By John Gillooly, Providence Journal
April 7, 2014
He started his high school coaching career when he was still a college student, and he won the state’s major boys basketball championship in only his second year as a head coach.
Somebody else in his position might have thought high school coaching was simple. But right from the beginning, Jim Psaras knew high school coaching wasn’t going to be easy, especially at a mid-size public high school in the smallest state in the county.
But he welcomed the challenge.
The world, and the city of Newport along with it, already was starting to undergo dramatic changes when Psaras became the Rogers High School boys basketball coach in 1989.
The boats in Newport Harbor during the summer seemed to be getting bigger and more plentiful, but the city was losing some of its middle-class residents whose children had formed the core of what had been successful Rogers athletic programs for decades.
It also was becoming a world where teenagers were facing a constant bombardment of new technology that would drain their attention and focus.
But fortunately for Newport, one constant over the past three decades was Psaras’ passion for coaching high school basketball.
A few weeks ago, Psaras announced he was stepping down after 26 years as the Vikings head coach. It marked the end of a long and dedicated coaching career that, unfortunately, we just don’t see that much in high school sports these days.
It was almost three decades of a passion for teaching young people some very valuable life lessons through their participation in sports, as well as winning a lot of games.
His won-loss record is one of the most impressive in the history of Rhode Island high school boys basketball. His Rogers teams won three Division I state championships. Since 1990, no other public school boys basketball team has won three Division I state titles.
His teams won 421 games in 26 years in a variety of different divisions, while losing only 245. That’s a 63 percent win-percentage, which has to be one of the best by any public school coach in the history of high school basketball.
But his coaching career was so much more than the victories. It was 26 years of developing relationships with young people; nearly three decades of teaching teenagers important values of commitment, determination hard work and teamwork at a time when their lives are being affected by so many outside influences
Psaras has every right to feel after 26 years that his job is complete.
You just hate to lose the good ones in Rhode Island high school sports, and he was one of the best.
