Taking one final walk
After 44 years and 590 wins, E.O. Smith’s Ron Pires patrols his sidelines for last time
STORRS — The only time Ron Pires ever sat down when he was coaching a basketball game was when he got a technical foul.
So Friday night — even though he’s been working on strengthening his legs in rehabilitation after having heart surgery — Pires walked the sidelines one last time as the coach of the E.O. Smith boys basketball team.
“I started standing up and I’m going to finish standing up, even though it was hard on my legs,” he said. “I had a great time (Friday night). It was amazing.”
He started coaching at E.O. Smith 44 years ago, in 1979. It was his first high school job after graduating from Eastern Connecticut State, where he set the school scoring record.
At the time, soccer was the main sport in Mansfield. That didn’t faze Pires. He took the soccer players — great athletes, really — and they played basketball in the winter and he had some great teams in the 1990s. The Panthers made it to the state championship game twice, in 1993 and 1994. Jim Calhoun’s son, Jeff, played for him, graduating in 1991. In the later years, they had players like Tyler Olander, who played at Uconn, and his brother, Ryan, who played at Fairfield. Pires also won 590 games.
But two weeks into this season, Pires, 74, had some chest pain. He went to the doctor. He had blockages in his arteries and had to have surgery. Pires only has one functioning kidney, which was a transplant from 20 years ago, and the surgery weakened its function. He was in the hospital for three weeks and now he goes to dialysis three days a week.
As much as he didn’t want to admit it, it was time to stop coaching.
So E.O. Smith invited alumni back Friday night and Pires got to walk the sidelines once more, this time with Matt Raynor, who played for Pires on the Class M runner-up team in 1993. Raynor, now a dentist in town, took over the team for the season when Pires was unable to coach.
It’s been a rough year. The players are young and inexperienced. The Panthers only won one game. They lost their last home game Friday night to Bolton, 58-54.
But the alumni that packed the stands behind the E.O. Smith bench were there to see their coach in action, one last time.
“It’s my family basically,” said Pires, a retired middle school teacher who lives in Norwich. “I was in tears for a while out there, just to see how many people I touched in a way and at the same time, they touched me too.”
Raynor choked up after the game talking about his former coach.
“It was an honor to stand in his shoes for the season, despite the lack of success,” he said. “To stand with him and coach tonight was weird but amazing. He hasn’t been here since Dec. 10. It was amazing.”
The seniors from his 1979 team came back. John Miller, Russ Howard and Don Rowe were a little suspicious of the new guy back then.
“He only coached me for one year, but I have very strong memories,” said Rowe, who lives in Marblehead, Mass. “He had a great impact on my life.”
Said Howard: “He tried to set a tone for the program that was built on hard work, being in shape, discipline.”
“Practices were hard,” Rowe said. “It was great to see him,” Miller said. “I still remember the [same] facial expressions in the huddle.”
Tom Greaser, a guard from the 1993 and 1994 state runner-up teams who went on to play soccer at Georgetown, was also there Friday.
“He was one of the best coaches I ever had,” said Greaser, who lives in Bethesda, Md. “He instilled in us a belief we could compete and win against anybody in the state.”
E.O. Smith went 26-1 his senior year, losing to Middletown, 82-54, in the 1994 Class L championship game.
The Panthers had lost to St. Thomas Aquinas, 63-48, in the Class M final the year before. They had lost only two games in the regular season that year. E.O. Smith was in the NCCC and there were battles every night.
“There were amazing games with Stafford, Ellington, there would be a packed house every night,” Raynor said. “I tried to explain to my guys that tonight was like every night when we played in the ’90s. It was a million degrees in here and you couldn’t get a seat and everybody wanted to be there.
“Great memories.”
Ryan Olander, who graduated from E.O. Smith in 2008 and played professionally in Lithuania, is now an assistant coach at Central Connecticut.
“I know if he could go on longer he would, so it’s tough for him to hang it up,” Olander said. “It’s just good to see him - hearing all the old stories and connecting.”
Eric Hall was also there Friday night. He met Pires as a fifthgrader at the YMCA in Willimantic, where Pires worked. Hall ended up becoming friends with Pires when he grew up and in 2001, he donated one of his kidneys to Pires. Pires was the best man at his wedding; he is Hall’s son’s godfather.
“Giving him a kidney pales to everything he’s done for every kid he’s met, every person,” Hall said. “It was easy. I was in and out in a week. What Ron did was a lifetime of things.”