The sign being held up by the Hollis Brookline High School baseball team says it all after the Cavs beat Plymouth 5-0 last weekend for their second straight Division II title. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

HOLLIS — Forget going to your typical store. You want hardware? Head over to Hollis Brookline High School, because the Cavaliers have plenty of it.

Title Towns.

In the last two school years, the Cavaliers have won nine championshps, and four of the five of this year’s titles – the five are wrestling and girls swimming in the winter and baseball, boys volleyball and girls lacrosse – were back-to-back. And girls lax had been in the previous two Division II title games, minutes away before bowing in 2021 and then losing a one-sided game (both to Portsmouth) last spring. But they broke through this year.

Last weekend, for the second straight spring, baseball and volleyball won on the same day, giving HB three championships for the 2023 spring season.

That’s hard to do two years in a row. Heck, HB almost had four titles this year, but the softball team lost in the late innings to Kingswood in the semis.

“It just shows what support from the community can do for these programs,” said soon to be HB athletic director Brian Bumpus, who officially takes over the department this summer with the retirement of longtime AD Rhon Rupp said. “I could list all of them, but the administrative we have is really supportive of everything we’re doing athletically and we all work in unison to make sure we’re providing the best opportunity (for the student-athletes).”

Bumpus, who has been handling most of the AD duties on a day-to-day basis at the school as Rupp’s right hand man while the longtime AD had reduced his role in some ways, says it’s about commitment.

“Over time the support from the community in all different areas in what we’re doing has grown tremendously,” Bumpus said. “There’s a lot of positivity around athletics. I know it sounds cliché, but all our stakeholders are totally invested in being successful in running good programs. We have coaches in place that kids respect and want to play for, and that’s important.”

The coaches, of course, agree.

“I’ll be honest, a lot of it’s coaching,” Cavs boys volleyball coach Ed Leonard said. “Bumpus and the athletic office do a heckuva job bringing in good coaches. It’s hard, with the lack of coaches this year (all over)….”

Rupp and Bumpus have also made coaches accountable, requiring them to email them summaries of that day’s game or event for their team so they could be read during morning announcements – and also having those accounts cc’d to the local media. That’s a process that Bumpus has said will continue.

Meanwhile, as Bumpus moves up, the district has hired Jordan Scott as assistant AD. Scott has worked the last several years in the NHIAA administrative offices with the title of sports coordinator.

Here’s a look at HB’s most recent championship success stories from the last two weeks:

BASEBALL

HB pitcher Charlie Hale had a vision – and it came to fruition.

HB’s title came courtesy of arguably its best pitching performance of the season, a three-hit 5-0 shutout of No. 8 Plymouth with senior righty Hale, a few hours after he graduated, striking out 14 in a complete game.

It was a performance for the ages, and one he envisioned on the ride from Hollis to Northeast Delta Dental Stadium.

“I was trying to imagine it on the way here,” he said after the game. “That’s what you have to do, you’ve got to imagine it, and see it before it happens.”

The Cavaliers finished the regular season 13-3, good enough for the second seed, and then won a tight 3-1 quartefinal over Bow before an easier 9-3 semifinal win over St. Thomas of Dover, a game in which Hale pitched in relief.

While he escaped a bases loaded jam in that one and allowed just a run over three innings, it was nothing like he did last weekend.

“He was dealing,” HB coach Jay Sartell said. “He went through the order a couple of times, they weren’t touching him, everything was opposite field stuff. His gas was still working, and he had a really good off-speed pitch … We feel we have enough pitching, so we’d go until the wheels fell off. Hard to deprive a kid of the moment to complete a game like that and end his high school career when he’s dishing like that.”

It was his best performance this year, perhaps ever.

“On this stage, yeah,” Hale said right after. “I was told on Wednesday after the semifinals that I’d be starting this game. So last few days I was making

sure I was hydrated, and on the bus ride here I was trusting myself. No one can beat you as a pitcher because hitting is the hardest thing to do in sports. If you remember that, and you trust yourself.”

Hale had been the third or fourth pitcher last year, and showed promise.

“We’d been going with the five pitcher thing the last few years, it seems to be pretty successful, and he was right in the mix,” Sartell said.

HB gave him plenty of support last weekend with five runs – two unearned – keyed by RBI hits by Gavin Knudsen and Jack Lager.

This was a Cavalier team that had dropped consecutive games to Hanover (which finished as the top seed) and local rival Souhegan (whom they had beaten in their opener). Sartell, who has guided the Cavs to the finals in three of his four years as head coach – hence Bumpus’ comment – gathered them together in the outfield in Amherst after the loss to the Sabers.

“Obviously going into the season we weren the favorites, based on last season and who we had coming back,” Hale said. “Early on we had a lot of tough games, we snuck out wins, we had those losses to (John) Stark, Hanover and Souhegan, which were all bad losses. After Souhegan, we talked in right field, we all came together, and if we want to win another state championship, it needs to start now.”

And that meant nine straight wins to a crown.

“Grit and adjustments,” Sartell said. “They’re a gritty group of kids, they listened to the constructive feedback, and they put it into play through practices and they apply it in games.”

Sartell said it was “a feeling out process” going into the season to see what kind of level the Cavs could be at. The back to back titles he said were “not entirely shocking, but surprising.”

Sartell has simply turned around a program that had been struggling a bit. The longtime JV coach was promoted for the 2019 season, and got the Cavs in the finals in which they lost a heartbreaker, 5-4, to Bow. Then Covid hit to cancel the 2020 season, HB bowed out in the early tourney rounds in 2021, and now they’ve gotten two titles.

What’s his secret?

“I think it’s putting the right peopl in the right place, no harm,” Sartell said. “Be as good as you can to put them in position to win and watch them perform. Give them the mental mindset to perform, infuse them with confidence and get out of the way. It works.”

The Cavs have the plaques and banners to prove it.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL

Back to back again, but it’s never easy. Yet a couple of hours after baseball won its title, Leonard’s team, like baseball the No. 2 seed, beat previously unbeaten top seed Londonderry 3-1 at Nashua South’s Belanger Gym.

“It’s really hard to win one,” Leonard said. “It’s interesting, my buddy I play basketball with that I’ve known for 35 years, I said to him, ‘Every year I never know what I’m going to get. It’s a new season every year. I know I have some returners, but. …”

And Leonard has had to make changes with his plans. For example, John Sommer, his first year he was on the right side. Last year on the state title team that shocked Windham, he was moved to the middle. This year he was moved to the outside.

“We don’t know what I’m going to have and where I’m going to play them,” Leonard said. “It’s like chess. It really is.”

And the problem is, boys volleyball isn’t thought of as a major sport like baseball or lacrosse. It’s spring, high school student athletes would likely rather be outside. It’s not usually a sport that has many hard-core volleyball players.

“It’s just so challenging just to get kids to come out,” Leonard said. “It’s not a premier sport, kids want to be outside. It’s culture. When I got here and started coaching there was no culture. They were lost, they didn’t understand brotherhood and playing for each other and being together. They had no concept of that. And we started it, and we just built it. These guys are a unit.”

Leonard is a volleyball specialist.

“I talk to some of our guys and we work on some specific things, and I’ll tell you a lot of other teams probably don’t work on some of the things that we do,” Leonard said. “It’s not fun, but it wins titles.”

The Cavaliers had hit a junction after bowing to Londonderry in a five-set regular season match in which they were constantly playing catchup to force the fifth set. Leonard was so upset he darted quickly from the gym and sat on the bus, hesitant to even come out to talk to a reporter. The Cavs had cruised through the regualr season at that point, but now were facing stiff competition with Windham and Coe-Brown also on the latter part of the schedule. They ended up losing four sets the rest of the way, and just one in three tourney matches – the second set in the four set finals win vs. Londonderry.

Besides any tactical things – mainly lapses on the defensive side – Leonard noticed that his team wasn’t celebrating points, coming together in the middle of the court like most other teams do. Too much was being taken for granted in his mind, as things were almost too easy bcause of the soft first half of the schedule.

“We weren’t coming together as a team when a play would happen,” Leonard said. “You see it on the girls side a lot. They come in, no matter what. And we weren’t doing that. But they’re a tight knit team, but they weren’t doing it on the court. So we had a conversation about it, why aren’t we doing this? Where’s the human connection?”

They found it within themselves, and in many ways, according to senior hitter and Player of the Year Aidan Norris, a lot of it was already there.

“Somthing consistent with this team throughout the whole season was how much fun we have,” Norris said. “We have a very, very heavy-ended season, at the end we played our best competition, and it was kind of a shock for us.

“It (a championship) was always in our head. This team has a drive like no team I’ve been on before. My club experience or here.”

A key will be what happens with Leonard. He announced after the semis he was stepping down, but Bumpus and the administration is lobbying him to return, so stay tuned.

“He has shaped everything about this,” Norris said. “He is a coach that accentuates the personalities on the team. It’s such a goofy fun team, and he was able to let us do that.”

And then, Leonard said, the Cavs had to figure out who they were as a team.

“We didn’t have an identity,” he said. “During the season, they picked up an identity and were like, ‘We’re just going to be ourselves.’ OK, that’s your identity.”

Their identity is what HB is now used to: Champions.

These title plaques like this are nothing new lately for the Hiollis Brookline High School athletic program. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

GIRLS LACROSSE

There were so many emotions tugging at the Cavaliers as, at Nashua’s Stellos Stadium, they were deadlocked at 11 with Hanover with 2:24 left to play in the Division II title game.

Hanover, wich never led, won the draw, but the Bears then got too anxious, and shot too early. They missed wide, and then HB’s Bella Haytayan intercepted a pass and the Cavs went on to win on a goal by senior Paige Mello with 19.7 seconds left.

This was fitting, and in a way worth the wait for the HB seniors who had played in the previous two title games.

“Yes it was,” the senior Mello said when asked if it was indeed worth the agony of the last two years. “It feels awesome, very well-deserved. We worked extremely hard all those years but this was definitely our best year.”

First, the Cavs had lost the last two title games to Portsmouth, which this year moved up to Division I. Second, HB coach Linda Haytayan – who started the program at the one Nashua High School back in the mid 1990s – kept in mind the memory of her friend and late Nashua South coach Lindsay (Maynard) Toomey who passed away in late November after a two year battle with cancer. Toomey had coached the Nashua South girls team to a state title in 2007, and Haytayan at that time was her assistant. The last time Haytayan won a title at Stellos Stadium was with that 2007 team.

“I had her memory card on my clipboard,” Haytayan said. “A very good friend of mine.”

Haytayan is perfect example of another good hire for the HB athletic administration. She had coached the Hollis middle school team, had all that extensive experience as a coach and as a player, and was an easy choice. She coached several of the Cavs since the second grade.

“It’s special for me, I’ve had these kids for so long – and also my daughter,” she said. “This one was super special for me.”

Haytayan said going into this season, even with Portsmouth out, she never considered her team the favorite.

“I’d never think that way,” she said. “Because I have all due respect for those other four top teams – traditionally Hanover, phenominal program; Windham, phenominal program; Goffstown, super chippy and aggressive, got some great athletes, and Winnacunnet, they’re developing players all the time. As a coach, I’d never underestimate that top five.”

In fact, in the Goffstown quarterfinal win, HB was a man down for35 minutes.

Alyssa Hill, who led the Cavs with four goals in the title game, took the first shot on HB’s final possession but the ball hit the post, and Haytayan was there for the rebound. She and sophomore sister Sabrina paced the offense much of the year.

“They’re just two great players,” Linda Haytayan said. “They work well together, they’ve got great one vs. one skills, and they’re super hungry to score. And it’s great, because that’s what we need, somebody to put the entire offense on their back and carry the team through.”

“It was a great game,” Linda Haytayan said. “A game that could have gone either way.”

But in general, things have gone the Cavalier way over and over, haven’t they?