About nine years ago, I wrote something mildly controversial for our sister paper, The Cooperstown Crier: Cooperstown, the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, is actually a basketball town.
Driving home from Binghamton on Sunday, after the Hawkeyes won their second Class C state title in boys basketball in seven years, I thought about that column and smiled.
It feels like everything has changed since then, in my life and in the world. However, in “America’s Most Perfect Village” the important things remain the same. The world may know us for our beautiful shrine to baseball, but the marque sport in the village – technically just outside the village, in terms of Red Bursey Gymnasium at the middle/high school, and The Clark Sports Center down the street – is basketball.
I know, skeptics abound. Even in 2017, I got pushback. One of the great sports writers/editors who was here before me, Rob Centorani, once tweeted at me: “To those in the village, you’re a basketball town. All other parts of the planet consider you a baseball town.” When the school baseball team made a couple of runs to the state Final Four, they threw out a couple of, “Some people say we’re not a baseball town, but …” posts themselves.
So, I know, not everyone agrees.
Still, I get a lot of mileage out of my observation. For a decade, when people ask what it is like to live here, or when I am playing tour guide, I pull it out. “Well, the funny thing about Cooperstown is …”
And don’t get me wrong, the school’s athletic programs are strong in many sports. In the 15 years I have lived in or near the village, I have watched programs built up in volleyball, wrestling and softball. I have seen good coaches take baseball and soccer teams to championships and Final Fours. I have covered state champions in track and field, as well as excellent swimmers, cross country runners and tennis players. I have seen the football kids and parents fight to save and revive their program. I even got to help raise a few soccer boys.
Still, when the basketball teams are good, Red Bursey Gymnasium is the center of winter life. The Winter Carnival is great fun every year and the rotating cast of organizers do a great job to give people something to do in dreary February. However, the school teams give the community a place to be from November through February, including the Dick White Holiday Basketball Tournament at the end of each year. And, if we are lucky, the basketball extends into March and ends with celebrations and parades, like the one Cooperstown will have on Main Street on Tuesday night.
I have many biases to admit. First, basketball is my favorite sport to watch and to cover, although wrestling is a close second, and soccer holds a special place in my heart these days.
In my nine lives of covering sports for newspapers, I have covered four state championship teams. I am blessed; all four state-title teams have won basketball titles. The first two were in Alabama, when I was just starting out. There’s probably a longer piece I could write about those years and those titles. As I have said before, it was my “Southern Exposure” time of life. Both schools were in Autaugaville, Ala, a town of less than 1,000 people on the Prattville-Selma Highway, on the cusp of the Black Belt. Autaugaville High School was 90 percent Black. Autauga Academy was 95 percent white. Football was the most popular sport at both schools and probably everyplace else in the state. Yet, somehow, they both won state titles in basketball while I was there.
Eleven years ago, I was fortunate to cover Cooperstown’s girls basketball team when they won their state title. Since then, I have watched Coach Mike Niles and his teams win five more section titles and two more regional titles. I like and respect Niles, his players and his program. I expect another run at a state title soon, probably with eighth-grade phenom Emma Johnson and freshman Lanie Nelen as the stars.
I missed most of Cooperstown’s 2019 boys basketball state-title run. My mom was sick and we had a good, young sports editor then, Jared Bomba. I knew our coverage was in good hands. However, since my son played soccer with John Lambert’s son, Charlie, I remember texting John congratulations after the win. I wasn’t the only one, of course. On social media, Hall of Famer Wade Boggs sent congratulations as well.
Saturday, after his team has won its semifinal game on an amazing buzzer beater, Lambert told me he had déjà vu. Sunday, he and his players and their friends and family were all smiles, at least from the fourth quarter on. I could not help but share their joy.
Reporters in general, including sports writers, are not supposed to have biases. I have read a company policy or two at various newspapers that tell me not to make friends with the people I cover. I try, but I am human. I live in a small town, with a small school community. I have lived in or near Cooperstown for 15 years, and for some of them, I wasn’t even a newspaper person. For a couple of years recently, I was the president of the Cooperstown Sports Booster Club. So, what follows is one or two admissions of my biases, though perhaps not all of them. I won’t run an editor’s note, but I think it is better to disclose these things somehow, somewhere.
My mom, Jennifer Evans, who died last year, used to babysit for the Nelen family. In fact, she was one of their sitters when Miles Nelen was born. He was literally a baby when she was his babysitter, so he doesn’t remember her, and the Nelens have their own friends and family nearby. I don’t want to overstate it. However, as tears well up in my eyes as I write this, I don’t want to understate it either. I am fond of their family. As Miles became the star player on the basketball team, I couldn’t help but cheer for him and his teammates. As they were on the path to winning a state title the past few weeks, I couldn’t help but smile.
Last winter, as I was driving around to playoff basketball games, I was thinking about ending my side publication, Cooperstown Sports News. I had started it when I left the newspaper business “for good” and did not want my soccer boys run to the Final Four to go uncovered. Last spring, I started making plans to end the service. I was on the fence about it in May when we had my mom’s celebration of life. When the Nelens showed up to pay their respects, I knew I had to give sports writing one more year.
“This is an impossible year for me to walk away,” I wrote at the time.
I didn’t know I would end up back at a newspaper, but the same idea popped into my head when the job opened, and my life changed in ways that made a desk job at a professional newspaper more desirable. “What if the boys do win? I would love to be there to cover it.”
Sometimes life gives you want you want and sometimes life gives you what you need. This time, it was both.
One lesson I learned from the 2015 girls state title is, I focused too much on star Liz Millea and only in retrospect realized how that team was filled with great athletes and even better leaders. When we did a 10-year reunion story with Niles and most of the team last spring, I admitted my mistake to them. As a group, those state champs always seemed to have good laugh about the “Liz and the girls” phenomenon, but I think they appreciated my revision.
I don’t know if those lessons came through in our coverage this year, but I wanted to mention it here because this year’s group was filled with great athletes, great leaders and great role players.
If Nelen and center/forward Jackson Crisman were the stars, seniors Cooper Coleman, Christian Lawson and Ben Lewis were the unsung heroes, the hustle and defense guys who made the team a team rather than a couple of stars. Coleman, Lawson and Lewis each made at least one play in the last three games that saved the championship for their team. Actually, it was many more plays than one.
Junior wing Brody Murdock is a star player, too, as we will all see next season, when the other five key players graduate. He may have deferred some to the older players, but everyone who watched him saw his contributions, his athleticism and his potential.
The rest of the team did their share, too, in practice, from the bench, and on court when needed, including after the games had been decided. After all, until the last three games, the Hawkeyes had breezed through much of the season.
The coaching was excellent, too. Lambert may have a distinguished career as an Otsego County and State Supreme Court judge, but I think his calling is coaching. His family’s legacy is intertwined with Cooperstown’s history — the school’s soccer and football fields are named for Paul Lambert, his late father and a former Cooperstown Central School coach and administrator, and John’s oldest child, Jack, was the star of the 2019 state championship team. Now Lambert has written another chapter of his family’s legacy. The job he has done coaching boys basketball has been amazing.
With the 2019 team, it was a deep, talented group, that had a star guard, a great big, two shooters who were great athletes, a talented point guard and three or four defense and hustle guys who led by example. This year’s team wasn’t as deep, and it wasn’t a group featuring Lambert’s son and his friends. Yet, as Cooperstown adjusted defenses, tried to shake off double teams on Nelen, and ran a game-winning play called Blind Cow, it was obvious for everyone to see. Coaching was one of the strengths of the team, too.
I admit, I was almost as happy for the Lamberts and the other families involved as I was for the Nelens.
The question for this year’s team was always, could they take their undefeated regular season, where they only had a few challenges, and adapt to the state playoffs, where the teams would be as good as they were. Last year, the team was 24-0 when they lost to Moravia in the regional championship. I know that loss sparked their determination to finish this season with a state title.
Nelen told me Sunday he thought everybody doubted him and his team. Crisman told me he thought people had underrated Cooperstown and overrated some of the other teams.
I don’t know if those things were true, but I believe the team believed them.
They have earned the final word. After all, over two years, their group went 51-1 and won a state title.
Still, there were moments against Notre Dame in the regional game and against Lyons on Saturday in the semifinals where it looked like the Hawkeyes had met their match. And it did take Crisman “throwing up a prayer” in Saturday’s semifinal to send Cooperstown to the state championship game.
The prayers were answered for Crisman, for Nelen, for their families, the community, and for me, as well. The reason I stayed in sports writing this year turned out to be a real thing we all witnessed the past few weeks. The basketball boys did bring home another state title. I hope my mom was watching, smiling, too.
Cooperstown, the village of basketball, celebrates.