Its growth can be seen through the prism of a recent playoff foe.
In 2019, the Salamanca boys basketball team suffered an unceremonious end to its season, falling to Tapestry by a numbing 51 points (99-48) in the playoff quarterfinals. Unsatisfied with where it stood in the big picture, it began taking the necessary steps to raise the profile of its program.
In 2020, the Warriors won 15 games and reached the semifinals. A year later came the big move: A jump from the CCAA East to the West, where it would be the lone ‘C’ school in a division of ‘Bs’. Salamanca went a pedestrian 7-7 in the regular season that year, taking its lumps against the likes of Olean and Allegany-Limestone before again meeting Tapestry in the quarterfinals. And this time, with a much younger and more experienced team, a group that it was still grooming for bigger and better things down the road, the Warriors held their own, losing 62-56.
“I think that was the moment the players knew, ‘OK, we can really do something special here,’” coach Adam Bennett recalled. “And to their credit, two days later, we had the entire team in for an open gym workout, and they were committed to doing everything they could that spring, through the summer and team camps and summer league and individual workouts in the fall leading into this season to become the best team they could be.”
And they wound up being just that.
SALAMANCA, behind its former broadcaster of a coach, who’s cut from the cloth of former standout Olean leaders Jeff Anastasia and Don Scholla and become a student of the game himself, went 17-8 while winning its first sectional title since 1968 and advancing to the New York State Final Four for the first time in program history. In doing so, it became almost a mirror image of a girls team 25 miles down the road … and across the border.
Both Bennett and Otto-Eldred’s Shawn Gray took their programs further than they’d ever been before, the latter leading the Terrors to the PIAA Class A quarterfinals, rarefied territory for local teams in any sport. Both had a “team” in every sense, but one that was led by a singular talent — the Warriors by star sophomore Lucus Brown and O-E by phenomenal junior Katie Sheeler.
Both, too, had been building toward this for the last four years. Indeed, since taking over in 2018, Gray’s teams have jumped from 16 wins (in both 2020 and ‘21), to reaching the District 9 Class A title game in ‘21, to going 24-4, making a return trip to the ‘A’ championship (where it fell to Elk County Catholic) and embarking upon its memorable run through the state playoffs.
FOR THAT, each was rewarded with the area’s top honor — Bennett as the Thomas K. Oakley Memorial Award winner as Boys Coach of the Year and Gray claiming the Margie Holland Award as Girls Coach of the Year. And for both, the hardware has as much to do with the talent they had as it did their coaching acumen.
“First, I’m proud of our players,” said Bennett, one of three Salamanca coaches to earn Boys COY honors, alongside Brian Koscielniak (2014) and current assistant Pete Weishan (1998). “Any award like this is a reflection on them, and our staff, and the hard work they put in … not only this year, but for a long time, building the culture that they’ve worked hard to build here.
“(Assistant) Greg Herrick has had this group of kids since they were little. And for us to have the season that we had, with so many great teams in our league (including three sectional title winners and two NYS Final Four participants), I’m just proud that we were able to do it in a year that was so competitive across the board.”
FOR THE Big 30 as a whole, it was a special campaign.
Indeed, five public school girls teams and four boys squads either reached or won a sectional or district title this winter. As such, a handful of coaches had an argument for COY accolades, including A-L boys coach Glenn Anderson, who guided his team from a No. 6 seed in the sectional playoffs to its first berth in the NYS semifinals, and Portville girls coach Inga Welty, who helped the Panthers to their first sectional title since 2005.
But Bennett and Gray also engineered program firsts, and did so in impressive fashion: The Warriors, as a No. 4 seed, won a rubber match with Randolph in the Section 6 Class C1 semis, cruised past Holland (70-51) in the championship and had a lead with five minutes remaining in its Final Four loss to Stillwater. O-E, meanwhile, after winning 19 of its last 20 to close the regular season, knocked off a pair of private schools en route to the PIAA Elite 8.
“Just to be included with that (group of coaches), I’m flattered,” said Gray, O-E’s second Girls COY, joining his predecessor, Barb Close (2017). “Not for me, but more for kids than anything else.”
Echoing Bennett’s sentiment, he added: “Any accolades I get come from them, that’s for sure. I try to give them a lot of autonomy and I tell them that player-coached teams are better than coach-coached teams any day, and they just kind of went with that this year. They took ownership of the team and took us as far as we could possibly get, places that our school had never been before this year, and it was definitely fun.”
FOR BOTH, their rise was similar to their program’s. Bennett served as an assistant to the sectional title-winning Scholla for seven years before taking the Salamanca reins in 2016. Gray, meanwhile, led the O-E youth program from 2006-’14, when his step-daughter played, before coaching the JV boys when friend Dan Dalton took the varsity job and receiving the head girls gig when Close stepped down in 2018.
Both were also the beneficiaries of a supportive administration and community. And that’s what made their historic postseason runs so fulfilling.
“Salamanca’s a community with a very rich athletic tradition,” Bennett noted. “For us to be able to go somewhere that no boys basketball team in Salamanca has gone … my favorite thing about the whole experience was watching the community support us the way they did. The crowds that we had at JCC at Buffalo State were unbelievable.
“They’ve all bought into these kids and how hard they worked. I told the kids as we were making the run, that’s not a coincidence. Because they’re good kids, because they do things the right way and work as hard as they do, it makes them easy to root for. I’m just really proud to be the coach in this community and appreciative of the support.”
FOR GRAY, the experience was made sweeter by the fact he’s an alum, and it happened in a year where the O-E boys also made the PIAA playoffs. O-E was one of just two District 9 schools that had both teams in Clarion on March 5, when the boys beat North Clarion in the Class A third-place game and the girls fell to ECC in the championship.
“Being from O-E … it means more than I can put into words,” said Gray, an early 90s O-E graduate. “But you can see how much it means to the community when our gym is packed for a couple of playoff games and especially when we have to take a two-hour trip to Clarion on a Wednesday night for an 8:30 tip and you look up and we have the most fans in the crowd. That tells you a little something about our community and O-E as a whole.”
And for Bennett, aiding to his claim as the Big 30’s top coach was the adversity his team overcame.
On the same January day, he lost multiple regulars due to COVID-19 protocols and his top player, Brown, to a multi-game suspension for a violation of team rules. He later lost another starter to injury, and the Warriors went nearly a month without anything close to their full lineup. And still, Salamanca persevered, following a three-game slide with five-straight victories to reach Glens Falls. And still, O-E continued this golden era; it’s now 71-29 under Gray and would have made the PIAA playoffs in seven-straight seasons had there not been a limited field due to COVID last winter.
That path has led each here, to saying that coaching, unquestionably, is their calling.
“If it wasn’t for Barb Close and Dan Dalton, I wouldn’t be here,” Gray acknowledged. “They kind of got me here, they … showed me some things that maybe I didn’t know that I even wanted to do, and come to find out coaching is probably my favorite thing to do in life.”
Added Bennett: “To me, there’s nothing better than helping a team reach a common goal and trying to make a positive impact on the lives of your players. I just don’t see a better profession than that for me.”
