By Tom Robinson, NEPABasketball.com
Jim Lavan got a sneak preview of his new job.
Lavan, who filled in when an illness kept retiring coach Pat Toole away from the bench for part of the 2021-22 season, was hired by the Wilkes-Barre Area School Board Monday night as the new head boys coach.
“Going into the second half of our league season, Pat wound up with some health issues and wasn’t able to coach,” Lavan said. “For about two weeks, he was completely away from the team.
“I kind of got thrown in from being the assistant coach helping manage things to the guy running everything and making the decisions.”
When Toole returned, he was, at first, not as active as usual and Lavan continued to run games from the sideline, taking the one standing coaching position while Toole sat on the bench.
“When the district playoffs started against Delaware Valley, he was able to do the role of head coach, stand up and do the whole thing,” Lavan said, “which was good. I was happy that he was still able to finish out the way he should.”
As the coaching situation fluctuated, so did the roster and the Wolfpack slipped to final records of 7-7 in Wyoming Valley Conference Division 1 and 11-13 overall.
“We had some guys in and out of the lineup with different things going on,” Lavan said. “There was definitely some mixing and matching of the lineup toward the end of the season.
“The good and the bad of it was we got two sophomores that had not played many minutes at all on varsity got to start the two games in the district playoffs. They got some experience, which was good. We’ll have some guys coming back because we were senior top heavy. We graduated nine seniors and, excluding those two sophomores, there are only two other kids coming back who were consistently part of the rotation.”
The Wolfpack just completed their third season following the merger of the Meyers, Coughlin and GAR programs. Toole emphasized keeping as many players as possible engaged below the varsity level to try to make the most of combining a larger base of available athletes. Lavan would like to extend that approach to lower age levels.
“With the varsity, I think it’s just putting the time in during the offseason, I don’t think that’s any different than in the past,” Lavan said. “You have to give yourselves as many opportunities as you can.
“ … One of the biggest things to me that I want to put my stamp on is getting us an elementary program. We don’t have that right now. It’s kind of fading away. When you look at the other school districts and the other programs around us, they have fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade teams and they’re in their own elementary leagues.
“The elementary stuff, if we can get that off the ground and running, I think is going to really build a foundation for what this program can become.”
Lavan, a former Coughlin athlete who played basketball at Marywood University, was an assistant on the Crestwood boys team for six years prior to joining the Wilkes-Barre Area staff last season. A Middle School physical education teacher in the district, he had started in coaching with one year at Coughlin and two at GAR in the junior high programs.
Lavan is also an assistant athletic director at the school.
