Mr. Beverly Basketball
For Tom Donovan, the game never gets old
I was going by Balch Playground the other day and saw Tom Donovan shooting hoops.
I could have written the same sentence 60 years ago.
Donovan is Mr. Beverly Basketball. He’s played and coached the game his whole life. He played for Beverly High, played in college, and kept playing for years in local basketball leagues. He started coaching at the age of 23 as an assistant at North Shore Community College, spent 10 years as the Beverly High boys coach, and ran a summer basketball camp for 30 years.
For the last nine years he’s been an announcer on BevCam for the Beverly High boys basketball games, and this past season also did the girls games.
So there he was at age 77 on the hot noontime basketball court doing what he does best — coaching a young Beverly player. I was on my way to a story, but I had to stop because there is no more ‘Beverly’ story than Tom Donovan and basketball.
Seeing Tom at Balch reminded me of the day when he was picked as the Beverly High basketball coach. He was coaching the Beverly Legion baseball team at the time at Cooney Field and hadn’t even heard the news (these were mostly pre-cell-phone days) until I tracked him down and told him.
The first thing he said was he wanted to go to Balch and do the interview there for my story. That’s where he grew up playing basketball (he lived on nearby Courtney Drive), and that’s where he wanted to celebrate his dream of becoming the high school coach.
When I walked onto the court at Balch the other day, Tom was holding a stopwatch as Kyle Gambale, a rising sophomore at Beverly High, went through some drills. Tom was wearing an ancient Chris Ford Basketball School tank top. He had the same bushy mustache and longish hair that he had a half-century ago, only white instead of blonde.
“I work a lot of the kids out in the off-season,” Tom told me. “This is my way of giving back.” It should be noted that Tom does these one-on-one sessions for free. It’s strictly volunteer.
I actually coached with Tom one year on the eighth-grade traveling team, and as I watched him put Kyle through the paces I was reminded of the nice way he has with kids. He’s a stickler for fundamentals and hard work, but he’s always positive and encouraging.
So I asked him the question I already knew the answer to: Why, after all these years, are you still bouncing a basketball at Balch?
“My love for the game,” he said. “My love for the kids. I was very lucky. I found my calling early in life. I became a playground instructor in 1965 and found out I loved working with kids.”
“It keeps me young,” he added.
Tom turned his attention back to Kyle, who had just finished a particularly grueling drill. Tom told him that was the best time to practice your free throws, when you’re tired, just like in a game.
Kyle went to the line and started knocking down those free throws. Another decade, another lesson learned from Coach Tom Donovan.
