A loss in the Long Island championship is always tough to swallow. Sachem East is still the Suffolk County Class AA champion.
What’s more is that Friday’s game against Baldwin was the final contest in Matt Brisson’s long and successful coaching career in the Sachem Central School District. Brisson, a health teacher at Sachem East, officially filed his retirement paperwork last week.
“It was a great run,” Brisson told Newsday after Sachem East’s 50-47 loss. “It’s unbelievable what our kids have accomplished.”
It was yet another close game in a season filled with nail-biting moments. Brisson’s teams have thrived in those situations for years. Championships, rivalries, games that went down to the final second. There is nothing wrong with a little in-game adversity, playing a team tight and really earning a victory when it counts most. Sachem East has come out on top more than not under Brisson’s guidance.
Brisson’s teams knew how to win with class. They always played hard from the opening tip off to the final buzzer. You know what you could expect from a team coached by Matt Brisson day in and day out.
A coach in Sachem long before Sachem East was a thought, Brisson has experienced his most successful seasons at the helm of a program while in Farmingville. His teams have won states, they’ve won Long Island crowns and Suffolk County titles. They’ve upset top seeds. They’ve lost close contests in the final seconds. They’ve all walked off the court proud to wear Sachem on their chest, knowing Brisson is always in their corner.
Some see it as just a game with an orange ball and a basket on hardwood. Matt Brisson, the son of former longtime Sachem administrator Bernie Brisson, sees it as so much more. He was tense for a reason on the bench, pacing as every second ticked away and every point earned. He was careful with how he addressed his team and the media. Always level headed, never too cocky. Like so many other successful and well-known coaches, Brisson used basketball to preach life lessons, the ones where you have to dig down deep inside to prove what you really have and earn what you really want.
I can remember interviewing Brisson live on WSHR as a student broadcast journalist at Sachem more than 10 years ago, just before the district was about to split and Brisson would go to Sachem East and launch the program. Asked what it would be like to split his team, then the varsity girls program at Sachem High School, and tears welled up in his eyes. He cared then and he cares now. He cared about the well-being of his student-athletes and how something as seismic as a district restructuring would affect the lives of the girls he had coached for years.
Everything turned out fine in the end, but Brisson’s emotional output remained the same. He’s shed plenty of tears over the years; when they won states, when they lost close playoff games, when he’s been asked other questions about his athletes who mean so much to him. Brisson’s raw emotion is what makes him real and what makes him standout compared to many other coaches. He gets it and he’s not afraid to show how he really feels.
He has never cared about the numbers, the stats, the accolades. He never will. There’s no need to even list them in this story because we’ll remember Brisson’s tenure at Sachem as something far more important than records and numbers. We’ll remember Brisson as a great man and coach with a huge heart and an extreme love for Sachem, it’s students and its community at-large.
Thanks coach, for everything you’ve done for Sachem.
-Words by Chris R. Vaccaro