Another Honor For Brunswick School’s Legendary Squash Coach Jim Stephens (Tennis This Time) by Rob Dinerman
photos courtesy Jim Stephens
Dateline May 2, 2022
--- Just 63 days after having the U. S. Squash Exhibit at the Arlen
Specter Center named after him at the Exhibit’s dedication ceremony on
the evening of February 26th, Jim Stephens, the legendary
recently-retired head squash coach at Brunswick School in Greenwich,
CT, who led the Bruins to a record five U. S. National High School
Championships (and 13 final-round advances) during the 17-year period
from 2004-20, was honored once again this past Saturday afternoon. This
time Stephens was recognized for his playing/coaching achievements in
tennis and this time the organization paying tribute to Stephens was
the University of Virginia (UVA), on whose tennis and soccer teams
Stephens performed with distinction, first as a player (as a member of
the Class of 1967) and then as a coach of three different sports during
the early 1970’s. The occasion was a UVA dedication ceremony in which
the main exhibition tennis court was named for Gordon Burris (who
served at UVA in a number of capacities for 45 years, including six
years as the men’s tennis coach from 1967-71 and in 1975) and Court Six
was named the Jim Stephens Court. It marked the second time that a
racquet-sports facility has been named in Stephens’s honor, preceded by
an event in January 2008 in which Brunswick School’s eight-court squash
facility, which had been constructed in 2000, was named “The Stephens
Squash Center.”
Stephens, as noted, had been an elite two-sport
athlete at UVA, especially in tennis, where he had gone undefeated at
No. 1 during his junior season, earning the No. 1 Atlantic Coast
Conference (ACC) ranking and receiving both the John Pritchett Award
--- as the Cavaliers’ outstanding tennis player --- and the John Polzer
Award as UVA’s the best all-around athlete. Unfortunately, his senior
year was severely curtailed when he suffered a severe injury after
being clipped from behind during an early-autumn soccer game, resulting
in nerve damage to his right leg and requiring surgery to his lower
back that sidelined him for the remainder of that soccer season and the
entire tennis season as well. After undergoing a second back operation
a few years later, Stephens returned to Charlottesville, where he spent
the first half of the 1970’s coaching the UVA men’s soccer, tennis and
golf teams, During the three-year period from 1972-74 inclusive in
which Stephens led the Cavalier tennis team, it compiled records of
15-5, 15-4 and 17-3, hence 47-12 overall, and finished second in the
ACC in both 1973 and 1974.
Stephens then left in June 1974 to become the head
squash pro at the Field Club of Greenwich , where he remained for 11
years until accepting a position in September 1985 at Brunswick,
where he coached the high school varsity squash team and taught
middle-school mathematics throughout the 35-year period from 1985-2020.
During that extended time frame, Stephens guided the Bruins from a
ragtag unit that didn’t even have its own squash courts (resulting in
one Greenwich Time article
about the team which was titled “The Gypsy Squash Players From
Brunswick”) to a powerhouse that won a record 18 New England
Interscholastic Squash Association (NEISA) championships (including
nine-straight from 2012-2020), captured U. S. High School titles in
2015, 2016 and from 2018-2020) and went through Stephens’s swan-song
2019-2020 season without losing a single match, winning every
regular-season and team tournament competition by a score of 7-0.
During his years at Brunswick, Stephens also coached the high school
varsity tennis team for 23 years and the golf team for 12. Even this
past spring, having retired two years ago and with his 77th birthday
(on June 21st) fast approaching, Stephens informally coached the high
school varsity tennis team at Greenwich Country Day, which George H. W.
Bush, the 41st U. S. President attended eight decades ago.
Among the speakers at the dedication ceremony this
past weekend were Dirk Katstra, the Executive Director of the Virginia
Athletic Foundation; Lindsay Wortham, UVA’s former women’s tennis coach
and supporter of the Virginia Tennis program, who was directly
responsible for the dedication of the new facility at the Boar's Head
Sports Club; and current UVA head tennis coaches Andres Pedroso (men’s)
and Sara O'Leary (women’s), who spoke about the Virginia tennis program
and the honorees. UVA’s 2021-22 men’s team is currently ranked sixth
nationally and the women’s team is ranked fourth. Also in attendance
were current UVA President James Ryan and former (from 1990-2010)
President John Casteen.
With his unique brand of humility, purposeful mentorship
and humor, Coach Stephens has influenced generations of players in
teaching the values of sportsmanship. Thirty-four Brunswick alumni
became captains of their respective college’s men’s team. In addition,
he has coached many outstanding players at Brunswick, including eight
High School All-Americans (that designation only began in 2014,
otherwise there would have been many more) and future College Squash
Association All-Americans Alexis Miron ‘89 (Dartmouth), Will
Broadbent ’02 (Harvard) and Hayes Murphy ’14 (Penn).
Since 1998 U.S. Squash has nominated a coach for the
USOC National Coach of the Year Award who has exhibited leadership,
excellence, character development and mentoring at the highest level.
In 2014 Jim Stephens became the first high school team coach to be
honored in this fashion. Then, in the spring of 2016, the Greenwich
Leadership Forum presented him with a Lifetime Leadership Award, and
the following autumn he was chosen as the recipient of the Appleseed
Award in recognition of his contributions to Brunswick School as a math
teacher. The fact that he received three major awards in just 18
months, each of them honoring him in separate areas --- a coaching
award, a citizenship award and a teaching award --- bears full
testimony to the multi-front positive influence Coach Stephens has had
on his student-athletes and the larger community.
Rob Dinerman, author of A History Of Squash At Brunswick School, and Coach Stephens
