Coach retires after 20-year coaching career and 14 sectional titles
Kevin O’Connell holds the Section V Class C Coach of the Year Award that he received in 2022. Photo by Brian Donahue
For a self-professed “baseball guy”, Kevin O’Connell wound up having a stellar coaching career as the first coach of the Honeoye Falls-Lima Girls Varsity Lacrosse program.
O’Connell, who retired from teaching and coaching at the end of the 2023-24 school year, guided the program to 14 Section V titles, 13 New York State Public High School Athletic Association (NYSPHSAA) championships, 13 NYSPHSAA semifinal appearances and six NYSPHSAA finals appearances on the way to a 240-164 record. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that out of 113 graduates who played on varsity over his 20-year career, 68 of them (or 60%) have gone on to play the sport at the college level (32 of them at the Division I level, the NCAA’s highest level).
“I was a baseball guy my whole life,” said O’Connell during a recent interview. “I played baseball in high school and in college. At HF-L, I started coaching with Ralph Clapp as an assistant in the varsity baseball program. Then, the junior varsity softball coach left at the last minute and I took that position. Shortly after that Rick Pound approached me. He, and John and Roxanne Price had started the youth lacrosse program. They had a lot of girls playing and needed to separate the programs into boys and girls teams and he asked me to take the girls program. I said ‘But Rick, I don’t know anything about lacrosse!’ He told me that he had seen me coach and knew that I was just what he was looking for in a coach and that he could teach me about the game.”
Pound laughed when he recalled that conversation. He and the Prices had begun the lacrosse program in 1996 with 34 boys and girls. By spring 1997, the program’s second year, that number was up to 57 and in spring of 1998, it was up to 65 with 17 of those players being girls. Pound was coaching the girls three days a week and the boys three days a week and the teams were playing in a youth league.
“I approached Kevin in 1999,” Pound said. “He and I were on the football coaching staff together. I had noticed his level of integrity and his focus on the kids. He showed that he was a standup guy with great character. That’s why I asked him about taking on the girls program in 1999. I told him I could teach him lacrosse but I couldn’t teach him to be the kind of person he already was: a good coach with a focus on the students. He was a student of the game; he watched other coaches coach and would go to any clinic he could. Obviously, he was the right choice. Look at what he and the girls lacrosse program have achieved in 20 years.”
The girls and boys teams played in the Rochester Area Lacrosse League in 1999 and 2000. In 2001, the teams moved to the modified level. In 2002 and 2003, the teams were at the junior varsity level and, in 2004, both the girls and boys teams became varsity level programs.
There were a couple of reasons why O’Connell said yes to becoming the girls lacrosse coach.
“One, was because the program was starting on the ground floor and it was enticing to be able to build the program,” O’Connell said. “The other was my little girl, Kayla. I thought it might be a way for us to connect and bond.”
How did someone with no knowledge of the sport teach the all-important stick skills needed for lacrosse when he first started coaching? O’Connell revealed his secret.
“When I first started coaching, I never demonstrated a skill with a stick in drills,” he said. “Rick gave me names of those kids who had great stick skills. If I wanted the girls to practice a stick skill, I would have one of the better players come up and demonstrate what I wanted the others to do during a drill. I knew that if I had demonstrated it and did it wrong, the better players would know it and question me being their coach. The first couple of years, I did that and I learned from watching the better players so that I was eventually able to do it. In the meantime, it also gave those players a sense of leadership because they were helping their fellow teammates.”
A Rush-Henrietta Roth (when R-H had two high schools) graduate, O’Connell was a three-sport athlete as he played football for coach Jerry Everling, basketball for coach Jim Cox and baseball for coach Don Fazio and then Neil Edkins. After high school, he went to Monroe Community College where he played baseball for the legendary Dave Chamberlain, playing in the Junior College World Series his first year at MCC. After his two years at MCC, he moved on to SUNY Cortland where he also played baseball and got his degree in physical education.
“I always wanted to be involved in athletics when I was at R-H and school was not as much of a focus,” O’Connell said. “When I was a junior or senior in high school, I knew I wanted to stay involved in athletics so I decided to be a physical education teacher and get into coaching. All three of my high school coaches were very impactful on me and my coaching. I learned so many things from them that I ‘stole’ and used in my coaching.”
In turn, O’Connell has had a big impact on his players. Many of them attended a retirement party for him over the summer, including some from his first few years as a coach. Many of them probably share the same sentiments that more recent grads have of O’Connell.
“Playing for coach O’Connell was nothing short of great,” wrote HF-L 2023 grad Clare Ruff, now studying at the University of Pennsylvania where she is also playing lacrosse for the women’s team, in a text. “My four years with him were great, but I think it took me until going to college to realize the level of impact he had on me. He couldn’t have prepared his players more for the most important aspects of the game – willingness to learn and competitiveness. But more important than on the field, he taught me so many lessons about dealing with day to day life challenges and how to live my life as a whole.”
O’Connell’s coaching philosophy extended to his teaching philosophy as well.
Although former fellow Lima Primary teacher Jeff McKee originated Lima Primary’s “Dance Party Fridays”, O’Connell continued the tradition after McKee’s retirement for the kindergarten and first-grade students.
“Jeff loved music and one Friday, he came in and said I’m going to play Aretha Franklin’s Respect during class,” said O’Connell. “He got the kids in our first class to dance to it and they got a kick out of it. Each class that day really loved it, so much so that the next week the kids asked to do it again. It really took off once it was posted to the school’s Twitter account and people followed us. During COVID, it was something we could do online with the kids. It was really something so simple, yet the kids got excited about it.”
In the last couple of years, O’Connell has taken on another role at HF-L, that of being a bus driver.
Like so many other school districts, HF-L has battled a shortage of bus drivers. O’Connell was one of the teachers who stepped forward to fill in the gaps.
“Bill Harvey, the former transportation director for the district, knew I had a CDL license because I drove a truck during the summer for a construction company,” O’Connell said. “Bill came to me and said he had this big need for drivers. I told him sure I’ll do it. I had a lot of respect for Bill so I was willing to help him out. HF-L has been good to my family and I and I had no problem helping out when HF-L needed me to do so.”
It was just one more way that O’Connell could connect with the students, just as he did with his players.
“Before every practice, we would go around talking about our days for 5-10 minutes; and during that he and the other coaches would bust our chops, and tell us funny aspects of their days too,” Ruff wrote. “During COVID in the spring of 2020 when schools went remote, we would have Zoom calls where everyone could talk about their days/weeks in quarantine. He wasn’t just a great coach, he is a great person. HF-L girls lacrosse and coach O’Connell will always be synonymous in my mind!”
Pound, who left HF-L in 2005, returned in 2015 to become O’Connell’s assistant with the girls varsity. Two things about O’Connell stand out in his mind as to why O’Connell was a successful coach.
One is that he had a vision of building a child’s success and tying sports to life lessons and he was a proponent of students not specializing in one sport but in being a two or three-sport athlete, a philosophy that Pound shared.
The other was the fact that O’Connell was not afraid to take chances or take the easy route as far as scheduling opponents.
“That is one thing I appreciate about Kevin,” said Pound, who is a close personal friend of O’Connell. “He would play the tough opponents like West Genesee, Skaneateles, Victor or Pittsford. Last year, the team played four state champions. He did not shy away from that but knew that playing tough competition like that would put the girls into the best possible position to be prepared come sectional and state tournament time because they would learn from their mistakes and the losses.”
As to what comes next for O’Connell, he has already started the next chapter as he is working for Power Construction. He may also be a substitute bus driver for HF-L and will continued to officiate both women’s and men’s college basketball at the Division I, II and III level as he has done for many years. He may also get back on a lacrosse field, this time as a referee.
For O’Connell, while the wins and accolades that have come with them (just this year, he was named the 2024 Coach of the Year from Section V by his fellow head coaches, the Section V Class C Coach of the Year in 2024, the Monroe County Coach of the Year in 2024 and USA Lacrosse 2024 High School Girls Coach of the Year for New York) are nice, those aren’t the highlights of his coaching career.
“The highlights are the connections with the girls through lacrosse,” he said. “I was fortunate to see them walk the halls of Lima Primary as kindergarten and first-grade students, then see them compete for sectional titles and down at SUNY Cortland for state titles and fortunate to being a part of their lives. I still talk with some of them; have been invited to weddings and it is wonderful now to see them as young ladies. It meant the world to me that so many of them came to a retirement party for me. I have often referred to the girls lacrosse program as my third child. I thank my wife Kirstin and my children Kayla and David for allowing me to coach because it does take away from family time. Having the opportunity to coach Kayla on the varsity was a highlight. I think that time was and is awfully precious to both of us.”
