Standing behind the bench for the Notre Dame Academy hockey team, John Findley set the bar awfully high. Now it's someone else's turn to try to clear it.
Findley has retired as the Cougars coach, ending a terrific seven-season run at the all-girls school during which NDA was a perennial powerhouse and made two state championship games.
"At 63 years old and after 35 years of coaching high school sports, it's time to go," Findley said Thursday. "It's a younger person's job. Right after we got into the tournament (this season), I just decided that it was enough."
"I know it was a difficult decision," said Tom Findley, John's twin brother and a longtime coach at Hingham High who retired just three years ago. "But like me, as we get older with grandchildren there are a lot of real-world things that are more important in life. It's something I know he'll miss, but it's time for him to teach his granddaughters how to skate and be with his family as they grow their families."
Coaching always has been a family affair for John Findley, a father of three who was an assistant on his brother's staff in Hingham and who had his younger daughter Martha on his NDA staff.
John Findley logged time as an assistant coach at both BC High and Duxbury; at the latter spot he coached both the boys team (winning a state crown in 2000) and the girls team. He then spent more than a decade as an assistant on Tom Findley's staff at Hingham, winning a pair of state crowns in 2008 (Division 2) and 2011 (Div. 1).
"There wasn't a better time in my life than coaching with my brother and winning two state titles with my two daughters (Meg and Beth) on the teams," said Tom Findley. "That was a great run."
John Findley joked that he was always the good cop to Tom's bad cop on Hingham's staff. "It was awesome because we could feed off each other," he said. "We were thinking the same things." When Hingham players would come to him with a problem, he would tell them, "I'm going to tell you what you want to hear; (Tom's) going to tell you what you need to hear."
The brothers, who co-own a trucking company (Red Line Freight Systems), grew up together in Milton and both played ...
