CASEY BIDS ADIEU

DOVER — New Hampshire high school basketball lost one of the sport’s genuinely nice people when Dan Casey announced Thursday he was stepping down as head coach of the Dover High School girls team.

Casey, 47, coached 19 years at Dover, the last 10 as the head coach.

The 1990 Dover High grad has taken a new job and he said it was “going to result in conflicts and I wasn’t going to be able to put the time in that I needed to, to coach the way I want to coach.”

Casey has been coaching high school sports for 26 years and, at this point, plans to continue to coach the Dover High girls tennis team.

His first high school coaching job back in the early 1990s was with the Exeter boys tennis team.

Casey’s 21 years coaching basketball started as the JV girls coach at Dover under Ernie Clark, a position he held for nine years.

He left Dover for two years to coach the varsity girls basketball team at Portsmouth High School before returning to Dover in 2009 when the head coach position reopened.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had a winter without coaching basketball,” Casey said. “One of the things that I’m actually looking forward to is my son’s senior season. I’ll be able to watch (Max’s) games and be a fan. I’m very happy about that part of it.”

Casey said learning the coaching game under Ernie Clark was a perfect situation for him. “I felt that he taught me a lot of things that I carried with me.”

When Casey became head coach he said he was fortunate to have Clark’s daughter, Jessica, coach with him for several years.

That was one thing that has hit home with him, Dover players returning to give back to the program.

“That’s one of my proudest things,” he said. “The relationships I have made and (former players’) desire to come back and be part of it.”

Casey was an assistant when Dover won its last state title in 2002 in old Class L, and was also aboard during runner-up finishes in 2001 and 2005.

The Green Wave never got to the final during his stint, but they were almost always competitive.

Two games that stand out are Division I first-round wins in 2016 and 2017. In 2016, Dover beat No. 8 Manchester Central in overtime, 38-32. It was then freshman Katrina Krenzer who sent the game into overtime with a basket as time expired.

She scored her 1,000th career point as a senior this past winter.

In 2017, Dover overcame a 17-point first-half deficit to upset No. 5 Londonderry, 47-46. Dover won the game with 12 seconds to play when Casey’s daughter, Maggie, rolled in a 3-pointer.

While those two games do stick out for Casey, he added with a laugh that “as a coach I remember a lot of the losses more than I remember the wins.”

Casey said that the Londonderry win, in particular, “was a theme for a lot of teams. I felt we were always a scrappy team, a hard-working team. One that fought from the tip off to the last whistle.”

He said of those two playoff wins, “the girls didn’t want to give up. Keep at it. Keep at it.”

Looking back over his 26 years as a coach at various levels, Casey said, “every year brings additional change. It’s a lot different now than it was then.”

He laughed. “I started coaching before cell phones.”

While he placed himself in the category of coaches trying to win a championship, he added that “I wanted it to be something that when the kids graduated and looked back on their high school basketball experience, it was one of the highlights of their time in high school.

“I tried to challenge them,” Casey said. “I tried to be creative in practices, game plan sometimes, use different defenses. Try new things and change things up a bit.”

Still, he felt consistency in the program was important, pointing to assistant coach Jackie Small who has been with the Dover girls program since before he joined it over 20 years ago.

Casey said he tried to get to know each and every kid and to build a relationship.

“Basketball was obviously what I was there for, as a job,” he said. “But there’s a lot that goes beyond the sport.”

Beyond the wins and losses and Xs and Os, and Dan Casey always understood that.