For the first time in what seemed like forever, two of the area’s premier programs were suddenly … vulnerable.
On Dec. 10, the Olean High boys basketball team fell to Williamsville East on Coach Altmire Court, ending its celebrated 80-game home win streak. That was at the beginning of a very un-Olean-like 6-5 start to the year.
Twenty-one miles up the road, the Franklinville girls opened the season 1-3, with all three of those losses coming by 13 points or more, though the latter two came without star senior Dani Haskell, who was sidelined with an illness. That was half the number of losses it had suffered in the previous two seasons combined.
Yes, for a brief stretch early on, the Big 30’s standard-bearers in their respective genders were as beatable as they’d been in recent memory. And yet, by mid-March, they were among the final two teams standing.
That was the common ground between this year’s Big 30 Coaches of the Year, Olean’s Tim Kolasinski (the Thomas K. Oakley Memorial Award winner) and Franklinville’s Allan Dunlap (the Margie Holland Award winner), both first time recipients:
Each led his team from their first true points of uncertainty to what had essentially become a birthright for both: the Far West Regional for the Huskies and another sectional championship appearance for the Panthers.
“MY GUYS were really, really upset about that,” Kolasinski said of that streak-ending 55-46 loss to Williamsville East. “They were upset because they lost the game, obviously, but they were upset because they felt like they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain.
“At the end of the day, they may have lost that home winning streak — we didn’t win the league — but we did do what we set out to do, which was play our best basketball at the end of the year and, fortunately, bring home another sectional championship.”
Generally, the top Big 30 bosses are selected for one of two reasons: They either took their team the furthest into the postseason or they were successful in a year where it was unexpected.
In a way, Kolasinski and Dunlap fell into both categories.
Not that success is ever unexpected at Olean and Franklinville, both of which have captured state titles in the last five years.
Olean, though, was essentially starting anew with a first-year coach who’d lost the top seven players from a team that reached the New York State Final Four in 2018-19. If ever there was going to be an understandable dropoff in the annual machine that has become OHS basketball, this was it.
Franklinville had switched leagues and moved up a class after making back-to-back trips to the state title game in 2018 and ‘19. If ever it might have been knocked out of the postseason early, this was it.
But neither of those things happened.
Kolasinski, in year one P.A. — Post-Olean coaching legend Jeff Anastasia — guided the Huskies to within one win of a return trip to the NYS Final Four, a victory it never got a chance to secure due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Dunlap, in his final season of this five-year golden era, brought the Panthers to within a last-second 3-pointer of a third-straight sectional title.
Obviously, the success of this team, the way that this all went, is very gratifying,” Kolasinski said. “There’s no way around that …
“At the end of the day, whatever we do, whoever you’re talking to is going to have a different opinion about it — somebody’s going to say you did a great job, you got lucky, whatever. We just kind of had to turn off and tune out that outside noise and just go to work and do what we thought we could do.”
The Huskies did just that, winning 13 of their final 14 games, including a triumph over backyard rival Allegany-Limestone for the overall Section 6 Class B crown. Franklinville won 17 of 18 games, including a perfect 10-0 mark in league play, before falling to Holland in the Class C championship contest.
And though the Panthers’ season might have ended a bit short of where it had hoped in the final go-rounds for Dunlap and Haskell, they — like Olean — could still view it as a success.
“It was heartbreaking to lose that way,” Dunlap acknowledged. “But yeah, for me, I’ve coached 22 years at all different levels; you learn over that span that one game doesn’t define the success of a season.
“Our success this season was all the things that happened outside of that — the relationships that we built with each other, the interaction with the community, our school — just all the things that go along with a playoff run and a successful season won-loss-wise … those are the important things.”
FOR KOLASINSKI, the basis for his Oakley Award citation was in a tremendous first act.
Though he sought to minimize the pressure and lofty expectations that came with being Anastasia’s replacement, he ultimately didn’t need to, leading Olean to another run through Buffalo State despite returning only one player — senior Covi James — who’d received any meaningful minutes in 2018-19.
In the end, the hardware was merely the icing on the cake of proving that it could still compete with a new-look team.
“I’m certainly not going to stand here and tell you that I knew we were going to be sectional champions or we were going to be having a chance to return to the final four,” said Kolasinski, who spent 13 seasons as an aide to Anastasia before taking the reins. “But I will tell you this: I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it either.
“One of the things we spent those 13 years doing was just trying to maximize whatever we had every year. That’s kind of the mindset I went into this season with: I’m not sure what we’re capable of doing, but at the end of the day, wherever it ends, I want to say we took it as far as we could. When it was over, I just wanted to be able to look back and say, we all gave it our best shot.”
FOR DUNLAP, his first and long-deserved honor was as much rooted in his body of work as in what Franklinville accomplished this winter.
In five years, he led the Panthers to a glittering mark of 135-51, including five trips to the sectional title game (four in Class D, one in C), two Class D titles, two trips to the state championship and an NYS crown in 2019. And bigger, perhaps, than the titles these teams won is the legacy they’ll leave behind.
And that’s what Dunlap, at the helm for what will likely go down as the greatest era in program history, who has since announced that he’ll be stepping down from his post, is proud of most.
“Absolutely,” said Dunlap. “I’m very thankful for the kids that we’ve had come through in these past five years, and not only that: everybody has a piece of it. You’re only as good as the people that surround you, so everybody has a piece of the success, from all the great players that we’ve had, to assistant coaches, to our administration at the school and our community with the support that they always give.
“I don’t think we can have the successful program that we’ve had without all of those pieces, without great parents.”
He added with a laugh: “Me as a coach, I’ve probably, in all honesty, played the smallest part with everything that everybody puts into a program. It’s been really, really nice. Looking back, I think it’s a really nice legacy that we’re leaving.”
That’s something that both coaches hoped to emphasize — that their awards were as much about the players as anything they did from the sideline.
“I was very fortunate to have been with Coach Anasastia in some capacity for 13 years,” Kolasinski said. “One of the things of the many that I learned from Jeff was that honors like this really belong to your players. I’ve got to give those kids credit, they came to work everyday … (our success was) a testament to those guys buying in, working hard and really getting better everyday.”
