LEBANON — Has Dave Faucher reached the finale of his basketball coaching career? Perhaps. Perhaps not. He never can tell.
On paper, the end seems likely. A season as interim boss of the Lebanon High boys team ends after the upcoming playoffs. The Raiders’ regular coach, Kieth Matte, said last week he’s returning as planned after a sabbatical of sorts. And Faucher wants to watch as many contests as possible next winter at Nichols (Mass.) College, where his youngest son, Scott, is the Bison’s first-year head coach.
“I’ll be involved somehow,” the 70-year-old Faucher said last week, seated in the Lebanon locker room. “But it might just be from the outside, enjoying my son’s games and looking at tape of teams he’s going to play. I also care about Dartmouth, and I went about a dozen of their practices before (the Lebanon) season started.”
Faucher has thought he was finished a couple of times before. When he exited Dartmouth in 2004 after two decades as an assistant and head coach. When he quit at now-defunct Daniel Webster College in Nashua after a 2014 disagreement with his athletic director.
“I was done, totally done,” Faucher recalled. “But I started coming to (Lebanon) practice and sitting in the stands. Then I got involved in practice. And then Kieth was coaching his son and I thought I could act as a buffer, so I started sitting on the bench.”
Matte said the combination worked because neither man felt the need to prove he was in charge.
“Dave has said he’s had his run and he knows the boundaries,” said Matte, who handed oversight of the Raiders’ offense to the older man. “If I had more of an ego, it might be a problem, and if Dave had more of an ego, he wouldn’t have worked with us. We had it set up in a way that the kids get a lot of great coaching, and not just from me.”
Two seasons as an unpaid volunteer turned into something more serious when Matte asked for a year off to watch his daughter, Alexis, play her senior season at Mount Royal Academy. He approached Faucher about handling the reins and receiving a stipend, but the lifelong hoops maven asked for a little time to make the decision.
On one hand, taking the gig would undoubtably help the Raiders, who had a good, young core of talent. Faucher and the players knew one another well, and he genuinely enjoyed being around them, likening the boys to the kind you’d want to encounter at a park or the community pool.
On the other hand, there were those bus rides. Faucher had driven himself to away games as an assistant, but now he’d have to endue the bumps and frosted-over windows and midnight returns from games on the Seacoast and through a snowstorm.
There was also the issue of what Faucher describes with a grimace, as his “competitive demons.” The mental monsters that dig into his basketball-besieged brain after a game, leaving him inspecting the bedroom ceiling at 3 a.m. They’ve never gone away, despite his long experience in the sport.
“I should have perspective, because I’m not going to get fired if we don’t win a game,” Faucher said in his gravely voice. “But I have that personality of total immersion, and I hate to lose. There’s baggage that I’ve created over the years.”
Happily for its coach, Lebanon doesn’t lose that much. The Raiders are 14-7 overall and 12-6 in NHIAA Division II, finishing seventh in the standings and earning the right to host a first-round playoff game this week. Lebanon’s enjoyed the return of junior point guard Logan Falzarano from a hand injury, and he works well with shooting guards Jon Willeman, a junior, and Hunter Bienvenu, a senior. Forward Wade Rainey, the team’s heart and soul, is another junior, physical and unflappable.
Forwards Caleb Smith and Jackson Stone — a junior and a freshman, respectively — give Lebanon’s lineup athletic bulk, and junior Tommy Berthasavage is another option in the backcourt for a team that was 16-6 last winter and exited the playoffs in the first round. Well-drilled in fundamentals and cohesive movement, the players absorb Faucher’s lifetime of learning about a game in which he didn’t foresee himself working at their age.
A 1967 Somersworth High graduate, Faucher was a senior at the University of New Hampshire in the early 1970s when he took a hoops class with Wildcats coach Gerry Friel. He caught Friel’s eye with an assigned analysis of his team and was made a student assistant during his senior year, sticking around for a couple more seasons after graduation. Stints at several New Hampshire high schools and Merrimack (Mass.) College followed before he arrived at Dartmouth as head coach Paul Cormier was taking over a historically dismal program.
The Big Green came within a whisker of an Ivy League title in the late 1980s before Cormier left for Fairfield (Conn.) University and Faucher took over at Dartmouth in 1991. He guided the team to a pair of runner-up finishes, helped snap Pennsylvania’s 48-game league winning streak and won 18 games during the 1996-97 season, only the second time since 1958-59 that a Dartmouth team had reached that number.
By the end, however, the Big Green was “leaking oil,” Faucher said. After the 1996-97 campaign, Dartmouth managed only one other 10-victory season and endured five seasons that included 18 losses or more. The coach resigned in 2004 with a record of 136-208 and spent a year outside basketball, working in human resources for a chain of hair salons. He returned to the game with three seasons as Kimball Union Academy’s boys coach.
The other half of that job, however, was fundraising for the prep school, an activity Faucher didn’t enjoy. So when Daniel Webster came calling, he took its job offer, despite absorbing what he said was a $15,000 annual pay cut and the need to rent an apartment in the Nashua area for six months a year.
Six seasons at Daniel Webster, recruiting a vastly different type of student-athlete than he had at Dartmouth, was laborious but rewarding for Faucher, who was 66-89 with the Eagles.
“Our kids mostly came from nothing, city kids without money,” the coach recalled. “I became a better person coaching an all-minority team with a background so different than the Dartmouth kids. I still stay in touch with some of them.”
Lebanon’s players, many of whom played in the local Longhorns AAU program founded by Scott Faucher, benefit from his father’s wisdom and experience. Dave Faucher is able to size up opponents’ tendencies and pick a play or tweak a defense in seconds.
“The way he makes adjustments is phenomenal,” said Rainey, the son of Dartmouth women’s soccer coach Ron Rainey. “He’s helped my decision-making, and so I play smarter.
“He’ll tell us a play to run during a timeout, and we have absolute faith that it’s going to work. It brings a kind of calm to the guys on the floor that’s priceless.”
The Raiders know their coach will be prepared, poised and able to handle whichever way the basketball caroms. What happens with the Lebanon staff beyond this season has taken a back seat to the desire to make a substantial playoff run.
“He cares as much about winning as any of us,” Rainey said. “He’s still got a ton of energy and runs around with us at practice. We sing him Happy Birthday every year, but other than that, you wouldn’t know how old he is.”
If this is the end, it’s not a bad way to go.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.