Pinkerton's O'Reilly inducted into national lacrosse coaches hall of fame
Dec. 3—Brian O'Reilly has no doubt that the recognition is due to all the games the Pinkerton Academy boys lacrosse team won under his 38-year coaching tenure.
O'Reilly, who won 568 games and 12 state titles leading Pinkerton before retiring in 2019, was inducted into the National Interscholastic Lacrosse Coaches Association Hall of Fame last month at Plandome Country Club in Plandome, New York.
O'Reilly, currently Pinkerton's athletic director and football coach, laid the foundation for all those victories and championships by starting the Derry Youth Lacrosse Association in 1986.
The association allowed kids in the Derry area as young as age 6 to learn and play the sport for free and also supplied free equipment.
"That became the future of what became our successful program," O'Reilly said. "By the time those kids got to middle school and high school, they were as highly skilled as anybody that we played."
Only seeing the sport for the first time when he came to Pinkerton as a football and track coach a year prior, O'Reilly became the Astros' junior varsity boys lacrosse coach under Dick Bly in 1976. O'Reilly became the varsity boys lacrosse coach in 1982.
The NHIAA did not offer boys lacrosse until 1994. Prior to that, the Astros competed against prep schools around New England like St. Paul's School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Holderness School and Proctor Academy.
At that time, O'Reilly said, lacrosse was a prep school sport outside of early hotbed states like New York and Maryland. The Astros, mostly consisting of football players, used their physicality to make up for the talent advantage the private schools had on them, he said.
Experiencing the skill level in that prep school league was among the driving reasons behind O'Reilly starting Derry Youth Lacrosse Association.
Pinkerton, which won the prep school league's Northern New England Championship in 1985 and 1993, was one of the few NHIAA teams when NHIAA play began that already had a local feeder program.
O'Reilly was the only high school coach at the time who also coached at the youth level, he said.
"That was everything," said O'Reilly, who became the first New Hampshire coach to eclipse 500 wins in 2016 and retired with a 568-162 record. "That was the difference maker in the sport in our area."
The Astros won the first four NHIAA state championships from 1994-97, when there was only one league, before capturing four straight Division I titles from 1999-2002.
Even after NHIAA play started, O'Reilly scheduled games against prep schools until the NHIAA disallowed it around 2007 and he always had the Astros play against other New England powers.
Chris Cameron first saw Pinkerton play in 2003 during his one-year stint coaching Trinity High School. He took his current position as Bishop Guertin's head coach the following year.
Cameron, a Long Island, New York, native, had been away from lacrosse since retiring as a pro in the mid-1990s and was just starting his high school coaching career.
"We (Trinity) were Division III so I went ahead and just said, 'Let me see what else is out there,'" Cameron said. "Then I saw Pinkerton and I was blown away. I was like, 'Oh my God.' I couldn't believe how good the level of play in New Hampshire was. Next year, I went to Bishop Guertin and my goal was, 'I want this program to be at the Pinkerton level.'"
Bishop Guertin and Pinkerton met in the Division I final for the first time in 2005, when the Cardinals defeated the Astros, 10-8.
Starting that year, the programs played each other in the Division I championship game 11 times over 15 seasons, including seven straight from 2013-19.
"They were never going to make it easy and we always knew they were going to be there," Cameron said of the Astros.
Second-year Londonderry coach Dave Wiedenfeld, who played football and lacrosse for the Lancers before graduating in 2016, said O'Reilly's Astros always had a blue-collar approach.
"It was like even if the skill wasn't there, you know these kids are going to make you earn scoring a goal or they were going to run through a check," Wiedenfeld said. "They were going to work hard and they were working hard in part to the kind of mentality he built into those programs."
Gennaro Marra, a 2019 Pinkerton graduate who played football and lacrosse for the Astros, said O'Reilly made it clear to his players that nothing was going to be given to them.
"Whether it's in the early spring when it's kind of chilly out or late in June preparing for a championship game, just being able to focus on what needs to be done," Marra said, "and working hard in practice and, when we go out onto the field, all the things should come naturally through all the practicing we did."
That's not to say O'Reilly's Pinkerton teams did not have skill.
In the early years of Derry Youth Lacrosse, O'Reilly taught players ages 7-10 to shoot with their left hand by tying a string around their stick and to their left glove so they could not move the stick to their right hand.
O'Reilly coached 67 high school All-Americans, 10 college All-Americans and five players who won an NCAA national championship.
"Those are the things that I'm proud of — that we were able to develop the skills of kids so that they went beyond us to higher levels," O'Reilly said.
Marra, now a graduate student captain at Southern New Hampshire University, played a vital role in Pinkerton's final two Division I titles under O'Reilly in 2018 and 2019, the coach said.
Marra, who had never been a faceoff specialist before his junior year, quickly became among the state's best at that position. He fueled the Astros' eight-goal fourth quarter in their 14-12 comeback win over Bishop Guertin in O'Reilly's last game in 2019, earning eight of his 21 faceoff wins in the final frame.
The Cardinals led, 9-6, entering the fourth quarter and held Pinkerton to one goal over the previous two quarters.
"That was an awesome one," Marra said. "Losing so many guys from the year before, I'd say, we definitely came in as underdogs...Just going in with the underdog mentality and outwork them, kind of thing."
Wiedenfeld, one of four brothers who all played lacrosse at Londonderry, said it's a full-circle moment for him to have O'Reilly greet him when his Lancers play at Pinkerton. Despite playing for the Astross rival, Wiedenfeld said O'Reilly was always part of his athletic career.
"Even though he doesn't probably realize it, he made a big change in other players' careers in terms of kids at other schools," Wiedenfeld said, "because they knew who O'Reilly was, they knew what was expected out of his players and they knew what they had to do if they wanted to compete at a similar level."
It has been three seasons now since O'Reilly retired from coaching lacrosse but Cameron still expects to see him on the other sideline whenever the Cardinals play Pinkerton.
The Astros played Bishop Guertin in the 2022 Division I semifinals and last year's Division I final under current coach Steve Gaudreau.
"He raised the bar for New Hampshire," Cameron said of O'Reilly.
