Paul Finnegan, Sr.

Harvey Gates: “Coach Finnegan was a tough but fair man who really cared for his players.  He made sure we had the proper equipment, especially skates, to make us into hockey players.  He was a B.C. hockey guy and could still skate hard when he coached us.  He would challenge Walter Stone during end-of-practice sprints and beat him.  And Walter Stone was fast.”

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Skip Fryling: “Coach Finnegan came in at the right time.  He had hockey skills and he made us competitive against really good teams.  He would motivate us with certain quips like ‘you guys couldn’t break a pane of glass shooting like that’ or ‘you look like you’re on double runners out there’ but his coaching at the very beginning of the hockey program was extremely valuable to us.  We needed that type of coaching discipline.  We were a brand-new program and he made us feel like we had a right to be there.”

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Jack Mullen: “Coach Finnegan was my history teacher in high school.  This was during the Cold War years of high political tension globally.  He kept it topical and often asked the class ‘what did Nikita Khrushchev have to say today?’  I had known Coach from a year earlier when he was the assistant freshman football coach to Larry Keenan.  I liked Coach Finnegan.  He was a good guy to us in those early years of the hockey program and I’m proud to say that I stayed acquainted with him for many years thereafter.”

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In 1957, weeks before the newly minted Scituate High School varsity boy’s hockey team prepared to take on their more experienced South Shore League opponents, a call went out for a head coach.  Joe Gately had coached the junior team the prior year but the school department felt that the new varsity head coach should have a college degree and work in the school system.  There were very few teachers or administrators with hockey experience in those days, but one man stood out.  His name was Paul Finnegan.

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Paul Finnegan was born in Everett, MA in 1927.  As a boy, he played football, baseball, and tennis.  The Finnegans summered on Kenneth Road in the Sand Hills area of Scituate.  Paul was a good student and his parents sent him to Boston College High School.  It was during his high school years that Paul began skating and playing organized hockey.  He graduated from B.C. High in 1945 and went on to pursue a university education at Boston College.  Paul played ice hockey at B.C. and made the team that won a national championship in 1949.  

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That Boston College team went 21-1 in 1948-1949.  The team’s one regular season loss was to Dartmouth College in January.  The teams met again in the national championship game in March 1949 and B.C. beat them 4-3.  After graduating Boston College in 1950, Paul entered Naval Officer Training School in Newport, R.I.  He then served on a U.S. Navy destroyer during the Korean War.  Soon after he finished his Navy commitment, he married Marilyn Hourihan in 1953.  Marilyn’s family had also summered in Scituate and they developed an instant relationship.  

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The Finnegans bought a house on Briarwood Lane, a short walk from Central School and raised four children there.  Paul got a job teaching history at Scituate High School.  As it turned out, he was a natural educator.  He coached a little bit of high school football and jumped at the opportunity to coach the new varsity hockey program.  This was the fall of 1957.  The junior hockey team from the prior year had convinced the Scituate School Committee to add the sport to the varsity athletic program.  Funds were tight initially, but Coach Finnegan stressed the importance of having good equipment.  On more than one occasion, he took his players into the old Bucky Warren’s Sporting Goods store on Winter Street in downtown Boston to get them properly fitted for skates.  They may have worn spare football jerseys, but Coach wouldn’t stand for second-rate skates.

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Harvey Gates remembers going to Bucky Warren’s: “Coach Finnegan recommended that we buy good skates. They should fit properly and last a long time.  Like the other guys, I got a pair of Tacks – these were real good skates and not inexpensive.  Coach made us get them properly fitted – no more of this ‘buy them bigger and grow into them.’  He thought hockey skates should be worn tight, maybe with one thin sock or even no sock.  He also recommended that we put the skates on when we got home and soak them in the bathtub.  That way they would eventually form right to our feet.”

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The 1957-1958 debut of Scituate High varsity hockey was the culmination of a long desire to play in the South Shore League against the best public high school hockey teams in the area.  That first team included junior team members Skip Fryling, Paul Johnson, Bruce Sunnerberg, Jon Story, and Bill McKeever.  The other seniors on this first varsity team included Bill Kay, Jack Kelly, George Rodgers, Glen Tedford, and Luther Haartz.

Underclassmen included Donald Grip, Walter Stone, David Desler, Billy Barron, Jon Gunn, and Jack Mullen.

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Scituate played out of Salt’s Rink in Weymouth in those first few years.  It was originally built without a roof but they added one sometime in the late fifties or early sixties.  Scituate won their first game out of the gate, beating King Philip Regional High School 3-1.  The rest of that season was punctuated by a few wins among a handful of losses, but the program was deemed an immediate success due to the enthusiasm of the players and a coach who was determined to drill the fundamentals of hockey into them.  

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Ice time for practice in those days was difficult to obtain, so Coach Finnegan made sure his players got their skating in on the ponds.  To Finnegan, skating was skating.  It didn’t matter whether you were on an ice surface in a rink or outside on a frozen cranberry bog.  If a pond was frozen somewhere in Scituate, Coach Finnegan had his guys practicing there as much as possible.  Fortunately, Scituate had plenty of options when it came to skating outside.  

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As Harvey Gates remembers it: “Coach Finnegan was very stern.  I was scared to death of him.  But once I made the team, I wanted to get better so I went to public skating to improve my skating skills.  Coach said, ‘skating is skating.’  It didn’t matter where you skated, just that you kept skating and improving.  I never regretted putting in that extra time skating.”

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In 1958-1959 Scituate beat Canton, Thayer Academy, and King Philip once each and Brockton twice.  Senior goaltender Bill McKeever played superbly, registering the second highest save percentage in the league.  Many of his teammates recall how brilliant McKeever was that season, stopping pucks from all over the ice.  One of them caught him square on the chin.  McKeever shrugged it off, never losing his concentration.

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Harvey Gates again: “We were a very mediocre team those early years.  We probably won no more than eight games over three seasons.  The teams we played against – Hingham, Archbishop Williams, and Weymouth especially – were very good, very established teams.  We had trouble keeping up with them.  But strangely, we never felt we were on a losing team even when we had a losing record.  We felt that everyone we played against had a head start on us and it would take some time to get a team together that could really compete.”

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As guys graduated high school and went off to college or to pursue a vocation, Coach Finnegan continued to push his younger players through their paces.  There were a number of lean years during the first decade of the ice hockey program, but Mr. Finnegan continued to recruit Scituate boys to learn and play the sport.  By the time he was ready to turn the head coaching responsibilities over to his assistant Paul Johnson, Paul Finnegan had built the foundation for the high school ice hockey program.  This program would grow substantially over the next decade.  Hundreds of boys grew up in Scituate playing pond hockey, and as they got older, competed fiercely for the opportunity to play the sport they loved at the high school level.  Mr. Finnegan was integral in making that opportunity a reality.

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Paul Finnegan left the Scituate High School faculty in 1966.  He was named the first director of student affairs at UMass Boston at its inception.  The campus was in Park Square at the time.  In the early 1970s, Mr. Finnegan established intramural and recreational athletics for students at the college.  He was responsible for the university’s adoption of the nickname Beacons for its athletic teams.  Mr. Finnegan thought it an apt description for a school that was to have its new campus built adjacent to Boston Harbor.  To this day, UMass Boston sports teams are known as the Beacons because of Paul Finnegan.

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Although Paul moved on from teaching classes at Scituate High School, the Finnegans never left Scituate.  Paul Finnegan remained in the town for a number of years.  He spent much of his free time enjoying his 32-foot cabin cruiser The Hat Trick, which he moored in Scituate Harbor.  Paul Finnegan passed away in 2006.  Those who played for him at the inception of the varsity hockey program more than sixty years ago remember a principled man who gave much of his time teaching the game of hockey to eager young high school athletes. There’s not a man among them today who doesn’t look back fondly at the time they spent with their teammates and their coach.  Paul Finnegan contributed in no small way to their development as hockey players, but they remember him most for the lasting impact he made on their lives.

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Edited June 5, 2019