Mike Steiner
Sports Editor
Perhaps this complaint is getting as repetitive as my beef with Lebron James and Brett Favre (would someone PLEASE give me props for having not mentioned them for what seems like years?). That’s OK though because to all you doubters, I have found your kryptonite: indisputable evidence. That’s right, folks, Steiner’s got numbers to back up his previously thought-to-be ridiculous rants. So sit back and enjoy my most factual column to date.
It’s been an impressive year for Keene State College athletics.
A couple weeks ago coach Charlie Beach won his 600th career game as a coach for KSC, a feat that shouldn’t be overlooked. And yet it still is.
Over my reign as sports editor (and when I say reign I mean it in a “Scar takes over pride rock while everyone thinks Simba is dead” kind of reign) I’ve been fortunate to witness some unbelievable milestones by our coaches:
In addition to Beach’s 600th win, coach Ron Butcher beginning his 40th season with KSC men’s soccer; coach Keith Boucher earning his 300th win coaching women’s basketball; coach Rob Colbert earning career win number 200 with the men’s basketball team; and coach Ken Howe earning win number 400 with baseball just to name a few.
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It’s been an unbelievable pleasure interviewing and interacting with coaches here, but sometimes it’s easy to overlook just how impressive the resumes here are.
I hear about Howe winning 400 games, but where does having 400 wins rank in comparison to the rest of the Little East Conference?
My initial thought was that there couldn’t possibly be any other schools that have as many ridiculously successful coaches as KSC. Sure, a little biased, but seriously look at those numbers!
So being the investigative person that I am (lie) and because I never like to lie (lie) I did hours and hours of research (unfortunately not a lie) to bring you, the reader, the truth.
I started with KSC and looked up the career record at KSC of all the current coaches at KSC. For fall and winter coaches I counted their most recent seasons. For fall that was 2010 and for winter that was 2010-2011.
For spring sports I didn’t take into account the number of wins accumulated so far in the current season because some teams have played a significantly larger amount of games than other teams.
The sports involved in the survey were men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer, field hockey, volleyball, baseball, softball, and men’s and women’s lacrosse.
I intentionally excluded swimming and all track and field/throwing events because there aren’t defined “winners” and “losers,” there are only places. It’s a rarity for a team to win an entire event but they can still be very successful.
What I found is exactly what I was hoping for: KSC is leading the LEC in wins among current coaches.
Not only are they winning, it’s by a pretty sizeable margin.
You can check the accompanying chart for numbers, but it’s pretty clear that KSC and ECSU are killing everyone else.
Here’s an interesting footnote though: over 1,300 of Eastern’s wins come from one coach. Not that that should affect how their win total is viewed but that’s around half of their total.
For those astute readers, you will note that there are only seven teams on the chart and there are eight teams in the LEC. Bonus points to you, but no, that wasn’t a mistake. UMass Boston may or may not be in the running for most wins, but I’ll never know because of how ridiculously uninformative their athletics website is in regards to coach wins.
I kid you not, I Googled names, searched through the archives, and went to biography pages on the site. Nothing helped. So, sorry UMass Boston, no one will ever know how you compare to the rest of the LEC.
Another thing worth noting is the asterisk (that funny, star-looking shape) next to Rhode Island College’s win total.
That’s because RIC doesn’t have a field hockey team or a men’s lacrosse team, which unfortunately throws their numbers off.
What is interesting about this story is that by removing swimming and track and field/throwing, we’re removing arguably our two most successful sports from the survey, which just makes the win total even more impressive.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me who is really blown away and proud of these numbers. I’ve always been fascinated by sports statistics and comparing them so it was really exciting for me to see how we stacked up to the rest of the LEC.
This just proves that I’ve been right the entire year when I’ve been telling people that KSC athletics are underappreciated. Just another notch on my hypothetical belt.
Mike Steiner can be contacted at msteiner@keeneequinox.com
