BROWNSVILLE — Before starting a lengthy trip home after an early-season road game, the bus carrying the Windsor High School boys’ basketball team pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot in Rutland.
The players all piled out — except one.
When teammates asked why he wasn’t joining them, the first-year varsity player replied, “I’m not hungry.”
But John Barth knew better.
He understood what life could be like for a kid from a family that was financially strapped. Swallowing your pride — and asking a friend or a coach for a few bucks to buy a meal — could hurt more than an empty stomach.
“John grew up with very little,” said Connie Barth, who was married to the legendary Windsor basketball coach for 56 years. “He never forgot how important it was for kids who had absolutely nothing to not feel like they were being left out of anything.”
Barth, a coach and teacher in Windsor schools for 42 years, died on May 9, after battling a fast-advancing cancer. He was 81.
“With his ties to Windsor, Coach Barth understood the different backgrounds that kids came from and he was sensitive to it,” said Paul Righi, who played for Barth in the late 1970s and is now an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene. “He was a terrific coach and an even better man.”
A gym rat and star athlete himself at Windsor High in the late 1950s, Barth started out at Springfield College, a private school in western Massachusetts, but “ran out of money,” his wife said.
He transferred to what at the time was Castleton Teachers College. A scholarship from the Windsor Rotary Club helped cover his college bills. “He didn’t have to, but he paid it all back,” his wife said.
Connie Barth, who grew up in Claremont, began teaching in Windsor around the same time as her future husband in the early 1960s. They shared an office in the physical education department. “We just enjoyed each other’s company,” she said.
From early on, basketball was a big part of their family life. As a preschooler, their son, Jonathan, tagged along with his father at weekend practices. (Barth was a devout Catholic, but that didn’t necessarily mean Sunday was a day of rest for his teams.)
Barth infused his players with a David vs. Goliath mentality. Although Windsor had the smallest enrollment of any school in what is now Vermont’s Division I, it didn’t stop Barth’s squads from competing year in, year out for state titles.
Taking a page from Woodsville High School coach John Bagonzi, Barth preached a full-court pressure, fast-breaking brand of basketball. It often led to entertaining high-scoring games, particularly when Windsor and Woodsville matched up in non-league contests.
“The first game I covered, each team scored over 100 points, and played great defense too,” recalled retired Valley News sports editor Don Mahler. “It was amazing nonstop basketball.”
Barth laid the groundwork for building a successful high school program on Saturday mornings when he brought elementary school-aged kids into the gym to learn the game’s fundamentals.
Righi, a product of the Saturday morning sessions, was an integral part of the Windsor team that captured the 1978 Class L, as it was known then, state championship.
“It took years for him to install his system, and we all learned from him to have high expectations,” said Righi, who went on to play at Middlebury College.
When Don Swinyer, a three-sport athlete who graduated in 1977, expressed an interest in coaching, Barth helped him get started. In the mid 1990s, Barth, who by then was Windsor’s athletic director, hired Swinyer as the school’s varsity baseball coach.
“Whatever he could to do help you, he’d do,” Swinyer said. “He helped me pick a college and was always there when I needed advice. He was a big influence in my life.”
About the time that his daughter, Sarah, was old enough to dribble, Barth turned his attention to improving the state of girls’ basketball in Windsor.
“He did a good job of getting more girls involved in the sport,” said Erin Rockwood, a 1996 Windsor High graduate whose last name then was Farnsworth. “He started working with us when Sarah and I were in second or third grade. We lost our first game by a score of something like 9-1.
“As we got older, we got a lot better.”
When his daughter reached high school, Barth took over as Windsor’s varsity coach.
Like his boys’ teams, the girls benefited from Barth’s coaching demeanor. “He was not a yeller so when he raised his voice, we knew we had to try harder,” Rockwood said.
Barth showed up at practice one day with a load of bricks — two for each player that they could paint their favorite color and write motivational slogans, like Nike’s “Just Do It,” on.
“We didn’t have weights, we had bricks,” Rockwood said. “He had us running and jumping with them.”
Nearly 20 years later, “a lot of us still have our bricks,” she added with a laugh.
Under Barth, the Windsor girls’ basketball team captured two Division III state championships in three years. The first title in 1994 capped a 24-0 season.
Over the years, Barth received feelers from bigger schools, but he wasn’t interested in climbing the coaching ladder. “He just loved Windsor,” his wife said. “He knew this is where he wanted to be.”
After years of teaching physical education, Barth went back to school to become a junior high science teacher. “He wanted to get back in the classroom, and he loved science,” said Dave Holloway, another longtime Windsor teacher.
After the Barths retired from teaching, the couple built a home on land they owned in neighboring Brownsville. To supplement his income, Barth grew Christmas trees, but he “gave away more than he sold,” Hathaway said.
In retirement, Holloway and Barth became golf partners. But when the cancer spread to his back and the pain became too much, Barth had to stop playing.
He didn’t stop living, however. And in a strange way, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last year was partly the reason.
With their daughter Sarah’s husband, Michael Eckrich, a pediatric bone marrow specialist, working the pandemic’s front lines at a Texas hospital, she returned to Vermont for an extended visit.
For six months, Barth spent every minute he could with his 4-year-old grandson, Sam. They fished for trout, planted a garden and took tractor rides.
When Holloway visited his ailing friend whose cancer had become terminal, the conversation often turned to Sam. “It’s when John realized that he wasn’t going to see his grandson again, that’s when the tears came to his eyes,” Holloway said
As for what happened that night 45 years ago or so in the McDonald’s parking lot in Rutland?
Barth and assistant coach Dale Perkins made sure the young player joined his teammates in line to order at the front counter.
After the team’s next away game that called for a food stop, Barth walked up the aisle of the bus. Without fanfare, he handed each player enough money to cover a couple fast-food burgers and fries.
The practice continued the rest of the season, but Barth never told his players where the meal money came from.
They just knew they had a coach who made sure no kid went home hungry.
Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com. He played on Barth’s teams as a junior and senior in 1976 and 1977.
