A Great Coach Who Built a Great Program
Ray Richard, Conval High’s first boys’ basketball coach and the first to reach 100 wins, will be recognized at halftime of tonight’s game with John Stark. The ball from that 100th victory in the 1973-74 season, signed by Coach Richard’s players, will be placed in the school’s trophy case. The following article on Coach Ray’s retirement from coaching is adapted from a 1978 column in The Peterborough Transcript:
The buzzer sounded and Ray Richard stood with fingers locked behind his neck, his elbows covering a disappointed face. His players, those who were on the bench, sat glassy-eyed and hunched over. The starters, drained physically and emotionally, dragged themselves to the sideline. Laconia fans cheered, knowing their team had won, 50-45.
Richard walked over to shake hands with winning coach Rick Knowles, took another look at the scoreboard, and puffed out a short breath. Quickly, he looked down to his team, clapped his hands and told the players to “go shake hands.”
It was not a good game, by Richard’s or anyone’s standards. But it was over. For the last time, after 261 nights of winning and losing, Conval High boys' basketball coach Ray Richard walked off a court with his team. Truly, the climax to a colorful and highly successful career did not fit the script. He had been a winner, and so shouldn't he go out the same way? Yet in the prelims of the 1978 Class I tournament, Laconia rewrote the ending.
Honoring Ray Richard for his 100th career win, at a January 1974 home game.
As irony would have it, Laconia made it all the way to the finals. Ray Richard had never been that far, and only once did his team make it as far as the semis. But while winning it all would have been nice, there have been a lot of coaches who ended their careers downcast, claiming one title along the way but then having to suffer through several following years of being at the bottom of the barrel.
Ray Richard and his teams at Peterborough High and Conval High never had to suffer such a fate. They consistently played on a steady plateau called winning—never unbeaten, but never a losing record.
Over 12 seasons, Coach Ray won 163 games and lost only 98, a seasonal average of 13-8.
No matter what the talent, of lack of it, Coach Richard was consistent with the end product. His teams at PHS and Conval High hustled on defense, ran a fast break, and always surprised some favorite in an upset every season since 1966. When he took over the Peterborough High job that year, he inherited a struggling program in a town that had always loved its basketball. The year before, PHS went 1-17. But in his first year, Coach Ray directed the Hilanders to an 11-7 record and into the the Class M tournament.
The next year brought another tournament appearance, and only the school’s growing pains cost his team a third straight tourney berth in 1969. Peterborough had been forced to move up to Class I because of its enrollment, but playing a half M and half I schedule during that transition, the percentage of quality wins was not good enough for the top eight Class I tournament qualifiers. A full year of Class I competition in 1970, however, had PHS back to Durham where they advanced to the quarterfinals.
The Conval years
1970-71, the first year for Conval Regional High School, was the season that was supposed to be "the one" but wasn’t. Richard’s first edition of Cougars were tabbed as favorites for the state championship along with Littleton, and sure enough, they began with an impressive 9-0 record. But a tragic knee injury to star forward Bill Bishop in a midseason game at Goffstown spelled the beginning of the end for the team’s title hopes. Though his team regrouped and played valiantly to finish 16-4, they were never the same team that started the season. Again, irony: Goffstown, the scene of the tragic story twist, was the one to end Conval's dream in the quarter-finals of the Class I tournament.
The next year? “They won’t win a game,” was the the belief of many fans looking to the 1971-72 season. That team, made up mostly of bench players from the previous year, was not expected to scare anyone. Yet under Coach Richard’s leadership, the Cougars knocked of number three Franklin and number four Goffstown during the regular, wound up 10-10, and surprised everyone by going back to Durham for another tournament appearance.
He admitted that the ’71-’72 team was his least talented, yet it must also be considered among Richard’s finest accomplishments as coach. A coaching colleague, Tom Robinson of Merrimack, gave Coach Ray the ultimate compliment: “He always makes the most of what he has.”
Robinson’s compliment becomes more profound when the sizes of Coach Richard’s players over the years are reviewed. Seldom did he have a big front line to clean house on the boards. Instead, he had many smaller teams—Munchkins, as they were dubbed in ’73-’74 when a team of short players made it to the Class I semis. In such cases, coaching meant adapting, manipulating, inventing and having the flexibility to deal with the likes of 6’10” Craig Keeler of Pembroke and 6’8” Lenny Kolhaas of Fall Mountain.
For Coach Richard and his teams, focusing on boxing out on the boards became a matter of survival more than strategy. Patience became the ultimate virtue. Speed and quickness—two entirely different things—meant the difference between success and blowout. And success often won the day.
The early Ray Richard years were ones of learning and growing up as a coach. He didn’t have all the knowledge and strategies when he first arrived on the scene at Peterborough High, and he heard it from some of the longtime fans who claimed he knew nothing about coaching. A few of them rode his back from the stands game after game. But even his most vocal critics—and that number dwindled considerably over the years—acknowledged that Ray Richard has been a student of the game. Continually probing ideas and strategies, searching for new plays to implement, and devising new offenses to go with pressure defenses—anything that could lead to victory.
A Richard-coached game does not please the plain zone and man-to-man fanatics. His is a game complete with such set ups as Gold, Blue, Man 1, Man 2 GD, and others—all variations on a theme, each designed to throw off the opposition at critical moments. He'd often preach, "A great defense leads to a good offense." When former NHIAA head Walter Smith jokingly told Coach Ray that “the worst thing you coaches invented was the four-corner offense,” Richard laughed and walked away. He was firmly against abolishing the four-corners and replacing it with a 30-second clock. “It would take the play away from a defensive-minded ball club,” he said.
But he won’t have to worry about such matters anymore. No more scheduling, no more scouting, no more long bus rides, no more vocal time outs, no more November to March practices.
In a day when few coaches seem to stay in one place too long, Ray Richard’s accomplishments at PHS and Conval High will be hard to match. He predicted neither championship nor doom in 12 years here, but produced a product that has sold easily and pleased thousands. Conval High basketball, with Ray Richard in charge, has been one of the most enjoyable experiences for fans searching for a place to let off steam and to forget daily pressures. (From The Peterborough Transcript, March 2, 1978)
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