WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Don Beleski
Part 1: ‘I’ On Sports: Remembering Don Beleski
The story of one of Manchester’s most well-known coaches, Don Beleski, continuing on with the wide range of sports he coached.
FOOTBALL
Most coaches think that working with one sport is enough. While many would have been satisfied with the success Don enjoyed mentoring baseball players in Little League, Pony League, Babe Ruth League, high school, and American Legion, not so, with Beleski. He loved coaching and he loved football. He began with the storied Manchester Vikings, working with its legendary gridiron mentors, Bob Lawrence and Wally Rozmus, back in the late 1960’s and remained with them for seven years.
Following that experience, Ken Sciacca, then head coach at Trinity High School, asked Don to join his staff, and – surprise, surprise – Beleski accepted. He remained there for 12 years, staying with Jack Gati when he took the reigns of the Pioneer football program in the mid ’70s. Some of his best memories with the crews from Bridge Street were the ‘76 state championship game against Salem and the many Turkey Bowl games against city teams, particularly the 1980 tilt against Central.
“We beat them and the kids knew that this was my last year coaching them,” said Don. All the players signed the game ball and gave it to me, a really emotional moment – one that I’ll never forget.” As impacting as that was for Beleski, he was overwhelmed when he was selected as an assistant coach for the N.H. Shrine Team (under Gati) stating “That was one of my proudest moments ever.”
BASKETBALL
When I asked Don if there was one sport he loved to coach more than any of the others, his answer was as quick as his reasoning behind it.“Basketball, without question!” he blurted.“Baseball was the easiest to coach because you have time to make decisions due to the fact that the game moves more slowly. Football was somewhat harder because there were too many specialty areas and you had to rely too much on your assistant coaches.
Track was really tough because there were too many events.
“I was alone, there were no assistants, and my only expertise was in the dashes,” he continued,” but basketball – I LOVED coaching basketball. As a coach, you’re constantly thinking no matter what sport you’re dealing with, but the pace of the game in basketball demanded continually quick thinking. As fast as the game was, as the coach, you had to be even faster.”
Though his coaching career began with the Boys Club All-Stars in the late 1950s (where he met Matty Bozek), as well as completing a brief two-year stint with St. Anne CYO, it was Sciacca, then Athletic Director at Trinity High School, who really opened the gym door for Don.
In 1972, Ken offered him the JV hoop job and, over the next two years, Beleski led his clubs to an astounding 40-and-1 record. It was at this time that varsity coach, Stan Gorski, became ill and had to step down from his position. Considering the job Beleski had done, Sciacca offered him the post as varsity head mentor and he remained there until 1985, retiring after that club won the third Class“L” title achieved under his direction.“In ‘74, we went to the semis and in ‘75 and ‘76, we won back-to back ‘L’ titles.
From 1974 through1985, we went to every state tournament. I say “we” because it was the kids that got us there every year. I just got the chance to lead them – and I couldn‘t have been prouder to do that,” Don said. “As much as winning three titles will stay with me forever, one game, in particular, will stand out equally and that’s when we knocked off the number 5 team in the country, Don Bosco High School from Boston. That was huge!”
In 1990, Don took over the head coaching job at Concord High for one year, replacing Bill Haubrick who had taken a leave-of-absence to pursue his master’s degree.
In 1992 and ‘93, he served as an assistant at Bishop Guertin High School of Nashua.It was during the ‘80s and ‘90s that Beleski also spent 12 years as head coach of a number of AAU Junior Olympic teams and went to six national tournaments during that tenure. My son, Todd Menswar, was a member of one of those clubs, and to this day, he still considers Coach Beleski to be one of the best he’s ever had – in ANY sport, and Todd played baseball, basketball, football, and soccer over his athletic career.
As he put it, “AAU was a great experience for me. The whole thing was eye-opening, but that was when AAU was really AAU, not the watered-down version you often see today. I appreciated Mr. Beleski’s coaching style and really respected him. He was a ‘no nonsense’ type of guy, but if you worked hard, you knew he’d always give you a shot.
The club I was on had tons of talent. A lot of people will remember some of them – Max Englehardt, Danny O’Donnell, Jason Richardson, Woody Anderson, Kirk McGonagle, Derrick Bowman, Jeff Stanley, and Greg Smith. Still living in the Manchester area, Don came out of retirement in 1998 to coach Goffstown’s Mountain View Middle School to a 15-3 record. He then moved to Hampton Beach where he remains a resident today.
Though Goffstown wanted him to return, the commute, he decided, would be too much.
“The distance wasn’t what bothered me the most. It was the time of year. As everyone around here knows, winter driving can be treacherous and trying to make the drive from the beach to the Goffstown gym for daily practices and weekly games was too dangerous. I’m moving again soon, but this time only to get a little closer to the water. I’ll be about 500 feet from the ocean.”
He has been asked numerous times by numerous people in the seacoast area to take another coaching job and, as much as he sometimes would like to, he usually responds to their request with the following answer: “I haven’t lost the skill to teach – to communicate. I still love coaching. The problem is while the kids haven’t changed that much, the parents have. Unfortunately, a number of them have pushed too many good coaches away from their jobs, not because the coaches didn’t do their jobs, but because the parents kept meddling so much that they (the coaches) couldn’t DO their jobs,” he said.
“Thanks to the internet, too many parents now think they know the sport and how to teach it better than the coach. They’ve become too influential and it’s resulted in a number of people now coaching for the wrong reason. I’m talking about those people who really don’t know the game that well, but are coaching because no one else will,” Don continued. “Coaching isn’t just telling kids what to do. It’s also explaining to them why they’re doing it…and it can’t be ‘because I said so. It’s my way or the highway.’ That‘s not what you‘re there for.”
And that is what I believe separates Don Beleski from the majority of others involved in coaching.There are many of us who have put in years trying to pass on the skills we’ve learned to those in our charge, but there are few who can really TEACH those skills, explaining not only what to do, but also why it’s important to do it and that’s Beleski’s greatest strength. He has a tremendous ability to communicate.
Additionally, too many coaches (at times, myself included), when faced with a “problem kid” on the team will just get rid of the kid. Not so Beleski, who’s often said to opposing coaches who’ve complained about a particular player, “If you don’t want him, I’ll take him.”
In Don’s own words, “I love the challenge of coaching. While I know some kids didn’t always want to accept things I did, when they’ve come back to see me years later, they always say they remembered what I did and, most importantly, why I did it. Though everyone’s heard the adage,‘There’s no ‘I’ in team,‘ truer words were never spoken. Whether it’s baseball, basketball, football, or track…they’re all team sports and, though some players may not like to hear it, they all have to be continually reminded of that. They’re often underestimated, but when they mature, kids remember.”
Beleski continued, “Many of my former players are now coaches themselves and one of the most rewarding things I hear from them is that they are using the same philosophy in their coaching that I taught in mine. And when I ask them Why? they say ‘because it works.’”
While some may have questioned his coaching style (and, yes, Don, there were a few…) no one could question his commitment to youth sports, his commitment to the youths he mentored in all the sports he coached for a combined total of 93 seasons. Yes, you read that right, 93 seasons !!!
Now “retired“ (honestly, that‘s what he said!), Don still works three days a week delivering auto parts around the Portsmouth area and, in his free time, referees middle school hoops five days a week over the winter transitioning to the baseball diamond in the spring where he umpires junior high baseball games. As to how the Trinity High School and Manchester Queen City Athletic Halls of Fame member would like to be remembered…
“As a person who has no regrets. I always tried to instill discipline and sportsmanship in my players, to get my kids to realize the importance of being a team player, to get my kids to be the best they could be in whatever sports they played. Additionally, I also want people to realize that, besides wanting to help my kids do the best they could while playing sports, I wanted those same kids to realize that playing sports would only go so far.
Doing the best they could in school would have a much bigger impact on their lives than playing sports. They needed to realize that if they also gave 100% in school as well as in whatever sports they played, when they were done, they could always say to themselves, ‘I did the best I could,‘ and that’s all anyone could ask of them. While some may have questioned my ‘style,‘ my answer to them would be, if I wasn’t doing something right, those kids wouldn’t have busted their butts for me and, fortunately, they did.”
My son, now a coach himself, was one of those “bust their butts for him” kids and, in his opinion, Beleski didn’t only teach discipline, sportsmanship, and team play, he taught his future mentors another important trait that a coach HAS to have: to treat his players fairly. Added Todd, “Mr.Beleski always did. I can honestly say that the two coaches who had the greatest influence on me were Don Beleski and Pat O’Neil. You always listened to their advice, respected their coaching ability, and never second-guessed them.”
Todd said they were two of the best, and I take him at his word, always have. If I can’t believe my own son, a “seasoned” veteran, below are Beleski’s “Seasons of Coaching” in each sport:
TRACK
High School Trinity
Total: 1 season
BASEBALL
- Little League
- Lions – Central 5 seasons
- Odd Fellows – South 6 seasons
- Pony League
- Sanders 2 seasons
- Babe Ruth League
- Elks & Kiwanis 16 seasons
- High School
- Trinity 1 season
- American Legion
- Sweeney Post 3 seasons
TOTAL 33 seasons
- FOOTBALL
- Youth
- Manchester Vikings 7 seasons
- High School
- Trinity 12 seasons
TOTAL 19 seasons
- BASKETBALL
- Youth
- Boy’s Club 8 seasons
- St. Anne CYO 2 seasons
- AAU 12 seasons
- Middle School
- Goffstown 1 season
- High School
- Trinity JV’s 2 seasons
- Trinity Varsity 12 seasons
- Concord 1 season
- Bishop Guertin 2 seasons
TOTAL 40 seasons
ALL SPORTS COMBINED – 93 SEASONS ! …TALK ABOUT GIVING 100%!
Ted Menswar Jr. is a life-long resident of the Queen City and a retired member of the English Department of Memorial High School who has been involved in local sports for 70 years as a player, a coach, a mentor and a fan. He can be reached at tedmenswar@outlook.com