Kevin McFarland ready to move into seat as Hamburg’s head boys basketball coach

Kevin McFarland was looking forward to sitting in the front row at Hamburg basketball games this season to watch his son Kevin play his senior season with the Hawks.

McFarland will still have a front-row seat for all the games but it’ll be as Hawks head coach after being approved 8-0 by the Hamburg School Board Monday night.

“I’ve never wanted to be a high school coach,” said McFarland, who has coached Hamburg’s middle school teams for the past nine seasons. “I like the world of middle school sports. I had an opportunity to apply for the job years ago when it came open, and I didn’t.

“Even when it came open this time I wasn’t going to apply. I wanted to be a dad. I had no intention to be a head coach.”

A series of unusual circumstances has caused McFarland to slide over a few seats.

First, Nick Evangelista resigned as head coach in mid October. He was replaced by middle school assistant coach Mike Donley Oct. 25; within a week Donley had a change of heart and left the job, citing “internal pressures.”

McFarland helped out during the void, running the Hawks’ open gym situation. He realized he needed to step forward as their next head coach.

“I didn’t like what I saw in the faces of those young men every day at open gym,” McFarland said. “They were not in a good place with so much uncertainty, and that’s not fair to them.

“They weren’t very positive about where things were going. I felt for them. A young man asked me: ‘What happens if we don’t have a coach?’ Those things hit me close to the chest. I wanted to make sure they have a good season by having a coach who cares and wanted to be there with them.”

McFarland has a difficult task ahead of him because of the timing, the lack of offseason cohesion and the fact that the Hawks haven’t known any success in a long, long time.

They have experienced 22 straight losing seasons since winning the Berks Conference Division II title in 2000; they last made the District 3 Tournament in 2006.

That’s a lifetime to these players.

The good thing is that seven of the top nine scorers from last season return, including Kevin McFarland III, who averaged a team-high 13.2 points; Xander Menapace, who averaged 9.9 points; and Connor Licklider, who led the team with 31 3-pointers. Both McFarland III and Menapace missed significant time because of injuries.

McFarland knows this group well. He coached the current seniors in youth ball for several years and stayed close because his son grew up playing with them.

McFarland grew up in Pottsville, where he was a top player on the Crimson Tide’s Schuylkill League championship team as a junior and led them in scoring as a senior in 1993-94.

He went on to play for Joe Bressi at Lycoming, where he was a four-year starter and graduated as one of the top scorers and shooters in program history. He started 85 games, third-most at the time of his graduation in 1998, and finished with 1,357 career points. He helped the Warriors win 21 games as a sophomore and 18 as a junior.

“I am the man I am and where I am in my life because of the opportunity Coach Bressi gave me,” McFarland said. “He showed me what I could get from a college education.”

McFarland currently works as a home and school visitor for Tilden Elementary.

“The sport has given me so much, it’s important that I give that to younger kids,” he said, “that’s why I’ve always been involved in the game.”

To help him change the culture within the program McFarland is bringing in Rob Flowers, the head football coach at Daniel Boone, as an assistant. (Flowers will continue to coach football at Boone.)

Flowers played basketball at Muhlenberg along with his brother Matt, now the head coach at Muhlenberg, and Rick Perez, the head coach at Reading High. McFarland has and will continue to draw on their knowledge and experience as coaches.

“We have a program that hasn’t had any basketball activity since February,” McFarland said. “That’s a long time. Having good men around these guys is important. Coach (Rob) Flowers’ energy and the understanding of what it means to be a team will be an important component of what I want to put in place.”

Evangelista coached the Hawks for four seasons. Hamburg went 5-17 last season and finished fourth in Division 3 of the Berks Conference with a 2-9 record. He remains the Hawks’ baseball coach.

Official practice begins Nov. 18; Hamburg has a tip-off tournament scheduled for Dec. 2, the opening night of the season across the state.

“The focus right now is putting these young men in a position where they can have some success,” McFarland said, “and the success isn’t about wins and losses, it’s (about) trying to (help them find) the love and excitement and competitiveness I saw for a long time with these kids.”