Winning, or coaching, has never gotten old for Snip Esterly

Snip Esterly heads to Hershey Thursday to coach in a district championship game for the 18th time, but he’ll approach it as if it was the first.

He has a dozen District 3 gold medals hanging in his den; 14 if you count those he won as a Central Catholic assistant. He doesn’t need more hardware. But he wants more because the players he’s taking to face Middletown in the Class 4A title game have never competed for any.

“Each trip back there it’s something special, because you’re always with a new group,” said Esterly, now 63 and in his 33rd year as a head coach. “I want to see the joy on these guys’ faces. They’ve worked hard. It’s something special for them. They’ll always remember it.”

The Saints were 6-11 a year ago and didn’t make districts. They were bumped out in the second round the year before when they finished 13-11 — at the time the worst record an Esterly team had compiled in 16 years.

Now they’re 22-4 and the No. 1 seed. With their top six scorers back from a season ago they’ve been expecting to play in this game since the ball went up in December. The Saints will be looking for their first district title since 2018 when they meet third-seeded Middletown at Giant Center at 4:15.

After back-to-back down seasons Esterly admits it feels like a long time since the Saints were back on the big stage.

“Nobody likes losing,” he said. “When you’ve get a special group of kids like this, and they’re trying whatever you ask of them, that’s all you can ask.”

Esterly doesn’t like to talk much about the staggering numbers he has produced over four decades; he’s in it for the competition and the experience of teaching young men the game, not for the win total.

You wouldn’t know he’s one of the winningest coaches in Pennsylvania basketball history, with 768 victories, or that he once took teams to eight straight district finals. The late Bill Faller, a Central and BC assistant coach, would’ve been able to tell him that his 191 postseason victories are easily more than the career total of all but two other Berks coaches, but Esterly would’ve had no idea.

He didn’t see any of this coming 33 years ago when he took the baton from Dan Haughney to become head coach at Central Catholic.

“I wasn’t thinking long-term at all,” said Esterly, 30 at the time. “I would’ve been an assistant coach for Reg (Reggie Weiss) for 40 years. I had no aspirations to be a head coach. I loved what I was doing as an assistant.”

He continued to apply the same basic principals he had learned from Weiss, his high school coach, and won 20 games and reached the PIAA Tournament his first season. It was all about defense and sharing the basketball with Weiss, and it’s been the same with Esterly.

His current team is different than most he’s coached: They’re an offensive-minded bunch that shoots well, runs the floor and sometimes ignores the stop signs Esterly will flash late in a game and with a comfortable lead. He’s pulled his hair out at times with this group, hoping to get them to be more patient and take care of the ball better, but at the same time says he still loves coaching them and being with them in the gym each afternoon sharing the lessons he’s learned.

That has never changed.

Neither has his demeanor. Esterly has always been known as a demonstrative sideline general who’s as demanding — and loud — on his players as he is on the refs.

He’s toned that side of his game down considerably in recent years — age and wisdom have played a part — but he can still get as fired up as anyone. You can hear him in every corner of Wolf Gymnasium when he’s unhappy about a call or if a missed defensive assignment leads to an easy bucket.

“The bark was alway worse than the bite,” said Jason Linderman, a freshman at Central Catholic during Esterly’s first season as head coach and now an assistant at BC. “He’s just passionate. Everyone sees the games where he’s pretty intense, but I got to see the other side of him, and how he interacts with kids at practice and just how much he genuinely cares about the kids, each and every one of them. That means a lot to the kids.”

Esterly was close to giving up coaching a couple times. In 2007, after winning a PIAA championship at Central Catholic, he was burned out and thought it might be the right time to leave. For a few months after the season he thought of himself as retired.

“The only thing I didn’t do was hand in the resignation papers,” he said. “I was done.”

He wanted his assistant coach, Mike Murphy, to take over the program, but Murphy couldn’t because of work obligations. Esterly ripped up the resignation letter. That was five district championships ago.

A few years later, when Central Catholic closed and the school and athletic programs were to merge with Holy Name, Esterly figured he was finished. He had an undying allegiance to the late Vince Shemanski, Central’s principal; athletic director Joe Murphy; and others at the school. Even though he graduated from Wilson he had become part of the fabric of Central Catholic.

“It was a tough, tough time for everyone,” he said.

He figured that Tony Balistrere, the Holy Name head coach, would get that position with the Saints. He thought about coaching his daughter’s team at Cocalico. Eventually, Balistrere was named Berks Catholic principal and Esterly was named coach. That was three district championships ago.

There are no thoughts of leaving now. Next season he’ll coach his 1,000th game. A decade from now he could be approaching 1,000 wins. Only one person in Pennsylvania boys basketball history — Ron Insinger of Loyalsock — has ever accomplished that.

“The passion’s still there,” Linderman said. “He’s as intense as he’s ever been. He cares just as much as he ever has. He hasn’t lost that intensity or that passion to win, or (desire) for his teams to get better. Nothing’s changed in the way he prepares and the way he gets his teams ready. The energy’s there. I expect him to do it for a lot longer, too. I don’t see him slowing down.”

Linderman said the current group of players, and their journey, has reinvigorated Esterly.

“He really likes the players, and the players push him (to be better),” he said. “He wants to get them better and that’s really got him excited, too.”

Golf season doesn’t pick up until the state playoffs are over and it’s generally time to put away the clubs when a new basketball season arrives in the fall so there’s no reason for Esterly to stop now.

“I totally enjoy coaching,” he said. “The kids are fantastic. I get along with everybody. It’s been fantastic. As long as my health holds up I can see myself going a few more years.”