Hollis Brookline coach Ryan Kelley pleads his case to official Bill Dapkus during this past Sunday's Division II title game at UNH. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

DURHAM – Right time, right team, right coach.

It all came together three years ago for the Hollis High School boys basketball team, though no one knew it at the time.

The Cavaliers coaching job opened up three years ago, and the timing was perfect for Ryan Kelley.

He had made his way in basketball coaching at the youth development level, and jumped into the high school world for a year as the head coach at Mascenic Regional. But he couldn’t resist the move to HB, since he lived in Brookline and his son, Dylan, was going to be an incoming freshman there.

“The commute, I live in Brookline, it’s a 13-minute commute,” Kelley said. “The timing was perfect, my son was an incoming freshman when it opened up. I like to coach, I like to teach (the game)… If I have an opportunity to help a community, I want it to be mine first. So it’s an opportunity to teach in my community and help them for as long as I can.”

Kelly works in the hi-tech field, and isn’t a classroom teacher. But what he teaches from the youth level up is the game of basketball.

“I like to coach, I like to teach, I like to educate,” Kelley said. “I’m not a ‘real’ teacher, but in my heart I am. Inside I am.”

Kelley had to be patient. The Cavs had run out of true basketball players, mainly athletes from other sports. But there were some building blocks, namely current 6-6 senior Alton Williams, and Kelley was ready to mold things together.

“We were excited when we heard he was coming,” said Williams, who had played for Kelley in travel team ball.

Kelley was not deterred by a four-win season in his first HB year – a short two years ago.

“This is only my fourth year as a varsity head coach,” he said. “The two decades before that was all about youth basketball and development. So taking it over, four wins was one thing, but it wasn’t about that one year. I was still in development mode to be honest.”

But that development mode helped Kelley build what he ended up with last weekend at the University of New Hampshire’s Lundholm Gym: A 21-0 state champion, HB downing Pelham 42-37 in the Division II title game. That’s as good as it gets.

“Words can’t describe it,” Williams said, the net draped around his net and him clutching the championship plaque with a firm grip. “We’ve been working to get here for a really long time, and it feels good to finally just get it done.”

In Kelley’s second year, with a host of underclassmen returnees plus a couple of players who had returned to the program after sitting out a year or two, HB won 14 games and looked like at least a Final Four team, but Sanborn had other ideas and eliminated the Cavs in the quarterfinals.

That served as motivation for this season, and planted a championship seed.

“That feeling in the locker room, I hated it,” Williams said, noting it served as motivation for this year. “All of us, everyone that was returning, we said ‘We’re winning this thing.'”

Kelley worked hard and long with Williams on his game, helping to mold him from a soccer player to basketball. But besides Williams, he had the experience of winning a championship with his son, Cavs junior forward Dylan, who had eight points and nine rebounds in the finals.

“It’s old hat for me, I’ll be honest with you,” Kelley said. “And he’s the youngest of four, and I’ve coached all four of them. It’s kind of normal in our house now. And him being the fourth of four and seeing it – his oldest sister won a state championship back on 2018. So he’s been on the sideline of a pitch or on the sideline of a basketball court all his life.

“He says things to the team during practice that he’s getting from me but he’s not trying to copy it. It’s what he’s used to for 16 years.”

For Dylan Kelley, winning a championship with his father “was such a surreal experience.”

“It’s an experience that not many players get,” he said. “I feel so blessed to be able to share this experience with someone so close to me. Of course we have our hardships during the season, we battle back and forth but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter that that coach and I are blood related, we’re all a family. At the end of the day, we’re all family.”

The last two minutes, Kelley said, were a microcosm of the season, with the Cavaliers up by one, then three, then finally five points.

“What I mean by that is I’ve never coached from the front,” he said. “I’ve always been coaching for development and coaching for catching up. Back in travel basketball it’s been ‘Look at what Bedford does, can we compete with that’, right?

“And so this season coaching from the front, it was the same thing with that last possession, so we’re still up by one, what do we do? Coaching from the front, totally different ball game.”

Hollis Brookline’s Dylan Kelley (11) goes to the hoop past Pelham’s Troy Fornah while Pythons’ Brady Hegan looks to get over in time during Sunday’s Division II title game at UNH’s Lundholm Gym. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

Different or not, the Cavaliers were in front all season as wire-to-wire unbeaten champions. That could have been a lot of pressure for a team going into the finals without a loss.

“We felt it,” Dylan Kelley said. “But we also felt like we were the underdogs. People wanted us to lose. They didn’t want us to have the undefeated season in the end. That kind of lit a flame underneath us, we just really wanted to prove everyone wrong.”