CONVAL HOOP HERITAGE

T he 1984-85 Cougars were the first varsity basketball team in school history to score 100 points in a game. They defeated Pelham (which was still fairly new to Class I/D2 at the time) 105-42 en route to a 13-5 season. But they weren’t the first-first to do it. The 1974 JVs hold that honor, defeating Monadnock 100-54. The team went 12 for 12 from the line, and had four scorers in double figures: Phil Abbott, Jon Barnes, John Tempone and Craig Whitney . We can’t find record of any other CV team hitting the century mark so let us know if the milestone happened again. More than scoring 100 points in a game, the historic significance of the feat by both the ’85 varsity and the ’74 JVs was that it was achieved  before the era of the 3-pointer! That didn’t happen in New Hampshire high school basketball until the 1987 season. Ironically, the number of high-scoring games around the state since then have been relatively few. Pictured are the ’84-’85 Cougars who accomplished the feat—seve...

A young Dave Gavitt (with ball) in Peterborough with teammates Bernie Cutter (left) and Ron Bailey, and as legendary coach at Providence College. I n the 1954-55 season, Peterborough High School enjoyed its finest year since the 1941 state champions. The Hilanders, paced by Wayne Crowell, Ron Bailey, Gary Brown , former Hancock High standout Bob Kierstead (Hancock had just begun sending its high school students to PHS), and a kid named Dave Gavitt , finished the regular season 14-2 and won the Monadnock League Championship. Highly ranked in the Class B state tournament, the Hilanders were heavy favorites against St. John of Concord (now Bishop Brady) in the first round. The Green and White seemed well on their way to the quarter-finals, holding a 10-point lead heading into the fourth quarter. Then, as the Peterborough Transcript reported, “everything went wrong. Not a tally was scored by the luckless Hilanders until co-captain Gavitt netted a desperation two points after six minutes o...

Mighty Warriors from Antrim, 1967-68 (front, from left): Dennis Huntington, Richard Brzozowski, Gary Cole and Bruce Davies. Standing (from left): Coach Chick Hamel, Fred Doleac, Jeff Barsanti, John Doleac, Robin Rockwell, Dave Jones and Bill Davies. Missing from photo: Steve Brzozowski and Bruce Chesson. W hen Antrim High School joined Peterborough High School to form Conval Regional High School in 1970, it’s not surprising that two winning basketball traditions helped to immediately put the Cougars on the map. While Peterborough was the team of the decade in the 1930s and produced champions in the late 1920s and early 1940s, Antrim High was among the cream of the crop throughout the 1960s. From 1962 to its final season of 1970, Antrim was a perennial participant in the Class S (D4) state tournament and among the best in the state near the end of the decade. But the season everyone in Antrim will long remember is 1967-68 when the Warriors were on the edge of reaching the pinnacle of hi...

Al Johnson ('87) had a jaw-dropping 30 seconds in the 1986 state semi-finals vs. Berlin . I n the 1986 state tournament semi-finals against Berlin, Conval junior Al Johnson qualified for the Guinness Book of World Records and reportedly a mention in USA Today by scoring nine points in the game’s last 30 seconds! After the Cougars fell behind 32-30 with 34 seconds to play, Al converted a three-point play with 13 seconds to go, and scored six more points in the remaining seconds—two on technical free throws and four on layups. Holy cow! Conval, the fifth seed in the Class I (D2) tournament, won the game 39-32 and went on to upset highly ranked Fall Mountain in the finals, 52-48, for the school’s first-ever boys’ basketball state championship. #historymaker #nevergiveup #rollcougs

Kevin Pettee (CV '73 ) T he very first points ever scored by a Conval High boys’ basketball team were from the hands of an unlikely source. In the Cougars’ first-ever game in December 1970 at Bishop Brady High School in Concord, Kevin Pettee (‘73), pictured during his sophomore year, brought his JV bench and the varsity team in the stands to their feet after scoring the school’s first-ever hoop. “I remember Coach Ray Brown looked amazed because I wasn’t ever anything like a good player,” Kevin recalls. He said the shot was “actually an error because when the loose ball flew by over my head in the three-second area, what I tried to do was to tip it over in the direction of a teammate. But instead, the ball bounced up off my palm and landed in the hoop. I doubt I ever scored another point.” #alwaysbeready #anythingcanhappen #historymatters #rollcougs