50+ Years Later- Bobby Staak Still Holds Blue Wave Scoring Record

Bobby Staak is Darien High School's most prolific scorer. It is easy to understand why -- a love of basketball runs in his family. His father played for Columbia University before having to leave school during the great depression. His mother played semi-pro basketball for the Stamford Aces. Her coach was J. Walter Kennedy, the former mayor of Stamford, and later the Commissioner of the NBA. She averaged 40 points per game and once scored 88 points in a single game!

Bob's father was a New York City milkman who migrated to Stamford and then on to Darien. Bob grew up with his younger brother, Barry, who also played basketball and baseball at the high school, on the "other side" of Darien in what was at the time an all white upperclass town. He developed close friendships to black kids from Norwalk and Stamford playing in the parks and YMCAs -- Calvin Murphy, Robert "Spider" Hayes, Roosevelt Penney, Woody Lake, Alex "June Bug" Hargrove, to name a few, and never thought anything other than they were his friends. They would come over to his house on the weekends and his mother would make lunch for them before going up to Hindley School to play ball all day at the outdoor court.

Bobby started playing basketball at the age of 5 or 6 and was always good at it. As he got older and better he sought out playing against older kids who were good players. He went to Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven, and New York City to play against the best players from those areas. When he got a little older his parents would drive him or he would take the bus to the Stamford YMCA a couple of nights per week to play against grown men who were semi-pro players.

He went to basketball camp every summer where there were very good players from all over New England, New York City, Long Island, etc. and was often the MVP at the camps. He would play in tournaments in New York with and against all the best players from the City after the high school season ended. Many of the names most people would not recognize today, but they were really good players who either did not qualify for college or fell into crime and addiction. However, some of the players he played against are very well known -- Lew Alcindor, Jim McMillian, Dean Meminger, and Charlie Yelverton who all played in the NBA. His basketball friends used to joke that he was the only white kid allowed in the parks when he played. One time Bob ran into Calvin Murphy in Las Vegas with Rudy Tomjanovich and Murphy said to Tomjanovich, "Who did I tell you is the baddest white boy I ever played against?" Rudy replied, "That kid Staak." Calvin exclaimed, "This is him!"

Bob said not many kids sought out to play against the best competition they could find, but he did and that was a big factor in his basketball development. Today, parents hire trainers to put their kids through drills, whereas back in the day a player had to take the initiative, but few did.

Bob said before he was in high school while playing youth basketball he was coached by some great Darien High School players -- Bob Saverine and Art Lupinacci, who both were starters on the 1958 Darien High School State Championship basketball team, and Tom Spangenberg and Sandy Fletcher, who also were on that team as reserves. Saverine signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles and played for several years in the majors and Spangenberg set the DHS basketball single game scoring record of 41 points which stood for several years until Larry Hart broke it with 45 points in the 1971-72 season. (Hart's record still stands today.) Spangenberg went to Dartmouth to play football where he had a great career as a running back.

Freshmen basketball players were not allowed to play varsity back then, so in Bobby's first ever varsity game as a sophomore he was a starter in the season opener on the road at Greenwich. He scored 25 points and Darien won. He scored 257 points his sophomore season and averaged just over 14 points per game. He averaged almost 25 points per game his junior and senior years and scored more than 30 quite a few times. He scored 36 points twice -- once in a blowout where he only played half the 4th quarter. He was also named 2nd team All-FCIAC as a sophomore and 1st team as both a junior and senior as well as 2nd team All-State as a senior.

Bobby Staak holds the all-time basketball scoring record at Darien High School with 1,166 points and he did it in only three seasons, before there was a three-point line.[1] This means his particular scoring record at DHS will never be broken unless the three-point shot is removed from the game. His scoring record still stands over fifty years later -- with or without the three-point line. He likely would have had far more points in the current era because many of his shots taken were from beyond the three-point arc. That he did it in an era when he played for a small suburban public school against the best players from the bigger urban public schools is quite remarkable. The best public school players in his era were not recruited to play at private schools as is often the case today.

Bobby played basketball year round, but he also played football for one year when legendary Darien coach John Maher was still coaching the football team. He was a pretty good baseball pitcher in high school, also, and could have signed a modest baseball contract out of high school with the Giants and Braves, but his goal was to be a professional basketball player. He says if the Yankees would have offered him a contract he might have considered baseball more closely! He made a list of "The Top 100 High School Cagers in America" and was recruited by over 100 colleges, but playing in New York at Madison Square Garden is why he chose to play for Lou Carnesecca at St. John's University. He mused that if he could do it over again he probably would have gone to North Carolina to play for Dean Smith or South Carolina with Frank McGuire.

There were no dorms at St. John's so Bob lived in an apartment near the campus, but living off-campus did not provide the college environment he was looking for. He was a business major, but realized he wanted to be a coach and St. John's did not offer the major he needed. He transferred to UCONN to play for Dee Rowe after his freshmen year and says it turned out to be the best decision he ever made. Bob became a TV Guide All-American, All-New England, All-Yankee Conference, co-captain his junior and senior years, MVP his senior year, and at graduation was the 4th all-time leading scorer at UCONN with 1,288 points -- and he did it only three seasons, averaging over 18 points per game. Bob did not have the benefit of the three-point line in college, either, and many of his shots were from behind the three-point line. One of the team managers used to say he shot the ball from "Staakonian range".

Having graduated from UCONN and his college career over, Bob signed a pro contract with the Pittsburgh Condors of the American Basketball Association, but he was the last player cut at the end of the preseason. He came back to Connecticut and played in the New York State Pro League on weekends where he once scored 71 points in a single game. He was also the head coach at East Hartford High School. The Kentucky Colonels of the A.B.A. came calling, but after a contract dispute he decided to end his playing career and move into coaching full-time.

Bob landed a job as an assistant coach with Dee Rowe at UCONN for two years, then went to the College of William and Mary as an assistant. He moved on to the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant under Hall of Fame coach Chuck Daly. While there, the 1979 team made it to the NCAA Final Four without having any players on scholarship due to Ivy League rules. Penn lost to Magic Johnson and Michigan State in the National Semi Final. Michigan State went on to win the National Championship.

The next stop was Xavier University in Cincinnati where he became the athletic director and head coach. He took over a mediocre borderline program, but managed to take Xavier to the NCAA tourney in 1983 for the first time in 22 years. The next year they missed going to the NIT Final Four losing by one point at Michigan, the team that was the eventual NIT Champion.

Bob is widely credited with laying the foundation for Xavier to become a first class program with the elements to rise to greater heights than they ever had experienced. His vision set the table for creating an image of Xavier as an elite Division I basketball program able to compete with any program in the country: one with a competitive schedule, top notch facilities, strong fundraising, an academic and athletic support system, and strong community and campus involvement. The foundation of the program was built soundly with a lot of cooperation from the administration, alumni, and community. Fortunately, the building of the program has continued to this day by the people who have followed in his footsteps.

His final stop at coaching in the college ranks was at Wake Forest where he was the head coach for four years before moving on to the NBA coaching for the next 12 years with the Clippers, Heat, Bullets, Warriors, and Grizzlies. He later worked for the Boston Celtics, the NBA league office, and scouted for 8 years with the Orlando Magic. Currently, he is scouting for the Miami Heat.

Bob feels that his basketball colleagues are like family. He became pretty good friends with Calvin Murphy from Norwalk. Calvin played in the NBA was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1993. He and Calvin competed against one another growing up and they played together on a "barnstorming" team during high school. They were also recruited together by several colleges their senior year. Bob competed against long-time Sacred Heart University coach Dave Bike and they became good friends when they became coaches and athletic directors at the college level. Bike recruited Frank Oleynick from Bridgeport to Seattle University. Frank was eventually drafted by the Seattle Supersonics. The head coach at Seattle was Billy O'Connor from Stamford who was a great player at Canisius and the coach at Stamford Catholic when Bob was in high school. Billy O'Connor is Dave Bike's brother-in-law and is also the nephew of Andy Robustelli from the New York Giants whose son Rick is a good friend of Bob's and went to UCONN together. Rick introduced Bob to his first wife. He has a lot of great memories from the old days and it is because his basketball friends are like family.

Bob was inducted into the Xavier Athletic Hall of Fame, the Greater Cincinnati Basketball Hall of Fame, the New England Basketball Hall of Fame, and the UCONN Fairfield County Sports Hall of Fame, and some day his Darien High School basketball jersey number 21 could be retired and will hang from the gym rafters. The hopes are that his retired jersey will have an impact on the kids coming through the Darien basketball program and allow him to feel like he is giving something back to them and the game that has treated him so well over the years dating back to his formative years in his hometown of Darien.
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Please visit https://www.change.org/RetireN... to sign the petition to retire Bobby Staak’s Darien High School jersey number 21. Please leave a comment at the bottom of the petition page!

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[1] There have been several 1,000 point scorers at Darien High School, but Bobby Staak was the first to reach that milestone when he broke Roger Myers school record by about 300 points. It would be 24 years and the addition of the three-point line before other DHS players reached the milestone. He was followed in 1990 by Paul Fiorita (1015), 1994 by Peter Davidson (1022), 1998 by Charlie Chacos (1004), 2014 by Matt Staubi (1108 -- Rye Country Day School and DHS), and 2017 by Alex Preston (1096).