Tim Clouser only coached in Sachem from 1968 to 1978, but he led the boy’s basketball program to one of its most successful stretches in school history. His players credit attention to fundamentals, and an easy-going demeanor as the great equalizer in connecting with players, and those sentiments remain 50 years later.
Clouser’s legacy is remembered this week as a decade’s worth of his Sachem teams mourn his passing. He was 80 and left a love of basketball behind, inspiring and impacting thousands of student-athletes in more than 50 years of coaching.
Former NBA big man and Sachem alum Jeff Ruland is the greatest player Clouser coached, and the two shared a bond for nearly half a century.
“I have much to be thankful for that guy,” said Ruland, a two-time NBA All-Star. “He was a good coach and a better person.”
Ruland lost his father when he was 9, so he got incredible support from Clouser and coaches Tom Sabatelle and Steve Rich at a formidable time.
“He was a good role model, and I was lucky,” Ruland said. “He was always teaching. He was about the fundamentals, and I learned a lot.”
Big games, consistent playoff appearances, and a flurry of NCAA recruits now define the Clouser coaching era at Sachem. His 116 wins, 10 seasons, and 8 playoff appearances all rank second in program coaching history to Sachem Hall of Famer Steve Rich, who took over the program from Clouser and continued the same success for the next 20 years.
Clouser was the 1977 Suffolk County Coach of the Year. His 1974-75 team won a League Title, and all of his teams were ranked among the best in Suffolk thanks to a generational group of talent that included Ruland, Division I basketball talent Mark Graebe, and a handful of other highly recruited players.
Other players like the Fabian brothers, Tom Evans, Harry Edwards, Joe Buonicontri, and many others helped guide Sachem to battles with 1970s powers North Babylon, East Hampton, and Southampton. Clouser’s 1977 team average of 67.4 points per game is the third-highest-scoring team in Sachem history. Sachem’s 93 points against Central Islip in 1970 are the most the Flaming Arrows have scored in a single game – that record is 53 years old, if you’re counting.
The son of a coach and English teacher, Clouser played ball at SUNY Geneseo and majored in English, and when a coaching and English teaching job opened at Sachem in 1967, he was hired.
Sachem Superintendent Walter Dunham and Athletic Director Dave Rothenberg hoped to infuse some life into the basketball program and asked then head coach Bob Maher to bolster the program with a new coaching hire who could help with JV and be a varsity assistant. Maher, from Rochester, knew Clouser from their time in upstate New York. Maher returned home to the Rochester area in 1968, paving the way for Clouser to land the head coaching gig.
“I was lucky enough to be [Bob’s] JV coach and learned much about building a team,” wrote Clouser in a Sachem Report column about his coaching career in 2016. “ When Coach Maher took a position upstate after the season, I vigorously pursued the opening. I liked what he was leaving behind, and I liked what was coming up.”
Long before his team was playing for a county title in 1977, his first group of varsity players during the 1968-1969 season were learning Clouser’s tendencies, and he was growing as a young head coach.
“We struggled, and we had no height,” said Bob LaCorte, who played on Clouser’s first team and later became a Sachem teacher and basketball coach. “I respect him tremendously for working with us. He loved basketball. He loved teaching it to us. He loved having us work on fundamentals. They were essential in our practices all the time.”
His players grew to love him. They describe him as nice, kind, level-headed, and a real player’s coach. At a time when coaches were traditionally rough or “old school,” this was a different approach.
“As a coach, I always loved preseason the most – with everyone competing hard and buying in,” wrote Clouser. “The ‘69-70 team certainly had a great preseason. Box-out drills resulted in stitches, and as time went on, the ball was finding the bottom of the net more and more.”
It wasn’t the winning. It wasn’t the playoffs. It wasn’t the big games. Clouser loved the hustle. The time of year when you don’t know how good your team can be. The uncertainty before a team bonds and realizes they are good enough to win. That column in 2016 tells much about a man and coach barely in the pre-season of his coaching career.
Edwards was an All-League two-guard on the 1977 team. He said Clouser lobbied hard to help him earn All-League status. It was a peak basketball accolade for Edwards, a misting contractor in Phoenix. He didn’t play a decade in the NBA like Ruland or in college like Tommy Evans. Clouser knew that this distinction would mean something to Edwards.
“He stood by me,” said Edwards. “When you’re a kid, you don’t think about how lucky you were to play for that team with that coach. He was wonderful. The greatest time of my life was playing Sachem High School basketball.”
Clouser was involved in building a program in the community, from the youth organization to the varsity. He built structure, provided a path for success, and saw a decade’s worth of young players mature in that system.
One was Evans, who went to grammar school at St. Joseph’s but had played in SYAG and followed the varsity program closely since he lived in the neighborhood just across from the high school on Smith Road in Lake Ronkonkoma. A self-appointed gym rat, he would try to open every door at the high school until one opened so he could get inside to shoot on an open basket.
During one varsity practice, a 13-year-old Evans was dribbling off to the side, and Clouser gave him a thumbs up.
“He came over and asked my name and if I would come out and run with the varsity for a little while,” Evans recalled. “I played for about 10 to 15 minutes. After the practice, he approached me and gave me some pointers on improving my game. I thanked him so much and continued to go down there.”
Tom Sabatelle spent a lifetime in athletics as a coach and athletic director at Sachem, where he played hoops in the early 1960s and was a freshman coach by the time Clouser was hired. He was one of the many young coaches in the district who benefitted from Clouser’s basketball acumen.
“He helped many of us in philosophy and perspective,” said Sabatelle. “He spent time working with the coaches just as much as the players.”
Dom Savino, another young coach in the 1970s, eventually became the Sachem boys varsity hoops coach from 1997-2005. He benefitted from his mentoring and went to a hoops camp in Philly with Clouser, where he met coaching legend Rollie Massimino, which changed his coaching life.
“Tim would offer advice, explain the game, and try to do whatever he could for any of us young coaches,” said Savino.
Sabatelle also made note of Clouser’s fondness for the girls’ basketball program and the respect he shared for coach Risa Zander and her teams. On several occasions, he congratulated the girls’ teams on big wins in the late 1970s.
“One time, he told them they put Sachem girl’s basketball on the map,” Sabatelle recalled. “He was very supportive of women’s athletics, and he was right; that program blossomed, and they were on the map.”
Frank Schmidt, a teaching college and the longtime varsity soccer coach at Sachem, remembers sitting at the lunch table with Clouser, who would use coins to demonstrate the movement of players on the court.
“One day, he told us that he called his father upstate last night, the day before basketball practice was to begin in November, to say hello and wish him his best,” Schmidt said, “as well as to tell his Dad that he would call again in March when the season was over.”
When it came down to coaching, Clouser believed in his players.
“We went into every game believing we were going to win,” said Evans. “He put a lot of faith and trust in his players and coaches. In our junior year, we played Long Island Lutheran, Brentwood, and St. Agnes, and every time we stepped on the court, we thought we were winning. We were a winning school. We were a powerhouse, and we had a lot of success. Tim was a big part of what we did.”
Certain years stand out in every program’s history. The two that always come up for Sachem basketball are 1977 and 1996. The only two seasons when Sachem boys basketball went to a county championship. The Flaming Arrows finally captured the elusive hardware in 1996.
“Whether it feels like yesterday or a lifetime ago, 1977 at Sachem was a truly great time,” Clouser wrote in a letter to his team that was published in Sachem Report in 2017 to mark the 40th anniversary of their run.
Playing North Babylon in a packed Nassau Coliseum and seeing Ruland score 40 points with a badly hurt ankle is now a legendary game. Forty years later, Clouser questioned himself on the game management.
“I continue to second-guess myself for not having a better scheme to handle North Babylon’s furious ‘32 minutes of hell’ press,” he wrote.
Since there was such an influx of college coaches coming to Sachem to recruit so many players from that period, Clouser thought that college coaching might be a path to get more involved with basketball. In a rare move, he gave up his teaching and coaching post at Sachem in 1979 and hit the college ranks.
First, he was at C.W. Post with Suffolk legend Stan Kellner and later coached at Wheeling College in West Virginia in the early 1980s and found himself everywhere from Lawrence Woodmere to Southold to Friends Academy to the Finger Lakes region before retiring.
For his 116 wins over 10 seasons and establishing a dominant basketball program in the 1970s, Clouser was inducted into the Sachem Athletic Hall of Fame in 2021. He was at the ceremony and in the gym one last time that Saturday morning in December.
He is survived by his wife Andrea, sons Brady (Amy) and Brian (Jeannie), and daughter Kristin (Andrew), as well as his eight grandchildren, Aiden, Cade, Blake, Andrew, Amelia, Peyton, Kenadie, and Hugo. He is also survived by his brother Jim and sister Mary. He was predeceased by his son Jamie and brother Roger.
There are services for Clouser on November 11 from 2-4 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. at M.A. Connell Funeral Home in Huntington Station, NY. Interment will be at Grove Cemetery, Trumansburg, NY, later this summer.
In remembrance of Clouser’s life, the family asks that any charitable donations be made to the Musella Foundation for Brain Tumor Research in honor of his son, Jamie.
