MANCHESTER – Last year was a dream season for the Manchester boys basketball team and coach John Reiser, and all anyone wanted to know afterwards was – Was he coming back?
After 37 years of coaching, Reiser had reached the top – cultivating a group of five senior starters into a team that was able to beat powerhouses like Windsor, East Catholic and Northwest Catholic – and then New London 77-74 in the Division II championship game at Mohegan Sun last March.
There were coach of the year honors, all-state and all-conference honors for the players. UConn coach Geno Auriemma told Reiser if he won a state title, he would give him free dinner for a year at his restaurant in town.
But was he coming back? He had already won two state titles with the Manchester girls and now one with the boys. He has 565 wins. He had nothing to prove.
He also had no returning starters; Manchester graduated seven seniors. He knew this season would be difficult.
Reiser didn’t foresee this year’s team going 0-20. But that’s what happened.
“I was asked at least 100 times if I was coming back,” Reiser said. “Then I started thinking about it because everyone was asking – ‘Why am I coming back? I’m on the top of the world, I got every award you could get, two different coach of the year awards.
“So why am I coming back?’”
Reiser has obviously given this some thought – before the season, and throughout the year, maybe especially on the nights when he couldn’t sleep, trying to figure out a way to get this new group of players – young, inexperienced, playing a difficult schedule – to win their next game.
And he realized he did it because of the relationships and connections he and his players forged over the years.
“Two things – one, you hear people talking about culture of a program – people don’t realize what we have here,” said Reiser. “My players come back. (Manchester’s all-time scoring leader) Ashley Perez always comes to see us. A lot of the guys come back. They call me: ‘Coach, can you open the gym up today?’ Girls from 15 years ago. Guys from my first year here.
“What happens to that? What happens to all that we’ve created? I said, ‘You know what? I didn’t get into coaching to win awards.’ I love teaching. I love being in the gym.”
So he came back. The Red Hawks started off the season with a loss to Cheney Tech, then lost to Windsor, 116-71, then East Catholic, 92-42 and Reiser was 0-3 going into Christmas.
He made some adjustments. He changed the lineup. The practices were good, he thought. But Manchester kept losing. The Red Hawks played East Catholic and Windsor, two of the top teams in the state, twice. Some of the losses were close – 10 points to Ledyard, 10 points to Tolland. One game, the Red Hawks led by 17 points but ended up losing by 10.
“I think they were like, ‘Wow, we’re going to win,’ then we reverted back to doing some bad things,” he said. “Another game, we were up 16-9, took a bad shot, (the opponent) scored to make it 16-11. I got on them about that and then we played awful after that and I realized I can’t do that with this group.”
He could get after last year’s group. This was an entirely different team and they were going through their own issues after the success of the last four years – Manchester went 44-6 in that time span.
“Last year, we were winning all the time,” sophomore point guard E.J. Perez said. “It was really fun being out there and looking up to all those guys. This year, now I’m in a bigger role. I’m out there trying to make plays. It’s hard and it’s overwhelming.”
But he added, “What I love about us is we come to practice every day and we come with the same intensity and we want to get better.”
Like everyone else, senior Josh Blake played on varsity for the first time this year.
“What people have to understand with a team as good as last year’s with seven seniors and the starting five was all seniors, we didn’t get much of an opportunity to get trained against the speed and ability of other varsity teams,” Blake said.
“We’ve started to hit a lot more shots and as the season progressed, we got more competitive and have seen a lot of improvement in terms of keeping games closer.”
Reiser only missed the state tournament once as a boys coach – when his Rockville team, which was 7-12, needed one win to get into the tournament but lost the last game because of a lane violation.
This year, because Manchester was moved up to Division I after last year’s success, the Red Hawks will still get to play in the state tournament. It’s a mixed blessing. They will be the 16th seed out of 16 Division I team and will travel to Westport to face top-seeded Staples on March 10.
“We probably would’ve kept practicing anyways to take advantage of the time I have with them,” Reiser said. “But now I have a little carrot there – we have a game. I’m going to talk to these guys about believing. You got to believe. Let’s see how much we progress in the next two weeks.”
So the coach who never went 0-20 learned a few things this season, mostly how to be more patient.
“I was talking to somebody about the season and they said, ‘It’s good for you,’” he said. “I said, ‘Why is it good for me?’ ‘It’s humbling.’ I said, ‘I don’t need to be humbled like this.’”
He laughed, ruefully.
“I knew this was going to take a lot out of me and it has. Having a rough year like this – just lack of sleep – I take it so hard. I don’t judge it on wins and losses, but you want to win. I want my guys to experience that.”
But that wasn’t why he came back. After 38 years, he’s learned to look at the big picture.
“It was a rough year, but was it a successful year?” he said. “I won’t know how successful we were until 5-10 years from now, these guys come back and I see what they’re doing – did I impact them in a positive way? Maybe 5-10 years from now, these guys will be doing great things. Being good people, good partners, responsible people, giving back – the things we talk about. Even though we didn’t win a game.”