Staff file photo / Greg Macafee. Badger boys head coach Josh Upshire urges on his team from the bench during a game earlier this season. Six NAC coaches are alumni of their respective schools.

There’s no place like home. For the six Northeastern Athletic Conference boys basketball coaches that run the program they once played for, that sentiment couldn’t be more true.

Bristol’s Craig Giesy (2003), Badger’s Josh Upshire (2002), Mathews’ Mike Weymer (2001), Chalker’s Mike Karr (1988), Maplewood’s Marty Urchek Jr. (2008) and Windham’s Cody Apthorpe (2009) were all prominent players for their respective schools. After graduating, they each found their way back home and are now guiding those same basketball programs in a head coaching role.

There’s a special feeling in being home, and in Upshire’s case, he’s happy he was able to help put a personal stamp on the program.

“It’s always good to come home and be able to see the people that you grew up with, to be able to come back and show your face and be able to help not necessarily change your program, but to mold it into the way that you wanted the program to run is always a good feeling,” Upshire said. “The guys ahead of me did a phenomenal job and for me to come in and change the program the way that I wanted it done was a good feeling.

“To be able to come home and have not really a hero’s welcome, but it was good to come home and have people excited to have you there.”

Weymer thinks being an alumnus is sometimes exactly what a program needs. To be someone who stood in the exact shoes of your players can lead to a greater understanding of the program, and he thinks it leads to a greater dedication to the program as well.

“I think when you have alumni leading their respective programs, I just think that there’s just a level of commitment there that you just don’t see at all these (other) places,” Weymer said. “It’s almost personal for all of these guys. At small schools, you might not always get the best players and even with your coaching staff, you have to coach up your coaches and find some diamonds in the rough there. But if you can find people that are really committed, that really believe in the school, believe in the community and want to be a part of those things, then you potentially have something special.”

Each path was different. For some, like Giesy, it’s not something he planned on originally, but for others, like Weymer, this is something he knew he wanted to do for a long time.

“I feel very strongly about my experience growing up,” Weymer said. “I had wonderful teachers, educators and coaches. It was always something that I wanted to do pretty much from the time I stopped playing. I wanted to one day be the basketball coach at Mathews.

“Basketball was kind of my vehicle to give back to the community and to try to do for others what the coaches or what the teachers and administrators did for me. (These) people were instrumental in my life and I wanted to try to do that for others.”

That was a common theme between the coaches. Returning home to give back to a community that had given to them.

In Karr’s case, he’s returned on multiple occasions. First when he took over the Chalker program in 1998, then after leaving, returned for a second stint, then returned once more in 2021 for his third stint.

Giesy and Karr have a unique connection. Karr, during his first stint with Chalker, coached against Giesy, who was then a star on the Panthers roster. Chalker and Bristol were rivals and two of the top teams in the East Suburban Conference at the time and were no strangers in the postseason.

“It’s changed a lot but those games were incredible,” Karr said about squaring off against Bristol in the early 2000s. “Obviously, they had (Giesy) as a player who was obviously strong and they got to states. We were very competitive at that time, and the atmosphere was unmatched and hasn’t been matched since to be honest with you. They were selling out games, the kids competed at a very high level and knew each other and it was just a great time to be not only a coach but a basketball fan.”

In Giesy’s senior year, the first year of the NAC, Bristol and Chalker met up three times. Each school won at their home court. The third matchup was such a highly-anticipated matchup, they had to move the game from Cardinal High School in Middlefield to Warren G. Harding to meet demand.

“We had some great battles with them,” Giesy said about Chalker. “We were rivals in the league. We had a game that was 101-88 my senior year. Then we played Southington again in the district final.

“The story of that was that the tournament was at Middlefield every year. The year before, we played Windham with Marty Hill in the district final and it was such a big game the year we went to state, they sold out and people were scalping tickets outside and stuff because Middlefield was so small. So when we played Southington in the district final the next year, they sold out so quickly they moved it to Harding.”

Bristol went on to win that game, but fell in the regional semifinal to Sebring.

Also competing on the court in the early 2000s were Weymer and Upshire. While Badger was also a part of those ESC battles with Bristol and Chalker, Mathews was kind of on an island.

During that point, the Mustangs were a part of the Inter-County League, pretty much the modern Scarlet Tier of the Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference. Another team on the outside of the NAC during his time in school was Apthorpe’s Windham squad.

The 2009 graduate was a part of Windham’s teams during its time in the Portage County League. It left for the NAC soon after his graduation.

Both Apthope and Urchek have a family tie.

“It’s a very full-circle experience,” Apthorpe said. “My time in the gym started when I was very, very young. My mom taught at the high school and she would take me to my dad’s practices. I was the waterboy, so I’d be at practice. I grew up in this gym and this school.”

The Urchek name is nearly synonymous with Maplewood basketball. Matt Urchek coached the Rockets program for years, and now, cousin Marty has taken the reins to guide the program.

Like Apthorpe being a waterboy for the Bombers, Urchek was a ballboy at Maplewood as a child.

While their paths didn’t cross in the same way as Giesy and Karr, Urchek remembers watching those early 2000s Bristol teams, and remembers meeting Upshire at a Badger basketball camp.

“I’m probably one of the youngest here. I can remember when I was younger, and I was the ballboy,” Urchek said. “I remember Craig Giesy’s teams and remember those guys when they were going to state. I was really young, obviously. And then I used to go to Badger basketball camps in the summer when I was little, elementary school, middle school, and Upshire and his buddies, all the upperclassmen, were there helping out with camps and those kinds of different things.”

Now, Urchek is coaching against them as peers.

When coaching at small schools together, a bond starts to form. Giesy noted how that happened with him and Upshire.

“You get to know each other,” Giesy said. “You get friendly. With Josh and I, it always seems like one guy is getting riled up and the other guy’s not. It’s fun as a coach, you can look down the sideline, look at each other and just kind of laugh for a second. Get yourself out of the moment and get back into it. There’s a lot of guys that have been coaching for multiple years now, so we’ve coached against each other for a long time. It’s fun.

“It’s part of the reason why you enjoy coaching, I think. Sometimes it’s hard to be a coach and the relationships are what makes it enjoyable.”

For Weymer, Giesy, and Upshire, the three have each made concerted efforts to honor the history of their respective schools and the communities that make up their districts. Bristol has done nights to honor Farmington High School, Mathews did a night to honor Vienna and Badger is cycling through the four school districts that consolidated to form the Badger district. This season, they’ll be honoring the Vernon Blue Streaks.

That extra touch is something that having a graduate is great for. For Badger, Upshire has used this as a way to come full circle and give some long-forgotten teams of years’ past their flowers.

“Part of the reason why I do the throwback nights is not only for me, but for my players to teach them that there were some really good teams back in the day before we were actually Badger,” Upshire said. “We tell our kids and we teach our kids about when we were Hartford. We tell them some information about Hartford, about some of the players and some of the accomplishments from the teams and the players.

“We’re learning about the past and you know where our program came from. So that was one of the big reasons why I wanted to do the throwback nights is to be able to honor those guys who have been really good in the past.”

Badger will be honoring Vernon, the township in which the school resides, on Jan. 13 against Mathews.

While not a graduate or an Andover native, Weymer wanted to give credit to Pymatuning Valley coach Ryan Schontz and his family for entering the community and embracing it like they have. It’s a family affair.

“And they’re tough to beat,” Weymer added.