By Christopher Hunt
PEARL RIVER – The girls’ chatter flew just above the boys’. Pearl River girls cross country coach Dan Doherty sat in the front and gazed out the window while the yellow school bus merged onto the Palisades Parkway. When the bus pulled into the parking lot, Doherty stepped off first.
He stood a few feet from the bus on the edge of the park at Bear Mountain where they would win the Rockland County championship. He stopped before he entered the field and dug the toe of his sneakers in the dirt and waited. Doherty never called a meeting but one by one the girls crowded in front of him and waited for direction.
He told them to walk over the course again if they were unfamiliar. Doherty reminded them to stay off the cement because “you’re just running farther and that doesn’t make sense.”
“You know what you have to do,” he said. “Go do it.”
He never looked any of them in the eye. Instead he continued grounding his foot in the dirt like a shy toddler trying to explain his mistake to a parent. The irony is that the Dan Doherty that most know is gruff and quick-witted sometimes cranky and even abrasive. But there isn’t a person in the sport that knows him and doesn’t respect him because 29 straight sectional championships, 21 county championships, 8 state titles and 2 state federation titles at least demands that much.
Now Doherty is in his 31st season, favored for a 30th consecutive section title and developing a young group that could be the best he has ever had. And in his own way – call it intimidation or motivation -- he is intent to squeeze every ounce of potential out of each girl on the team – from his best runner to the one still trying to figure out how to lace her training shoes.
Doherty started coaching the girls team in 1978, taking over for Bob Wood, who coached Doherty as a runner at Pearl River. The only season he failed to win a sectional championship was his first one.
“Sometimes it takes a little while to figure out what you’re doing,” he said.
The girls gathered in a picnic area just beyond the starting line. It is freshman Maria Kohlbrenner’s first varsity race after spending the season with the JV. Doherty ran with her father at Pearl River in the ‘70s. He didn’t need to coddle her before the race. He calmed her nerves this way:
“I’ll tell you exactly what’s gonna happen,” he said. “You’re going to walk to the starting line. A guy is gonna shoot a gun. You’re gonna put your left leg in front of your right leg. Then you’re right leg in front of your left leg. Sound familiar? It’s the same thing you’ve been doing all year long. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
Doherty isn’t much for hand-holding even with a top seven comprised of three freshman, three sophomores and a senior. The lone senior, Tara Clinton’s mother ran on Doherty’s first team in 1978. Even since then, with all the championships and accolades, with all the trophies and newspaper articles, this team is probably the best he’s ever had.
A week earlier, at the Section 1 Coaches Invitational, four of his girls broke 20 minutes on the 5K course at Bowdoin Park, the first time that’s ever happened. Doherty would know. He has recorded every time that every Pearl River Lady Pirate has run on every course ever in a packet he calls the Blue Book, even though he’ll tell you that today matters so much more than yesterday.
The girls are just about to start warming up when a photographer approached Doherty and asked for a team shot for the school year book. Doherty, wears thick gloves and blue hooded-sweatshirt, tells the man he would provide the team pictures. They had time to take the pictures but Doherty was thinking about the setting.
He walked away murmuring something not suitable for print but the message was that there was no way he would let his team be seen casually posing for pictures before a championship race as if they had come for a carnival instead of a championship race.
The junior varsity race started first. You can hear his voice across the field. With 400 meters to go Doherty’s girls had the race won. He scored the race with a pen on a scrap of paper in his pocket. But in stretch they each gave up a place and Suffern snatched the JV title. Doherty couldn’t console himself. He searched for solitude, pacing away from the crowd of people, searching for some sort of calm. He softly kicked a stick in restrained frustration.
When the varsity completed their warm-up routine they packed in behind the start and again waited for the coach to do what coaches do. Doherty came over still seething from losing the junior varsity race.
“They were winning the meet at the ice skating rink,” he said then pulled the scrap of paper out. “Each one of them lost a place to a Suffern girl. You know why? Because Suffern wanted it more than them.
“Does Suffern want it more than you?”
They all shook their heads to say no.
“Then you know what you have to do.”
Doherty pulled them aside one-by-one. He reminded them to be aggressive. “Don’t be intimidated,” he told the group. “You fear no one.”
The Dan nobody sees
Doherty is nothing if he’s not committed. He dedicated his life in two places: track and Mae, his mother.
Doherty has lived in the same house his entire life even after his three other brothers moved and started families. Once his father died in 1975, Doherty stayed at home with his mother, even as her health worsened.
“Nobody did what he did,” said his brother, Tom Doherty, who was the athletic director at Pearl River from 1982-92. “Many people say he should be a college coach and I’ll tell you he would be if he wasn’t with my mother.”
Said Clarkstown South coach Ray Kondracki, who lives in Pearl River: “That kind of commitment is what he expects from his athletes, whether they like it or not.”
Many have qualified Dan’s character by the way that he cared for his mom. He doesn’t take any credit.
“That’s the misconception,” he said. “She took care of me. I didn’t take care of her.”
Mae Doherty died on May 1, 2006. Dan gave up coaching that spring. Gilby Hawkins took over as head coach while Doherty decided whether he wanted to continue coaching at all. He returned in the fall but no longer coaches spring track. Tom Doherty said it was probably for the best. Dan needed a break and the girls probably needed a break from him. But Dan was there at nearly every meet as a meet official so they still heard a familiar voice screaming in their direction as they rounded the track.
“He expects nothing less than what he expects from himself,” Tom said. “He’s the girls state track chairman. He’s on every committee in the history of the world. He lives this.”
Tom Doherty promises that his brother has mellowed since the 80’s and early 90’s when parents would light up the phone lines and visit the school about Dan’s demeanor with his athletes. That doesn’t mean he won’t give a kid an earful.
“He adheres to the number one rule that most (girls) coaches don’t do,” Tom said of his brother, who was given the Frank McGuire Award last year, the highest honor for a high school coach. “He treats them all like boys.
It means that Dan Doherty holds every athlete accountable for their effort and commitment and because he does, his athletes recognize how deeply he believes in them.
“He is crazy at times but he really does care,” Tara Clinton said. “He only gets mad when you don’t live up to the potential that he sees in you.”
Doherty knows well how he can come across and he doesn’t make an effort to hide it, which is probably what earns most people’s respect.
“I am who I am,” he says.
And the race go on....
The gun sounds. Doherty is waiting before an endless hill that defines Bear Mountain’s course. He’s reminding each girl as she passes that they need to stay together, that the girls that are trailing need to move up. Sophomore Molly Shine doesn’t look right. She shows a slight limp and is struggling as the team’s seventh girl. Doherty tells her to drop out. She runs by him. Everyone disappears into the trails.
North Rockland is close but trailing. When they reappear Pearl River still holds a lead but Doherty wants more. Then Shine comes barreling downhill out of the woods looking worse than she did before.
Doherty screamed for her to stop in a way that sounds like it physically pains him to see her continue. She slows then stops. Doherty walks away without another word.
With a half mile left, Pearl River is in command but the coach yells to the girls that they are behind. He says North Rockland is leading. Shine dropped out and they need help.
Pearl River wins their 21st Rockland County championship. Doherty had told the team it was their race to lose from the beginning. “You’re the best team here. Now go prove it,” is what he said before the race.
Kerry Guerin finished fourth but was passed with 15 meters left. From afar you can see Doherty’s frustration in his gestures. He was drilling her about tightening up, her shoulder nearly touching her ears. “You can’t run like that,” his mouth motioned.
He met Tara Clinton by the finish line seconds later with a completely different demeanor. He patted her back and grinned before he put his arm around her. It was her first time ever running under 20 minutes at Bear Mountain. Molly Shine sat on a bench by the finish line with an ice pack on her knee and her eyes puffed from crying. Her knee had been hurting all week which is why he pulled her from the race.
Doherty sat next to her for a few minutes and never said a word.
Everybody got exactly what they needed.
“Well, we won,” he said about the race. “But that Molly situation hangs a dark cloud over it. Hopefully, she can be ready in two weeks (for the state meet). The other four ran good but they can run better. It’s like they’re afraid. What are you afraid of? It’s like you work so hard to run at a certain level and then you’re afraid to run at that level.”
They pack up and head for the bus. The team walks across the parking lot and starts to mistakenly board the modified team’s bus. Then realize they have to walk back across the lot. Doherty thanks no one in particular for a tour of the parking lot.
They board the bus. Doherty is quiet most of the ride. The win is in the past. He’s still thinking about how to make every girl better.
“I’m steaming about that JV race,” he said though. “I’m still steaming.”
Doherty tells girls three things when they join the team: “I tell them that I’ll make you laugh. That may happen once. I’ll make you cry. If you ask the girls they’ll say that may happen a lot. And I tell them that if you work hard and do what you’re told, I’ll make you famous and that’s happened often.”
He also says, “the only thing worse than having the worst coach in the world is thinking you have the worst coach in the world.”
Here’s sophomore Chelsea Kushner’s description of him: “He’s like the God of track and cross country.”