May 14, 2000. Jay and Heidi Darrah are on their way to Concord Hospital for the birth of their second child. Heidi is in labor, but Jay wants to make a quick stop at Toys R Us.
“I got a little basketball for him,” Jay said. “I wanted that to be the first thing in his hands.”
They got the ball and they named their son Cameron, after Cameron Indoor Stadium, Duke University’s legendary basketball arena. The Darrahs soon moved, the new house chosen because the backyard was well-suited for a basketball court. They quickly refinished the basement, turning it into a sports den, perfect for hosting the Pittsfield High School basketball teams Jay has been coaching since 2001.
“I was pretty much born into basketball,” Cam said. “Ever since I could walk, I’d be in the gym, watching his practices. As soon as I was old enough to be a manager, I would go to the games and keep a shot chart, and I would run the clock at practices. I would just do anything to pick up knowledge of the game.”
On Tuesday night, the boy born into Pittsfield basketball scored his 1,000th point for the Panthers with his dad and coach watching from the bench.
“It feels unreal,” said Cam, who is averaging 22.1 points, 6.6 assists, 7.5 rebounds and 3.5 steals per game. “To do it in front of the home crowd with all the alumni guys back, in that atmosphere, it was great. It’s crazy.”
The milestone bucket was a transition layup with 6:11 left in the second quarter during a 79-38 win against Sunapee. Cam, a 5-foot-8 junior point guard with a sweet jumper, crafty handle, full-court vision and high-revving motor, finished with 25 points, nine assists and six steals. Josh Whittier finished with 18 points and 10 rebounds for Pittsfield while Casey Clark added 12 points and eight boards and Gabe Anthony had nine points and three steals.
The win moved the Panthers to 8-1 and the 1,000 points put Cam Darrah’s name on the Pittsfield High gym wall along with 17 other Panthers who have reached that grand plateau.
Jay played with two of those 1,000-point scorers, Tony Martinez (who is now an assistant for the boys’ team) and Wylie Mousseau, during his days as Pittsfield’s point guard. And he’s coached six others during his 15 years as the Panthers head coach.
Cam witnessed plenty, m of those 1,000-point scorers himself. So like just about everything else he does on a basketball court, his feelings about scoring 1,000 points are colored by his connection with Pittsfield basketball history.
“Watching Sean Kryander and Ben Hill and Donovan Emerson score 1,000 points, it was never about them scoring. It was about the team and how they all did it together,” Cam said. “And looking up at that board, I don’t see just the names that are up there, I see the teams they were on and how the team had an impact on them and they had an impact on the team.
“It’s been a goal of mine, but I don’t want people to see my name up there, I want people to see my team, to see Josh Whittier, Gabe Anthony, Casey Clark, Matt St. George, Dylan Bocash Garret Guerro-Hadley. I want them to see that whole team and what we did. I want them to see how we were so bonded together and how we did everything as a family.”
Jay has been preaching that selfless message to his 1,000-point scorers – and everyone else on his teams – for years. It’s why he got into coaching in the first place.
“A big influence in my life was Kyle Hodsdon, who was our coach at Pittsfield my freshman and sophomore year,” said Jay, who graduated from Pittsfield in 1996. “The amount of respect and effort he got from us, I wanted to be that guy. He was the first coach that really made us understand what it was like to be a team and that it wasn’t always about winning and losing. It was about being a team and having each other’s back, and I’ve carried it on for the last 15 years.”
Not only has Cam been hearing that message for longer than he can remember, he’s been looking up to kids who were also hearing it. His role models were the Pittsfield players he watched in practice and games, players who would come to his house for dinners that usually ended in games on his Little Tikes basketball hoop. And, according to his dad, Cam had a knack for picking role models with the best skills and the best attitudes.
“My coach always says he likes to see me as a little bit of everyone,” said Cam, who refers to his father as dad and coach in equal measures. “I have Sean Kryander’s leadership qualities and his court awareness, I have Kyle Melvin’s tenacity and his confidence. I have Kevin Chagnon’s passion and determination. I just picked up all those little things that they did that I wanted to do.”
There is, of course, a role model that supersedes the rest. Tucked in the corner of the basement devoted to sports is a trophy case, built only because Heidi was tired of seeing her husband and son ditch their hardware in boxes under beds. Asked to pick out something special from the case, Cam pulls out his dad’s 1994-95 Pittsfield High Playmaker Award. It’s the perfect pick for a selfless point guard who is the son of a selfless point guard.
“I look up to him a lot,” Cam said. “Seeing how he can take 12 guys who just want to play basketball for him and how he does that, but how he also keeps track of all them, keeps them out of trouble, makes sure they’re doing well in school. He doesn’t just want us to be better basketball players, he wants us to be better people in the world.”
The Darrahs have put in long hours working on getting better. They would drive Cam to a pre-K basketball league in Bow because Pittsfield didn’t offer any organized leagues for kids that young. Jay took over the Pittsfield Parks and Rec basketball program when his daughter, Jacey, was in kindergarten and continued to run the program until Cam finished.
When Cam moved up to the fifth-sixth-grade team, Jay coached that squad on top of his role as the Pittsfield varsity coach. Cam would sometimes double up on practices as a middle schooler, working out with his own team and then hopping into drills with the varsity squad.
When Cam hit eighth grade, there was a numbers crunch on the varsity team and the Panthers needed to call up someone from outside the high school. Jay was hesitant to put his son on varsity, but his assistant coaches told him if any eighth-grader deserved a chance on varsity, it was Cam.
The coach’s son didn’t play much at first, but in the second game of the season at Wilton, Cam got his chance. The Wilton defense was leaving the corners open, but none of the Panthers were hitting open shots. After some cajoling from assistant coach Gary Clark, Jay put Cam in the game. The eighth-grader sank five straight 3s, the Panthers went on to win, 77-56, and Cam went on to score 192 points before he ever took a high school class.
Two games into his freshman season, Cam broke his right (shooting) wrist. Instead of calling it quits for the year, Cam practiced shooting with his left hand. After a few weeks, with the doctor’s reluctant blessings, dad/coach cut off Cam’s cast, taped up the wrist and watched his son/point guard run the show left-handed and somehow score 118 points in just eight games.
Cam managed to hit nine 3s with his left hand and score 118 points in just eight games, but the Panthers won only two games that season with a young and injury-riddled team. They improved to 6-13 last year as Cam blossomed into a big-time scorer, averaging 24.3 points per game. Now, with experience and extra work hurrying things forward, Pittsfield looks like one of the top teams in Division IV.
Defense has been instrumental for the Panthers, who are allowing just 37 points per game. The return of Whittier (10.9 ppg, 8.2 rpg) and St. George (5.5 ppg) after time away from basketball has been a boost. And Pittsfield is getting offense from multiple sources with six players averaging at least five points per game – Darrah, Whittier, St. George, Clark (7.6), Guerro-Hadley (5.7) and Bocash (5.5).
The ultimate goal, naturally, is to reach the semifinals at Plymouth State University and bring home the first basketball title in school history. It’s the same dream Cam Darrah has been having for a long time.
“Probably my earliest basketball memory is when I was five or six and my dad’s team made it to the Final Four that year and they went to Plymouth,” Cam said. “Just being in that atmosphere and seeing all the people and how big of a thing it was, it was awesome. I knew right then and there, I want to play here. This is where I want to bring my team.”
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at 369-3341 or at tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @timosullivan20.)