Sports

Sachem's Coaching Legends Gather

Come together for first time since retiring; group amassed 1,970 combined victories.

What do you get when you gather the winningest coaches in Sachem history for an afternoon? The predictable laughs and memorable stories – some more graphic than others – but more importantly, an understanding of just how diligently the foundation of Sachem athletics was built over the second half of the 20th century and beyond. 

You'd be hard pressed to find another athletic program in the northeast with as many successful coaches that created dynasties over time. Their regular season wins and playoff triumphs supercede most of the history to ever come out of the Sachem Central School District.

When people think of the Flaming Arrows they think of domination in numbers, but what it truly boils down to are the men behind the programs. The decades spent drawing plays and molding minds in the bowels of Sachem North. They were visionaries. The countless road trips, the invigorating program shifts and principles that other teams and schools copied because it just worked. They were pioneers. The hours of sacrifice and thoughtful preparedness that aided in sweet success at season's end. They were victorious.

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These men – the six that gathered at Fred Fusaro Alumni Stadium this week for a classic reunion of Sachem's greats – are the ones responsible for players like Jumbo Elliott and Neal Heaton, Dan Brienza and Dan Mayo, John Ebmeyer and Doug Shanahan. Thousands of athletes wore the famed Black & Gold and bettered their high school careers as members of the teams that these legends coached.

What makes a legend exactly? Years on the sidelines? Total number of wins? They both matter, but in Sachem's case, these six men are great because they helped forge the true definition of the Sachem name. Sachem would not mean half of what it does today without them.

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The six combine for 1,970 wins, 63 conference/league/division titles, 35 county titles, six Long Island championships and eight New York State titles.

  • Bill Batewell (baseball): 452 (1975-2004)
  • Frank Schmidt (soccer): 345 (1974-2005)
  • Jack Mahoney (wrestling): 341 (1972-2005)
  • Ken Friedheim (gymnastics): 324 (1969-2005)
  • Rick Mercurio (lacrosse): 316 (1985-2008)
  • Fred Fusaro (football): 192 (1971-2003)

Aside from Mercurio, who started teaching in the district at Sagamore Middle School in 1977, the rest came in during the late 1960s and early 1970s and all taught at North. Sachem, like many neighboring Suffolk schools at the time, was considered a soccer school. Under the leadership of Don Wooley, who the soccer field is named after today, the Flaming Arrows were a strong program, even with a football program operating then with Kerry Lawlor, then Brian Smith, leading the charge.

Football wasn't quite what would it become once Fusaro took the reigns in 1971. In a quick seven years he turned the program into a bonafied contender and captured a Rutger's Trophy and Suffolk County championship in 1977. Fusaro finished his coaching career at Sachem in 2003 having one two Rutger's Trophies, six county titles and ranked seventh all-time in Long Island football coaching wins. He is an assistant at John Glenn today under Dave Shanahan, one of his former Sachem players.

Football didn't replace soccer, or Frank Schmidt's quest for athletic glory, it just gave him a motivational force for his teams to play better once he took over the program from Wooley in 1974.

"Fred came in here and established a high school program beyond a high school program," said Schmidt, who coached until 2005 and is the fifth winningest coach in Suffolk County soccer history. "All the other guys eventually did the same thing. They all took a program and we got to be more than a high school coach. Because of the quality of kids we had we didn't have to work on the basic things. You could do things in your program that most high school coaches cannot do. It allowed us to go further in coaching. Fred put the bar pretty high. You can't run a mediocre program when the guy next door was living in the upper class neighborhoods."

Batewell helped the football cause as the head JV coach from 1967-2000 and became the head baseball coach in 1974, a position he held until 2004. His trip to the football field this week was a bit more special, or jaded depending on how you look at it, since his departure from the district was not a happy one. It was the first time he came back to the school since his final year coaching. The infamous split in 2004-2005 of the district was the end for some and a beginning for others.

Batewell was always a proponent of making sure Sachem excelled, "on the back eight pages of the newspaper, instead of the first eight pages," he said fondly at Bruno's Bar & Restaurant at a table surrounded by the other legends. He also gives all the credit to his players, many of which are head coaches around the Island, including North's Tom Gambino and Sachem East's Kevin Schnupp.

The same can be said for the rest of the coaches because many of their disciples are now preaching the word of Sachem athletics either in the district or elsewhere. The coaching network is bigger than that of any professional web of coaches.

"Great kids really make great coaches," he said, admiring the football field's crisp new turf, something he hadn't seen before this week. "From the mid-'70s right through the split, we had great kids that focused on doing great things for the school. I appreciate the efforts they put forth."

Those efforts helped Batewell amass 452 victories at Sachem, which ranks him fifth all-time in Suffolk. He continues to coach today as the head of Bellport's baseball program. Last year he guided the Clippers, along with former longtime Sachem assistants Joe Murphy and John Clark, to one of their most successful seasons in two decades. He's still got it.

During the twilight of their teaching careers at North, Fusaro, Friedheim and Mahoney were the elder statesmen of the building. By that time, students didn't know whether to shake their hands, look down when they spoke or just smile and hoped you weren't doing something wrong, even if you were a good kid. They had that kind of power and authority. Still, they're some of the nicest individuals the Sachem community will ever know.

Friedheim was always the most jacked up of them all and as a nationally recognized gymnastics coach he walked with the swagger that only few can understand.

After college, he heard of a job opening at Sachem, a place Friedheim thought was an individual town at first, not a community of hamlets near Lake Ronkonkoma.

"Coming from Nassau County this was like an overnight trip coming out here," he said, "but Sachem gave me the opportunity to take a young program and build it into something that was known nationally by the time I left. This for 37 years was a big part of my family."

His 324 wins rank first in New York and his teams won 15 division and county titles, and three state championships. Sachem no longer has a boy's gymnastics program, but that's a different story for a different day (check Sachem Patch for Friedheim's take on that situation soon).

Then there's Mahoney, one of the most well known wrestling minds in the country and a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. One of the modest individuals on the planet, Mahoney is ranked second in Suffolk, third on the Island and 19th in the state with his 341 wins. He is also second in Section XI tournament history with 157 all-time individual place winners. For him, winning came as a product of being focused.

"We knew what we wanted to do," he said. "We wanted to be good and win all the time. The rest took care of itself. We didn't go into it trying to be coaches of the year. We loved working with kids and everyone had the same attitude and same focus. It just worked out that everyone was winning championships."

The beauty in recognizing coaching legends is to think of the lengthy process they endured while crafting their programs. Success wasn't always the answer to the equation. Every one of these coaches suffered defeat, hardships and growing pains when they first began their journeys. Athletes became spoiled once winning was the norm.

"Too many of them arrived in the '80s and '90s and saw the success and assumed it was like that all the time," Schmidt said. Only in time was that the case.

Schools are lucky to be considered a dynasty in one sport for a short period of time, but to have dynasties in football, baseball, wrestling, gymnastics, lacrosse and soccer for over three decades places Sachem on another level, one where neighboring schools can only dream of being.

"You tell people where you're from and as soon as you tell them Sachem, everyone knows Sachem for what it is and what it was," said Mercurio, who won two lacrosse Long Island titles and a state championship. "We all had a role in it."

Check Sachem Patch for full-length features on all of these coaches throughout the coming school year, as well as profiles on all current coaches in the fall season.


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