June 1, 2005
Whitey says goodbye to basketball
By TOM WILLIAMS
Sports Columnist
It was a cool night, just a week or so before the start of winter in 1969. There weren’t many people in The
Charcoal Pit on Route 9 in Linwood. But the little, blonde guy was hard to miss. He had a smile that
covered his face.
“I had just won my first game as a basketball coach,” remembered Harold “Whitey” Haak, “and I wanted to
shout it to everyone, ‘I’m a coach and I won my first game tonight’.”
It was a junior varsity game. Washington Township beat Pitman. Township’s head coach was Pete Horn, a
former assistant to Dixie Howell at Ocean City. Haak played for Dixie and the association undoubtedly
helped him get his first job.
Ironically, it was Washington Township that defeated Haak’s Mainland team in March, knocking the
Mustangs out of the NJSIAA Group 4 Tournament in what turned out to be his final game as a head coach.
Haak officially resigned as Mainland’s boys basketball coach Monday night. He told his players the week
before. He will continue to teach and coach golf at Mainland.
“You get tired during every season,” he explained, “then you give it a few weeks, or months, to see if the
energy comes back. I wanted to wait until the dust cleared before I made a final decision. I still love the
sport and will try to get involved again, but the drive to run a program hasn’t returned.”
Haak coached 464 varsity basketball games, plus many more on the junior varsity level. His 218 wins at
Mainland moved him past Nunce Sacco as the winningest boys basketball coach in school history.
But Haak’s total varsity coaching record is 810-372, a total of 1,182 contests. He may be the only coach
in league history to register more than 800 wins. In addition to 244 boys basketball victories (including 26
at Millville) he has 411 in golf, had 112 in boys tennis and 43 in girls cross country. He started the boys
tennis program at Mainland after coaching the sport at Millville. Every time his basketball team visited
Millville, he took a quick glance at the championship tennis banner on the wall with his name on it.
“My wife and I have never had a Christmas vacation,” he said, “and my daughter in getting married in
August. There are a lot of things we’ve missed, though we’ve gained a lot from basketball.”
Haak had no reservations about who he would like to succeed him. “Jon Evans should get the job,” he said,
“and you can quote me on that. He is a great person with a great background – John Bruno was his coach
in junior high and Sam Botta in high school. He’s been a head coach and he did a terrific job at Oakcrest.
And he’s a Mainland guy. He left a head coaching job to come back to his alma mater.”
If Evans does get the job, he would become the third former Cape-Atlantic League star to be hired to coach
boys basketball in the CAL during this off-season. Van Cathcart, former star at Middle Township, has been
named to succeed the retired Tom Schurtz at Absegami. And Anthony Toner, son of Holy Spirit legend
Mike Toner and a very good player under Jim Mogan, returns to his alma mater to succeed John Ricci at
Sacred Heart.
Back in the summer of 1958, Whitey Haak was playing basketball on the Sixth Street courts in Ocean
City when a little guy wandered up and joined the game. Haak had just graduated, having played on a
team that didn’t lose a game until Riverside beat it by two points in the South Jersey final.
The little guy was Ken Leary, who had started as a freshman the year before at St. Cecilia of Kearny,
which lost to Wildwood Catholic in the state finals. “You could see right away he was something special,”
said Haak, “and I was glad when he picked Ocean City.” Leary had originally planned to attend Holy Spirit.
Who could have imagined that those two diminutive basketball players that day almost exactly 47 years
ago would go on to win more than 1,300 games between them, including 763 in boys basketball.
They both became disciples of Dixie Howell basketball and now they are both an important part of CAL
history.
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