SWAMPSCOTT — Last season was a trying one for the Swampscott boys basketball team.
Their coach, Dave Born, abruptly resigned midway through the season, giving way to interim coach Justin Fucile, under whom the Big Blue won their only game of the winter.
If the name sounded familiar, it should have. Fucile was the coach of the team immediately prior to the time Born took it over. He didn’t get chased out of town. He had to step down to concentrate on getting his master’s degree so he could continue as a math teacher at the high school.
But Fucile, a bonafide basketball junkie dating back to the days he played for Brian Bagley at Swampscott, never stopped loving coaching.
However, he takes what he does seriously, and not just the Xs and Os part of it.
“I think kids need consistency,” Fucile said Sunday on the eve of the first day of winter workouts on the North Shore. “They need support, both off the court and on the court.
“It’s important that they understand what the right decisions are and how to reach them,” Fucile said. “We talk about that — how to avoid situations that can put them in bad spots.”
He walked into one of those bad spots last February, after Born submitted his resignation following a Friday night loss in the Big Blue gym. He was asked by the school administration to take the team for the remainder of the season and he accepted. Then, in May, he was named head coach again.
“Last year, when I took over, it was fitful for the kids, and for myself,” he said. “We’d all supported Coach Born. It was a difficult season for a lot of reasons. I thought the seniors on that team showed a lot of leadership.”
It was a difficult year in other ways or Fucile too. He learned a lot about coaching serving as an assistant at Lynn English under Buzzy Barton and Mike Carr Jr., and took Carr’s death last January awfully hard. There was a moment of silence at Swampscott’s home game against English in February in memory of Carr.
Basketball has always been his outlet.
“I loved the game when we I played at Swampscott,” said Fucile. “But I love coaching for what it brings out in you.”
He says he learned a thing or two during his last stint as a coach — the most important thing being how important academics are to the equation.
“My last year, the thing that really cost us was that we lost two players due to grades,” he said. “That wasn’t good. So now, I want to make sure I focus on their grades.
“Also,” he said, “there was my temperament. Sometimes, I got too much into the game. I’m much more calm, I hope. I think better that way.”
He feels he’s laid a good foundation for the winter. The finished first place in the Saugus league over the summer, and the did well in the fall league in which is players competed.
Out of those off-season programs came his two captains: Jake McIntire and Tony Broadnex.
Beyond teaching a game he loves to kids who love it as much as he does, he sees coaches as life teachers.
“Kids are exposed to a lot,” he said. “It’s a lot easier for them to be accessing things that they shouldn’t be accessing.
“These days, they’re offering coaches courses for things like opioids, and other medications and types of drugs. We have to look at them, and we have to make sure students are with good groups of people so they can stay away from stuff like that.
“That’s why I love coaching,” he said. “I love the life part the most. I love to encourage players in the game they’ve chosen and they love, and I like to communicate how it relates to life, and how it’ll lead them in the right direction.”
