Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on July 11, 2015
WESTHAMPTON — Hampshire Regional High School sits atop a hill in Westhampton, overlooking a plateau of athletic fields. The softball diamonds are tucked into the southwestern corner next to the track. The baseball fields meet the wooded area along the Sodom Brook.
“I remember the first time I went up there,” Raider softball coach Brian McGan said. “I promised (athletic director) Ann (Trytko) I would put Hampshire Regional on the map. I’m not sure I did that, more my players did.”
Since that conversation about a decade ago, McGan has coached the softball team to four Western Massachusetts championships. Last month he and Trytko watched the 2015 squad raise the program’s first state title trophy, while simultaneously dropping a pin in the western Massachusetts atlas.
In May of 2007, Trytko was without a softball coach and the postseason was looming. At the same time, McGan was finishing his second season with the junior varsity team. Trytko didn’t hesitate to ask him to step in — and his first challenge was a slate of five games in five days to close out the regular season.
“They’d qualified for tournament and history has been made ever since,” Trytko said.
McGan returned as the varsity coach for the 2008 season and has made good on that promise from almost a decade ago.
On June 20, the Raiders wrote another line in the record book with the state championship in the program’s first attempt — a 2-1 win over Reading. It was the school’s first state title in any sport since the boys soccer team won in 2007.
“Winning the state title is the top ring, it’s the top of the pinnacle — you can’t get any further than this,” McGan said, still trying to grasp the concept of being state champions days later.
A week before lifting the state Division 2 trophy, the two-time Suburban League champions won their fourth Western Massachusetts title in seven years.
The program’s cycle of winning is close to matching the era of success enjoyed by the girls basketball team earlier in this century. The legendary late coach Jay Fortier led the Raiders to girls basketball sectional titles from 2003 to 2007 and state championships in 2003 and 2005.
“It rivals that run,” said Rich Moussette, who had a front-row seat for both stretches of success as a softball assistant to McGan and a basketball assistant to Fortier. “It’s very similar.”
But Moussette doesn’t feel like the entire community has caught on to Hampshire softball the way it rallied behind the success of the girls basketball team. The district draws students from Chesterfield, Goshen, Southampton, Westhampton and Williamsburg. Trytko echoed that sentiment, but added that by tournament time this year, the stands at Sortino Field on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst were filled with familiar faces and the school was buzzing between games.
Even the team took notice of the new attention and hopes the state title will increase next season’s support as the Raiders return all but three players.
“We’ve kind of given a name to the program, not just in the school, but in town and other towns in Western Mass.,” said Savannah Waters, Hampshire Regional’s standout shortstop. “People respect what we’ve done and they are impressed by it.”
The Raiders have been in six of the last seven Western Massachusetts finals, so while the hardware totals haven’t quite matched those of the Fortier-era basketball, the softball team has the potential to do that by repeating as state champion.
“I know Jay was a great coach and to be compared with those guys, it’s an honor for sure,” McGan said. “I’m one behind on both ends, so it’s a goal to go after now.”
McGan’s opportunity
The Raiders missed the postseason in the 2006, but they were 10-5 and on the way to the tournament when coach Tom Pereira resigned with five games left in the 2007 regular season. McGan took over and the team finished 3-2 in those final regular-season games. Hampshire then beat Hoosac Valley in the first round of the tournament, but fell to eventual champion Drury in the quarterfinals to finish 14-8 overall.
Since their first sectional title in 2009, the Raiders have won at least 18 games every season with a high of 21 this year, bringing McGan’s varsity record to 151-30.
During the second week of this season, the MIAA named McGan its 2015 Coach of the Year. Additionally, before the state final, the Raiders were presented with the MIAA’s Division 2 softball sportsmanship award.
“It just was a stamp of his success,” Moussette said. “The guy has done nothing but produce winners.”
McGan doesn’t like the spotlight and wasn’t comfortable with the awards dinner and photos that came with the personal recognition. In addition, he felt that placed a target on the team’s back this season.
“I took the job over for the kids,” McGan said. “I just wanted to show them how I learned to play and how to be a better player. To be recognized as coach of the year is a great thing, but I’m humbled by the whole thing.”
Early success
McGan’s success started long before Hampshire. He grew up in Troy, New York, and challenged himself on the baseball field by playing above his age level. He was an All-American first baseman for Hudson Valley Community College and was signed by the Toronto Blue Jays in 1981. He played three seasons in the minor leagues before ending his playing days.
“I was drafted and had fulfilled my goal of being a professional baseball player,” he said. “The reason I gave it up is that it wasn’t fun anymore. It was getting to be monotonous.”
McGan has been named to four hall of fames — Mohawk League, Twilight League, Troy High School and New York State Connie Mack Hall of Fame, all in New York. He also won an adult fast-pitch national championship in 1987.
McGan came with his wife, Lisa, to the Pioneer Valley in 1990 because she, as a Hampshire alumna, wanted to open her own law firm in the area.
Trytko said McGan’s résumé made him a shoe-in for a job at Hampshire Regional for the 2006 season.
“At the time, I only had a JV position opening,” Trytko said. “But he said he wanted to get in the program so badly that he would take anything that I had. With his résumé, there was no turning him down.”
McGan, 56, wanted to coach at Hampshire because his daughters, Ashley and Danielle, were in the pipeline. He also had the time to coach after leaving a job with FedEx because of an injury. During the day he would help his wife at her Springfield law firm Brodeur-McGan P.C., which gave him the flexibility to coach in the afternoons. His previous job had taken hours away from watching Ashley, who graduated in 2013 and now pitches at Keene State, and Danielle, a rising junior, on the field.
“I get to spend a lot more time with them than maybe some dads do,” he said. “But, to watch all of the kids get better, I think that’s the best.”
Once he held the reins to a portion of the program, his presence was felt almost instantly. When he took over the varsity team, the JV had not lost with him on the bench.
“We knew there was something special coming up, because they went undefeated under him,” Trytko said. “The kids he worked with knew his expectations when they moved up to varsity. If there is a weakness, he gives them the tools to work it out and it gets better.”
Waters, a five-year starter, graduated two weeks before the state title, and left as the program’s top all-time hitter after collecting 162 hits. She said McGan’s focus rubbed off on the whole team.
“He had high expectations of me personally and of the team,” she said. “He was always aiming higher and higher for us obviously. We all knew what he expected of us and how hard we had to work. Every day at practice it was like, ‘Don’t screw around,’ and ‘Get it done,’ but we still had fun. He really set that tone — work hard, play hard.”
Pushed fundamentals
The backbone of Hampshire softball has been executing the fundamentals, which was a challenge when McGan first took over the varsity.
“I finished (JV) practice one day and was standing by the varsity field watching one day, and (McGan) goes, ‘These guys don’t know how to play,’ ” recalled Moussette, who succeeded McGan as the JV coach. “He said, ‘You come to Sunday’s practice and you’ll see.’ I ended up going to Sunday’s practice and was like, ‘Oh my god, these kids have no idea.”
The two coaches and assistants Steve Moussette, Bill Dziok and Herm Eichstaedt quickly began fixing the issues, but McGan said it was the players who really made the changes.
“We really pushed the fundamentals,” McGan said. “How to play defense, how to throw the ball, the proper way to catch the ball. With the talent that I had with the kids, they just picked up and kept on going.”
Former players still use McGan’s coaching tidbits, even after their college careers have ended. Bri Eichstaedt was a member of the 2009 Western Massachusetts championship team and was in the stands for the 2015 state championship.
Eichstaedt, who is Herm’s daughter, played at Westfield State and now plays recreational slow-pitch, where she still uses everything he taught her about moving in the infield and playing shortstop.
“The amount of stuff he teaches you is crazy,” Eichstaedt said. “He teaches you down to the inch how to field a ball — other things that other people don’t know. It’s amazing.”
Eichstaedt, Moussette and Trytko said the program would not be as successful if it wasn’t for how McGan treated his players.
“He believed in me which makes you believe in yourself,” Eichstaedt said. “He gave me confidence, and I think that’s important.”
Waters agreed and added that McGan commonly took on the role of making sure the players kept a level head no matter who they were playing.
“He brought the confidence that we didn’t have,” Waters said. “He always kept his cool and told us, ‘You’re good enough to beat them — you just have to play like it.’ That was always his thing. He was never like, ‘I don’t think you guys can win this.’ Even when we played teams where we expected to win, he always said, ‘Don’t take them lightly, anything can happen.’ He was always the happy medium.”
The people around him said it’s that dedication to his players that make his teams so successful.
“Brian works really hard, he pushes and pushes and pushes and those kids never push back,” Moussette said. “They always respect the fact that he is doing it for them and that’s a great thing.”
Reaching for hardware
After their first Western Massachusetts title in 2009 under McGan, the Raiders’ success continued. McGan has used preseason goals to keep them hungry.
“I’m a big believer in setting the goals,” he said. “Because if you’re going out to play a sport just to play it, you’re going to do OK with it, but if you try to reach that goal, you’re going to do better in my philosophy because you have something to strive for and there is something there.”
The Raiders returned to the sectional finals in 2010 and 2011, but didn’t win their second crown until 2012. They lost in the 2013 sectional semifinals, before adding another trophy in 2014.
“By winning the first one in ’09, it made these kids want to get to where they were,” McGan said. “Now I’ve got another bar to set. It’s always a domino effect. They see success, they want success too. They (alumni) earned part of that trophy too.”
McGan said being challenged physically is a key for improvement. He made himself the best player he could be by playing with and against older youngsters. He has a similar belief about softball.
“Way back when, I just made up my mind that I was going to play with the older kids,” McGan said. “I think that made me a better player because whenever I went out to play baseball, they were 15, 16 years old and I was 8.”
Years later, he employed that same mentality in scheduling the Raiders’ opponents.
Before the 2013-14 school year, the PVIAC restructured its leagues. For the smaller schools, that meant the possibility of moving to a lower division and league, which worried McGan when it came time for the postseason. The Walker System is used to seed teams for the tournament and takes into account, among other factors, strength of schedule calculated by division.
Hampshire, a Division 2 school, did not change divisions within the state alignment, but McGan wanted to move up from the Franklin League to avoid too many matchups with Division 3 teams.
McGan went to Trytko, who fully supported the decision and called it an “admirable request.” Hampshire moved into the Suburban League and now plays against bigger schools. Its team of underclassmen routinely faced older players.
“Brian’s take on this is, ‘If we challenge ourselves, it’s only going to make us stronger in our own division and tournament,’ ” Trytko said. “He’s proved that the last couple of years.”
“Getting the chance to play against the D-1s was something I really wanted to do with these kids since I started,” McGan said. “Now they have to play us.”
The Suburban features one other Division 2 school — South Hadley — and three in Division 1 — Holyoke, Ludlow and Chicopee Comp. Hampshire is 17-1 since moving into the league and has won back-to-back Suburban titles. Winning the league fulfills one of the Raiders’ four annual goals — qualifying for the postseason, winning their league, winning Western Massachusetts and winning the state title.
This year they checked off all four for the first time.
The Raiders qualified for the postseason in their 11th game, finished undefeated in the league and ran through the postseason to set the bar even higher. With new banners to be hung in the school’s gym at 19 Stage Road, Trytko sees another dynasty in progress.
“It’s starting to become a comparison (with Fortier-era basketball) because the numbers are starting to be comparable — winning a lot of league titles, Western Mass. championships,” she said. “Now Brian, with his first state title, who knows what is down the road.”
McGan hopes there are a few more titles for the program in his future, and he has no immediate plans to stop coaching.
“When that time comes for coaching, it’ll be the same thing as playing,” said McGan. “It’s not going to be the kids aren’t any good, it’s just going to be because it won’t be fun for me anymore.”