FALMOUTH – November has slipped quickly into February and Dave Halligan is taking another Falmouth High team into a postseason tournament. Three months after his soccer team won the state championship, his basketball team is 18-0, the top seed in the Western Class B tournament, and a favorite to add another gold ball to an overcrowded trophy case.

Halligan can’t agree. “We can beat anybody. We can lose to anybody, too. I’ve seen it before.”

He has. The coach who most appreciates the rich tradition of Maine tournaments also knows their history. He should. He’s been part of it in one sport and the other for 25 years at Falmouth.

Call him a dinosaur. I did, walking into the main office at the Falmouth Middle School on Thursday afternoon and saying I was there to meet Halligan, and joking that there was none left quite like him. I didn’t know he was a step or two behind me.

“Brontosaurus,” he said. “I’m a brontosaurus.”

He’s a survivor. He turns 60 soon and somehow hasn’t been burned out or pushed out of his jobs. He is a middle school physical education teacher who wouldn’t be described as charismatic or glib.

In a time when parents are obsessed with their son’s playing time at the expense of team success, Halligan endures.

Burn out? People keep asking Halligan if he’ll give up one sport or the other or both. In another generation, men and women coached two or three sports during the school year, particularly if they were a phys ed teacher. That Halligan goes from soccer to basketball without missing a beat is rare today.

“I do look forward to April (vacation). My wife and I go to Florida and I recharge the batteries. Kids need to do that, too.”

Gray is overtaking his hair but if you look closely, there’s a kid behind the eyes that have seen a lot. A local kid. In a simpler, far-away time he was the star on Falmouth’s playing fields and basketball courts. His community has changed in 50 years but Halligan knows what it expects, which is one reason he survives and prospers.

“He does a good job of setting roles and expectations,” said Aaron Maines, who graduated in 2000 and was part of several championship teams. “He understood that no two players are the same. He puts the blueprint in front of us. We were not always the most talented team but we were a cohesive team.”

Maines and teammate Roger Levesque went to Stanford. Levesque plays soccer professionally. Maines now works for the Wasserman Media Group in Los Angeles, which represents more than 400 soccer players worldwide in its sports-entertainment corporation.

“One door opens the next door,” said Maines. “Coach Halligan helped me go from Falmouth to Los Angeles. In my job, I’ve been around some professional-level soccer coaches and I’ve picked their brains. I found out (Halligan) was preaching some of the things to us I’m hearing now.”

Stefano Mancini, a redshirt freshman on the University of Maine basketball team, led Falmouth to the 2010 state championship. “He’d never go into a game saying Stefano needs to take this many shots or something like that. In practice he’d definitely get on us but on the bench he lets the players play.

“Guys respect what he’s done. They want to play for him. People don’t give him the credit because they say he gets all the talent.”

Talent from a program covered with his fingerprints that extends throughout the school system.

Halligan shrugs. His soccer teams have won 10 state titles since he arrived in 1986. His basketball teams have won four times. He’s embarrassed, he says, when people count the gold balls and look at him.

“It’s not about you. It’s more about the program, and all the assistant coaches and players.”

In his mind, success is measured 15 years later when the boys who played for him are following their dreams in the workplace, and are good husbands and fathers and friends to those around them.

“Sometimes I do ask myself, why am I so fortunate? I know it’s because there are good people around me, people with character. I don’t need the credit.”

Need is one thing. Deserves is quite another.

Staff Writer Steve Solloway can be contacted at 791-6412 or at:

ssolloway@pressherald.com

Twitter: SteveSolloway

 

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