It’s called the Sheehan Test, and it’s one every football lineman and basketball player at Colonie Central High School has had to pass for the last 41 years.
Here’s how it works. Coach Jim Sheehan grabs your hand, and you have to match his grip.
We had different levels 3, 4, 5, 6 all the way up to level 9,` said Sheehan.
Even coaches had to pass the Sheehan Test.
`He shakes my hand for the first time (after coming to Colonie), and he breaks my hand in half,` said varsity baseball coach Greg Lanni.
`When he shook your hand, he’d try to break your fingers,` said varsity football coach Mike Ambrosio. `He’d say, ‘Show me the power.’`
But as he was crushing someone’s hand, Sheehan also sometimes passed along some vital information.
`As he had me in the grip, he said, ‘Listen to this if you don’t listen to anything else,’` said Greg Bearup, who succeeded Sheehan as Sand Creek Middle School’s eighth-grade football coach. `’When you teach, don’t let them see you smile till after Christmas. And when you coach, don’t demand anything less of your athletes until they give you more than you thought they had.`
Young athletes in the South Colonie School District won’t have to pass the Sheehan Test anymore, though. Sheehan is retiring after more than four decades of service as a football and basketball coach, mostly at the modified, freshman and junior varsity levels.
`Because of my longevity, I thought it was time to watch the games from a different point of view,` said Sheehan, who coached modified sports and served as a varsity assistant during his tenure. `There are some younger guys here who want to have a chance to coach, and I want them to have the chance.`
Sheehan started his career in 1967 by starting the eighth-grade football program ` first at Lisha Kill Middle School, and then at Sand Creek Middle School in 1968 when all eighth-grade students were moved closer to the high school campus.
`The first year we had eighth-grade football at Sand Creek, we had 150 kids try out. That’s a phenomenal number,` said Sheehan. `We only had 39 jerseys for the team, so I ordered another five jerseys to bring the number up to 44. I think that was the height of enthusiasm for eighth-grade football.`
Throughout his career, Sheehan worked with several Colonie coaching legends including Pep Sand, Harry Kachadurian and Dave Foust. He served as Ambrosio’s lineman coach until 2002 and worked as an assistant coach under Kilmer through this season.
`He was the guy who got the most out of our linemen in terms of motivation,` said Ambrosio. `He’s the kind of who they’d run through a wall for.`
Sheehan said he tried to get as much out of his linemen as he had to give when he was a lineman for the Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake football team in the 1950s.
`I played for Murray O’Neal, who was a tremendous influence in my life,` said Sheehan. `He taught me enough in terms of the fundamentals and the desire you need in football. Pep (Sand) had the same attitude as Murray had in terms of the passion and the fundamentals.`
Sheehan said coaching younger athletes required patience on his part. `At the freshman level, you have to teach everything four times because that’s the only way to get them to learn,` he said
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That doesn’t mean Sheehan kept his cool all the time. A classic story happened several years ago during a varsity basketball game.
`There was a situation where there was a really bad call,` Sheehan recalled. `I lost my composure, so I stood up and kicked my foot. I was wearing loafers at the time, and when I kicked my foot, my shoe flew off 25 feet into the air. Luckily, it landed behind the scorer’s table and not on the court; otherwise, it would have been a technical foul.`
There was also the time where Sheehan nearly forgot to send one of his basketball players home after a practice. He was disciplining the player for making a bad play in a game the previous day by having him run up and down a flight of stairs.
`So I put him on the stairs, and we did some drills,` Sheehan said. `After practice, I go into the locker room, shower, get dressed and start to go home when I see him still on the stairs. If I hadn’t walked out in that direction, I would have forgotten all about him. I don’t know how long he was on the stairs.`
Embarrassing stories aside, Sheehan said he enjoyed his coaching career at Colonie.
`There’s things in your life you enjoy doing ` otherwise, you don’t do them,` he said. `I’ve always enjoyed working with young men and teaching them the sports of football and basketball.`
And the coaches Sheehan worked with said that his players enjoyed working with him.
`The thing I’ll remember is he’s the classic high school coach. He’s way more concerned about the kids than himself,` said Kilmer. `He didn’t care about wins and losses. He cared about developing relationships with the kids, and the kids remembered that. Whenever they come back (to see a basketball game), they go to Jim first.“