Each week for the next two months, the Valley News will profile a local high school coach. It’s a chance to better know some of the people guiding the area’s teenage student-athletes and to discover something about them beyond shouted instructions, inspirational speeches and game-story quotes. Today, we meet Oxbow High girls basketball coach Barry Emerson, whose service goes far beyond the sidelines.
Family: Emerson has been married to his wife, Kristin, for 13 years. The pair was hitched only after Barry extracted a promise that his coaching career could continue. His daughter, Jacey, is a 24-year-old Oxbow graduate. Son Andrew, 12, is a rising seventh-grader, and son Ethan, 9, will be a fourth-grader in the fall.
Military Bearing: As a Blue Mountain High junior, Emerson signed up to join the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, which specializes in parachute assaults. An illness in his family thwarted that hope, but he joined the Vermont Army National Guard as a reservist after high school.
Hello, Hornets: Logging with his father in the summers convinced Emerson to avoid that kind of work. High school guidance counselor Brian Garrigan drove Emerson to Lyndon State College, where he later enrolled and graduated in 1991 with a major in physical education and a minor in health. He was the first person in his family to attend college.
Tough Guy: Emerson had played high school basketball for the demanding Ron Brown, and his own initial coaching job was with the Lyndon Institute freshman girls hoops squad. “If I knew then what I know now, we would have been undefeated,” Emerson said with a chuckle. “I tried to replicate what Ron had done with me and wound up being downright miserable to a bunch of freshmen girls. Luckily, it was a private school, or I would have been out on my ear.”
Career Switch: Summers in high steel construction led to Emerson working five years in that field after his college graduation. He took a significant pay cut to teach physical education at a school for troubled youth in Pike, N.H. “We had some 6-foot-2, 220-pound kids who didn’t like being told what to do, but I got great experience,” said Emerson, who led the students on hiking and canoeing trips during the warmer months. “You find that true leadership usually involves asking people to do things in a good, fair way.”
Olympic Dreams: After working for a year at Woodsville High and another at Haverhill Middle School, Emerson landed a PE job at Waits River Elementary School. He taught there for two years and moved to Oxbow in 2004. He began coaching the Olympians’ girls junior varsity soccer and boys junior varsity basketball teams and doesn’t hide his lack of soccer knowledge. “I can motivate kids, but I’m no soccer guru with the Xs and Os,” Emerson said.
Hoop Dreams: Emerson began coaching the Oxbow boys varsity basketball team in 2005 but was deployed to Iraq a year later, necessitating that his assistant take the job. He returned home but was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and did not return to the program after that. Last season, he coached the boys varsity soccer team when no other candidate could be found.
At War: When he entered the National Guard, combat “was as far from my reality as you could get,” Emerson said. “A lot of the other guys had no doubt they would never deploy, and they got out after our first one.” That was a relatively safe posting on the Kuwait-Iraq border, but the stint in Afghanistan resulted Emerson’s platoon sustaining injuries and a death while they patrolled near Bagram Airfield. “We went out every night at midnight and came back in at 7 a.m.,” Emerson said. “At one point, we had lost 40 percent of our guys to injuries.”
Peace of mind: “Coming home was definitely an adjustment, but I feel very fortunate to have been able to readjust and gotten my life back to where it was before,” said Emerson, a sergeant whose deployments were each a year long. “I know some guys had a very hard time.”
Back to the Bench: Emerson has coached Oxbow’s girls varsity basketball team the last three seasons. He said he will again guide the boys soccer team if another coach can’t be located this summer. “I promised the boys who are returning that there would be a team as long as there were enough athletes who wanted to play,” he said.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.