Dave Shea, who coached generations of boys and girls basketball and baseball players at Bacon Academy in Colchester, died Saturday at the age of 91.
Shea coached for 49 years, retiring as girls basketball coach in 2019. The school gym is named after him. He had an overall record of 778-308 and qualified for the state tournament in 48 of his 49 seasons.
He won two state titles (2012 in Class L and 2009 in Class M) with the girls team and Bacon was the state runner-up in 2001, 2013 and 2017. His girls record over 25 years was 449-140. His boys team won the Class S state title in 1981.
Shea was the second coach in Connecticut history to win titles with a boys and girls team (after Bill Reagan with St. Thomas Aquinas boys and the Old Saybrook girls) when the Bacon Academy girls won the title in 2009.
“Dave Shea was a legendary figure in Colchester and at Bacon Academy,” Bacon athletic director Kevin Burke said in a text. “He was known not only as a great athlete, coach and storyteller but as the heart and soul of the community’s sports scene.
“Dave Shea’s legacy lives on in the countless lives he touched, both on and off the field.”
Shea coached two of his granddaughters – Katie Mahoney, the Connecticut Gatorade Player of the Year in 2011 who is the all-time leading girls scorer at Bacon Academy with 1,760 points and went on to play at Brown; and Caitlin, whom he coached her freshman and sophomore years (2017-18 and 2018-19).
He also coached baseball at Bacon and won over 300 games. He coached his son John, who graduated in 1983, and who is also the second leading basketball scorer at Bacon (1,958 points). Ron Wotus (1,962), the all-time leading scorer, spent nearly four decades involved in professional baseball – most notably as a bench coach for the San Francisco Giants, who won World Series titles in 2010, 2012 and 2014.
Shea had to step down from his head coaching position after having a pacemaker implanted in late 2019 when he was 84. He was still helping out with the team until he retired before the 2020-2021 season.
“I’ll do what I can,” he told The Courant in December 2019. “They have some restrictions on me as far as being a game coach and getting all excited and whatnot.
“[My doctor] probably doesn’t even know the extent of what I’m doing. But I feel good and I’m just going to help out.”
Shea was a 1952 graduate of Bacon Academy and the school’s first 1,000-point scorer. He played four years of varsity soccer, basketball and baseball.
He signed a professional baseball contract with the Philadelphia Athletics and played five years with Philadelphia and Kansas City before his career was cut short due to shoulder injury.
Shea was a UConn graduate and got his masters from Eastern Connecticut and returned to Colchester to teach and coach. He retired from teaching in December 1999 after 37 ½ years of service as a science teacher, guidance counselor and physical education teacher. He was also the school’s athletic director and the school went from having seven athletic teams to 18 during his tenure.
He coached the boys basketball team 23 seasons and the girls for 25, picking up the job in 1993, thinking he’d be able to leave after a year and his assistant would take over. She coached for a year, then had a baby, and Shea came back in 1995 and he coached until 2019.
Shea was inducted into the Connecticut State High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2004 and the New England Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009.