with 16 points, while Connor Roy and Hampson chipped in with 10 each.

At the beginning of the season, there were certainly some question marks. But as the season unfolded, the Engineers started checking off boxes. “They were a team that accepted their roles and played them very well,” coach Walker said. “They were an easy group to coach. There was no fighting. They got along. They liked playing with each other.” As their record indicates, it proved to be a winning recipe.

Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

The wait is over: Groveton fends off rival Littleton for 17th state title

By Mike Whaley

(This is the first story in a series on the eight 2025 NHIAA state championship basketball teams.)

The Groveton High School girls began the 2024-25 season trying to reverse a recent trend. The most dominant girls program in the history of New Hampshire high school basketball with 16 state championships, the Eagles were in the midst of an unusually long dry spell. They had gone 11 years (2013) without claiming a crown – easily their longest hiatus since winning their first title back in 1988. Although Groveton was a contender in the previous two tournaments, it stumbled at or near the wire – a 47-33 loss in the 2023 championship to Colebrook and a discouraging 29-26 setback in the 2024 semis to Newmarket.

The Eagles were returning to their former level of play but the question was – could they reach the D-IV summit? The answer, when the D-IV dust settled, was an emphatic “yes,” courtesy of a thrilling 36-33 championship win over North Country rival Littleton. But it certainly wasn’t easy.

Veteran coach Tim Haskins recalled that the loss to Newmarket in the 2024 semis did not sit well after the 2023 championship loss to Colebrook. “We were right on track to get back again last year,” he said. “Newmarket played a great game in the semis and we didn’t. I think that loss, to be honest, was kind of hanging over us or in the back of our minds. We were pretty motivated to get back to at least that point – back to the semis. And then get a chance to win that game and then get a chance to get ourselves back to the final.”

Aspen Clermont [📸 KJ Cardinal]

The Newmarket game certainly motivated the girls. “It really upset me,” said senior point guard Aspen Clermont. “There were a lot of things that went wrong. We didn’t play to our full potential.”

Junior forward Delaney Whiting hit the 1,000-point mark this season, led the team in scoring and was named Division IV All-State First Team. “The biggest thing last year is we weren’t a team when we went out on the floor,” said the Eagles’ go-to player.

Mylee Kenison was a freshman forward last year. She admits she put too much pressure on herself. “It was a lot. I had a part on the team,” she said. “I had to try my best to get to the championship.”

Assistant coach Kelley Brown, a four-time champion during her Groveton playing days, said everyone played as individuals. There was no teamwork. When the team saw the game video, they all agreed: “We didn’t play as a team. We were playing one-on-one with the Newmarket girls. I kept reminding them this year that we need to play as a team.”

The Newmarket game served as a strong incentive for this past season. The Eagles were certainly a pretty good team. Were they good enough to make a run to the championship was the looming question. 

Delaney Whiting [📸 KJ Cardinal]

What helped early on was beating Littleton in their own holiday tournament, as they had done in 2023. Groveton stopped the Crusaders, 37-28, a game that flew under the radar with little press coverage. But it served to boost the team’s confidence for the rest of the season. “It helped us,” Whiting said. “It made us aware that we can beat them. It didn’t count as much in everyone else’s eyes. But it showed us we have what it takes to beat an undefeated team.”

The first part of the season before Christmas was the weakest part of Groveton’s schedule. After the holiday break, the schedule definitely toughened up. “It was literally five straight weeks where every team we played had a winning record,” said coach Haskins. “There just weren’t any breather games at all on the schedule. We’d win one and say, ‘Well that’s good.’ There was no time to celebrate. We had to turn around and get ready for the next one.”

Part of that brutal stretch included two games with Littleton, which the Eagles lost – 52-36 and 40-37. It stung, but it wasn’t the end of the world. In both games, Littleton used a big fourth-quarter surge to pick up the win. “In both of those games we were upset emotionally and frustrated,” said Clermont, a second-team all-state selection. Upset for sure, but not defeated. Underneath that frustration, they still had confidence. They knew what was possible.

Along with the two Littleton losses, the Eagles had some hard-fought wins during that stretch over White Mountains, 50-44; Pittsburg-Canaan, 48-38 and 54-41; Farmington, 50-48; Colebrook, 62-49, and Woodsville, 40-34.

Head Coach Tim Haskins [📸 KJ Cardinal]

Haskins said the goal at the end of the regular season was to be a top-three team, which would allow them to host the first two playoff rounds, and to stay out of Littleton’s side of the bracket. It took some work, but they were able to accomplish both goals.

Once you earn one of the top four seeds, the accomplishment is immediately relevant. Unless you get a first-round bye, there is the potential to host two playoff games. The Eagles took advantage of their friendly home court to roll through the first two rounds over Lin-Wood, 72-32, and Portsmouth Christian, 69-40.

“We knew pretty much what we were going to get with those games,” said coach Haskins. “Those rounds make me the most nervous. You’re the favorite and by a lot. What if we mess up? The farther we go, the less nervous I get personally.” If Haskins had any nerves in those first two rounds, they quickly dissipated.

That set up a semifinal game against No. 2 Holy Family, whose only loss had been to Littleton (47-40). Haskins had been able to scout the Griffins at Franklin. “We felt it was going to be a challenge because they had girls who were a bit bigger compared to what we had,” the coach said. “We were ready. We got back to the same point where we got knocked out last year. The girls were pretty determined that it wasn’t going to happen again.”

Clermont recalls Holy Family walking into the Bedford HS gym for the semis. “I said ‘Oh my god.’ They were pretty tall. It was a little intimidating.” Indeed, the Griffins were an imposing unit with five girls 5-foot-8 or taller led by six-foot freshman Lizkenza Yonkeu. Whiting was one of only two Eagles 5-8 or taller.

Kaycee Chappell [📸 KJ Cardinal]

The difference was that Groveton’s secondary players really stepped up. While the Griffins were able to limit Whiting’s scoring chances, holding her to five points, Mylee Kenison and Julia Chappell picked up the slack, scoring 13 and 12 points, respectively, in a convincing 51-29 win. Clermont also tossed in 12. The Eagles held a slight 19-16 lead at the half, but used a 16-5 burst in the third quarter to take control of the game.

“We felt whenever we can we like to play a pretty fast-paced, up and down the floor game,” Haskins said. “We felt it might give some of their big girls a little bit of a problem.” Groveton also held its own on the boards, despite being undersized. Another big factor was that the Eagle defense was able to hold HF sophomore all-state scoring ace Ryenn Pedone to 10 points, well below her 22.0 average.

“We showed that we weren’t just a team of one or two players,” the coach said. “We had different girls who could step up if the occasion dictated.”

Myle Kenison understood the situation and that she needed to be ready to contribute. “I knew I had to step up and when I was open I had to shoot. When I had my drive, I had to make a drive,” she said.

Groveton had advanced past the semis to the championship for the second time in three years. Their opponent was not a surprise – the unbeaten No. 1 seed and defending champions from Littleton. “It was two coaches and two teams that knew each other pretty well,” said Haskins of himself and the Eagles and Littleton and their coach, Dale Prior.

Littleton had won three games to get to the finals, but their path had been a little more difficult. No. 8 Farmington had pushed them in a 52-41 quarterfinal win and then they held off pesky Newmarket in the semis, 37-31.

Mylee Kenison [📸 KJ Cardinal]

The championship was just as everyone figured it would be at Colby-Sawyer College – tightly contested and down to the wire. It was tied after the first quarter, 7-7. The Eagles led at the half, 20-16, and then jetted ahead 33-24 after three quarters. As in its two previous losses to the Crusaders, Groveton found itself succumbing to a fourth-quarter outburst that reduced a nine-point lead to one with 32 seconds to play, 34-33, after a 3-pointer by Juju Bromley. Were the Eagles headed to loss number three?

Littleton fouled Mylee Kenison with 15 seconds to play. The sophomore forward had already stepped into the spotlight as an unlikely star in the semis with a game-high 13 points. Now she had two foul shots to give the Eagles a chance to maybe put the game away. “I knew we were up by one,” the sophomore said. “I knew they were going to foul us. They wanted the ball back. When I got to the line, my heart was beating really fast. I knew I had to at least make one of them. I usually just take a deep breath and shoot. I just took a breath. I knew if I made one we would be in a pretty good spot. I made both.”

Now leading 36-33, the Eagles did not let Littleton put in the tying basket and won their first state championship in 12 years. That ended the longest championship drought since the Eagles won their first state crown back in 1988, increasing their girls’ state record total for state championships to 17. It was the sixth title under Haskins who has coached the team for 19 years, and has been a part of the program for 39 seasons (and all the state championships). He got his start in 1986 as an assistant and JV coach under coaching legend Gary Jenness, who has more wins than any other high school girls basketball coach in the state with 641. From 1988 to 2013, Groveton had one of the most dominating runs in state history with 16 titles in 26 years. Only the Nashua girls are in the same stratosphere, capturing 15 crowns during an impressive span from 1982 to 2004.

Once a perennial contender in D-IV, Haskins noted it has gotten harder for Groveton to stay consistently competitive with the town’s declining population, an affliction that runs across the North Country. That makes this year’s championship run all that sweeter. 

Makalyn Kenison [📸 KJ Cardinal]

Mylee Kenison once again led Groveton in scoring with 10 points. Julia Chappell had another big game with eight points, and Mylee’s younger sister Makalyn also had eight. Littleton’s defense held Whiting to five points and Clermont did not score. For the Crusaders, Addison Pilgrim had 10 points, while Addison Hadlock chipped in with eight and Bromley tossed in seven. Two other players who supplied invaluable playoff contributions for the Eagles were seniors Kandrah Savage and Kaycee Chappel. Freshman Makalyn Kenison was a consistent force all year long as the team’s No. 2 scorer behind Whiting and its top offensive rebounder. She received all-state honorable mention.

To further drive home the point that Groveton’s secondary players expanded their roles during the playoffs, one need only look at the increased scoring numbers of Mylee Kension (6.9 to 10.5 ppg) and Julia Chappell (3.8 to 10.3 ppg). When it mattered most, they delivered.

Whiting did a commendable job adjusting her game, especially later in the playoffs when opposing teams really focused on shutting her down. “Rather than get super frustrated because she wasn’t scoring, she’d grab rebounds, play defense, get assists, and just was a good teammate out there,” said Haskins. “She did her role well in that respect.”

Haskins noted that when Groveton lost in the finals in 2023 and the semis in 2024, the team went six players deep in both games. During this year’s championship run, they embraced a seven-player rotation. “We were a little bit deeper and more versatile,” Haskins said. It was just enough to get the Eagles over the hump and onto the championship podium.

In addition to holding down Littleton’s long-range shooting game, the Eagles did not let them run. Clermont said they made sure to keep an eye on Bromley who is very good at getting breakaway baskets. “Whoever was closest to her when a shot went up, just went with her,” Clermont said. “It kind of worked. I feel like our defense didn’t give them a chance to break out.”

Ditto, of course, for the Groveton offense, which also likes to run. Littleton limited those opportunities.

Perhaps the biggest difference was the insistence by Clermont that Groveton use its 3-2 zone versus a 2-3 matchup that Haskins felt would stymie Littleton. For most of the season, the Eagles had used the 3-2. “I raised my hand and asked ‘Haskins, what do you think about trying the 3-2 and if it doesn’t work switching to the 2-3 matchup?’ He said ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ For the whole game, we played a 3-2 defense. It worked. We had really good communication during that game. Realistically, the entire year we did play a 3-2 against most teams.”

Clermost’s value to the team went way beyond what she brought to the court. She was Haskins’ team liaison, keeping him in the loop when problems were on the horizon. She was equipped to deal with any drama that might surface. “Being a captain on a girls varsity basketball team is a very difficult thing to do,” she said. “In high school there is X amount of drama. There is so much that comes up. Sometimes you’re not prepared for it. Last year prepared me because I knew what was going to happen this year. Who causes the drama and who does this and that.”

She added that she and Whiting, as captains, were in constant communication. “We talked about how to fix things,” Clermont said. “Before the playoffs started, we were in a very good place. We had very little drama. A lot of the girls were there to support one another.”

Clermont said that her role was there to set up the offense and “get people where they need to be and position people; keep it positive and all the attitudes in line. Sometimes Mylee would get down on herself. I would have to go over to her: ‘Dude, you’re fine. Let’s go.’ We’re not going to win with this attitude. There were times when I would say ‘Relax, we’re winning the game. There is no need to freak out.’”

Clermont’s presence will be the biggest void to fill next year, both her ability on the court and her strong leadership skills. Savage and Kaycee Chappell are also moving on. Haskins pulled the three seniors to the side fairly early in the season to make a point. “‘These three graduate next year,’” he told the rest of the team. “‘I don’t know who it’s going to be, but one of you is going to be the fifth starter (next year).’ The eight to 12 players this year will prep for maybe that role next year.” That, of course, is a story in the making. For now, the Eagles will savor a championship that, in a town used to winning championships, was well worth waiting for.

Whaley can be reached at whaleym25@gmail.com

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