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November 1, 2000

Ken Leary deserved a Whole Lot Better

By TOM WILLIAMS
Sports Columnist

There have been very few seasons since 1958-59 when Ken Leary was not part of Cape-Atlantic League basketball.

In December of 1958 he started a three-year career at Ocean City High School that saw him become just the fourth player to score 1,000 points at a CAL school. There are now more than 150 who have done it.

Later, after an award-winning career at Boston University and a few years assisting Gene Hudgins with the Pleasantville High School basketball program, Leary became the Greyhounds' head coach.

The rest, as they say, is history. Or, at least, it became history recently when Pleasantville abruptly replaced Leary as its boys basketball coach.

Leary's teams at Pleasantville won 519 games, more than any coach in CAL history. In fact, only three coaches in South Jersey history have won more.

These teams didn't just materialize. Pleasantville had not had a great deal of success in basketball. It was Leary, himself, who spent thousands of hours during the summer months developing talents and confidence in young athletes - young athletes who became Reggie Miller, Greg Jackson, Gerald Hooks, Tony Davenport, James Inman, Clifton Jones, Jamar Perry and many other talented high school basketball you've probably watched play.

When Leary left Pleasantville for two years to coach at Stockton, the Greyhounds struggled. When he came back, the team immediately turned around.

The success of Leary's basketball program has brought years and years of positive publicity to Pleasantville, a community that is succeeding in its efforts to pull itself back up to where it once was. There is a new high school building and new stimulation in the business community.

His teams won 58 games just in the state tournament, including eight South Jersey championships and three state titles. And he did it a number of different ways with a variety of styles, though most of it centered around fast-paced offense and pressure-filled defense.

During the 1990s, Leary had a couple of health problems, including a stroke. But his remarkable physical condition enabled him to come back strongly from both setbacks.

Last March, at the end of the season, Leary did not receive the form head coaches at Pleasantville normally receive to indicate their intentions for the following season. So, he sent athletic director Joan Robinson a letter stating that he was planning to return. Because of his prior health problems, there were questions almost every March from the media and others in the basketball community about whether he would retire.

Near the end of the school year, Leary found out that Robinson had given him a negative evaluation. Then, later in the summer, a janitor at the school told him he had seen an advertisement for his basketball job in the newspaper.

Leary checked the paper and then went to see Pleasantville's new Superintendent, Dr. Andrew T. Carrington, about the ad. Carrington told him they just wanted to see who would apply for the job. Leary left the office shaking his head.

After more than 30 years of working with Pleasantville's young athletes - helping them develop their skills, gain confidence and, in many cases, earn college scholarships that would have been otherwise unavailable - Leary was being replaced.

Of course, school administrators have the right to make such decisions. Sometimes they are wrong and are either convinced to change their decision (Ocean City's John Bruno) or penalized by legal action (Atlantic City's Joe Fussner) for their error. Even Robinson herself was reportedly on the verge of being replaced as Pleasantville's athletic director a few years ago before the administration recognized its error.

Even if you accept the premise that Leary should replaced - and there are a great many of us who do not - somebody who has given more than three decades of his life to your program at least merits a meeting. Someone should have talked with Leary about retiring, possibly after one final year. He has helped bring great praise upon Pleasantville and its high school. Doesn't he deserve some final recognition?

"I know I could have fought them and probably won," said Leary. "But I don't want to be there if they don't want me. That would be wrong for me and wrong for the kids."

In fact, once he saw the writing on the wall, Leary didn't even bother applying for the job. And he has nothing but praise for Butch Warner, the former Atlantic City High School player who has been named the new coach.

"Butch has been an assistant with me for 12-13 years," Leary said, "and he knows the kids and the program. I hope he does very well."

So do we all. In fact, we'd like to see him take off and win another 500 basketball games for Pleasantville. Lets just hope that, if he does, he gets a lot better treatment from his employers than Ken Leary did from his.

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