New Souhegan girls basketball coach Greg Cotreau talks with his players during a recent scrimmage. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

AMHERST – New Souhegah High School girls basketball coach Greg Cotreau brought his players over to the 1,000 point banner that had the name of the school’s best female athlete ever, Courtney Banghart, now the head coach at the University of North Carolina.

“I said to the kids, do you know that name?” Cotreau said. “And they said ‘No.’ And then when I tell them, they’re like ‘Holy Cow.'”

You can be sure every player on the Sabers now knows who Banghart is, and everyone who plays under Cotreau will. That’s part of the thinking and yes, that overused word ‘culture’ that he’s trying to first create and then establish after the program had struggled the past few years.

“That’s the big word, culture,” Cotreau, the former Manchester Memorial coach who had become a fixture in girls basketball in the Queen City, turning the Crusaders into a contender. “It’s not there. You know what you’re getting with (Souhegan) field hockey, they’re going to be in the mix every single year. Our girls lacrosse team, they petition up to (Division) I, they’re going to be in the mix every single year.

“Eventually I want Souhegan girls basketball to say every year we have to top that.”

Cotreau had his eyes on the Sabers for awhile, because he lives in Mont Vernon. He contemplated going for the job a few years ago when it opened up, but Manchester Memorial was becoming a consistent Division I contender with Lyric Grumblatt, who is now on the verge of making history at Rivier University.

“I couldn’t leave Memorial at that point,” he said. “I couldn’t leave that group on the verge of winning a championship (the Crusaders ultimately fell short). I couldn’t walk away from that. We were a contender for several years in a row.”

Of course, athletics in Manchester had been taking a downturn after COVID hit, but Cotreau would likely still be the Crusaders coach – until the Sabers job opened up in the spring with former coach Michael Vetack not returning. The program had struggled the last few years, and Cotreau is ready for the rebuild. So he applied and got the job.

“One of my major motive was my kids are getting older, my son is 12, my daughter is eight,” he said. “They’re in the district. I still want to coach but I want to be there to watch them play, now that I’m in the area.” And his daughter will be at Souhegan in a half dozen years, and he might have the opportunity to coach her.

“I have a chance to coach my daughter and get the program stabilized,” he said. “And hopefully we’re coming along like we were in Manchester by the time my daughter gets here. That was the kind of selfish reason behind it.”

Cotreau, being in the area, didn’t have to work too hard on research. He already knew some of the athletes, what type of talent was in middle school, etc.

“I felt with a couple of small tweaks, we could make a big difference,” he said.

His first big thing was to create more intensity. “That’s what I’m trying to do, talking up the intensity,” he said. “Have it in practice. We have to practice harder than we play.Those little things.”

How much of an adjustment would it be for the players?

“I think it’s a little different if I had taken the program over just after the summer,” he said. “There would have been a little bit of shock factor. But I was hired back in late May, so I was able to work with the girls all summer.”

And he’s done a few different things in preparation. He agreed to continue to run the Memorial summer league one more year and their open gyms last summer, and had the Sabers playing there rather than go to Sanborn, a practice that had the numbers low. They had enough players for two teams in the Memorial league. “Everybody wanted to come out and play,” he said. “They were able to kind of get a feel for me and I was able to get a feel for them as the summer went on.”

Then this past fall, rather than play locally, Cotreau had the Sabers enter a team in the Merrimack Valley Fall Ball League, playing against teams like Central Catholic, etc. He believed that move helped the Crusaders become a contender years ago.

In that fall league, Souhegan played Concord Christian, champs last year in Division II who moved up to Division I. “We had it at a six-point game with four minutes left,” Cotreau said. “Then we ran out of gas. Pretty loaded team, and competed really, really well against them for all but six minutes.”

Cotreau feels things are moving in the right direction.

“I think the biggest thing is building habits,” he said. “What are our daily habits? … I think they’re staring to see that if ‘We do things we’re asked to do, and do it with some effort and some intensity, we’ll give ourselves a chance every night.'”

Back to the history. Cotreau mentioned a couple names of talented Sabers in the last decade, but the list is not long when it comes to girls basketball.

“Amherst has always had really good athletes, but not many basketball players,” he said. “It’s been awhile. You have one kid who can really play and then you have athletes. … Now it’s a matter of how we can use that athleticism to our advantage.”

And maybe with a history lesson on a former Saber and Dartmouth star who is coaching in the big time world of college basketball, on national TV more often than not.

“I’ve been in contact with (Banghart) a couple of times,” Cotreau said. “The next time she’s in the area, she’s going to come talk to our kids. That will be pretty cool.”

It’ll be pretty cool, it seems, to be playing girls hoop at Souhegan if things go the way Greg Cotreau thinks they can.