Jim Bessey stops short of saying his career as a basketball coach is over. He also knows that the relationships cultivated by that avocation will live as long as he does.

Only a few days ago, one of Bessey’s former players stopped by his home in West Farmington unannounced. Mentor and pupil talked for 90 minutes.

“Players call me when their first child is born,” Bessey said. “They stop by the house after coming home from military service.”

Some guys never stop being ‘Coach.’ But the day-to-day grind of guiding one of the strongest programs in Class A basketball has ceased.

Bessey, 69, has retired as head coach of the Mt. Blue High School boys, a job he held for a total of 33 years in two tenures.

The departure leaves an admitted void in Bessey’s life and an obvious vacuum in the Maine hoop coaching fraternity.

“It’s a loss for the community and a loss for KVAC basketball to lose a guy with his morals, his character and everything that he’s all about,” said Edward Little coach and Mt. Blue graduate Mike Adams, who won Mr. Maine Basketball under Bessey’s tutelage in 1990. “It was a pleasure to play for him and to coach against him.”

Bessey scored the last of his 478 varsity wins at Adams’ expense when Mt. Blue edged Edward Little in a stellar Eastern Class A semifinal last month. Hampden held off the Cougars’ furious rally to prevail 46-43 in the regional final.

Neither the coach’s relative age to his counterparts nor the school’s steadily declining enrollment had slowed Mt. Blue.

The Cougars advanced to the Eastern Maine semifinals five of the past six seasons. This year’s team, featuring seniors Cam Sennick, Eric Berry, Blake Hart, Nick Hilton and Steven Yardley, took an additional step to the title game and was considered one of Bessey’s best.

“It’s obviously something I thought about at the beginning of the year,” Bessey said of 2011-12 being his farewell season. “I knew we were going to have a very competitive team. One of them started as a freshman. Two more started when they were sophomores.”

For most coaches, the job and its small stipend are an extension of their Monday-through-Friday role in the classroom.

Bessey already is a decade into retirement from his role as a social studies teacher.

“When I retired from teaching I had to ask if I was going to indulge myself or continue to make a contribution. I think everyone wants to make an impact,” Bessey said. “It has been a great experience. From my perspective there were no negatives. I gained a great deal from it as a human being. Obviously not financial rewards. All intangible things.”

Bessey graduated from Williams High School in Oakland, but he has been a fixture in Franklin County since attending the University of Maine at Farmington.

After completing his graduate studies at Applaachian State University in Boone, N.C., he returned in 1966 to take over the junior varsity program at what was then Farmington High School.

As the school district grew in stature, so did Bessey. With the exception of a four-year 1980s stint at Madison, where Old Dominion football coach Bobby Wilder was his standout player, his entire 46-year coaching life has been spent in SAD and RSU 9.

The pinnacle was an Eastern Class A championship in 1997.

“I think we were very competitive at a small high school with many disadvantages,” Bessey said.

Bessey coached players from 11 different communities. Mt. Blue‘s rural location in the foothills resulted in more snow days than other teams in the region had to face.

Scheduling and rescheduling practices was never easy, either, given the district’s far-flung representation. Bessey used this year’s point guard as an example. Berry lives 25 miles from the high school.

“Hampden is small but they don’t have the geographical area we cover,“ Bessey said. “Tournament week if I want to have a shoot around, I can’t bring the kids in at 9 a.m. and then call them back for the bus at 1. We have the shoot around and then we get on the bus.”

Professional and college coaching greats are said to have a “coaching tree” when their former players and assistants ascend to positions of authority. Bessey’s has more fruitful branches than most.

In addition to Adams and Wilder, Bessey coached the likes of Gavin Kane, Jeff Hart, Ken Marks and Craig Sickels. Those four alone have accounted for more than 1,300 victories and 15 state championships.

Bessey was the dean of KVAC coaches but not an anomaly. Roger Reed of Bangor, Mike McGee of Lawrence and Scott Graffam of Oxford Hills all have coached at those schools in parts of four different decades.

“Those are old-school coaches. So much about the game has changed and they are still around. Communities don’t understand how lucky they are,” Adams said. “I’m glad this was on his terms and not somebody else making the decision.”

Bessey said he “doesn’t have all the answers yet” about how he will spend next winter.

Some of his free time will be occupied by his grandchildren’s sports. He hasn’t ruled out returning as a junior high coach or as a college assistant.

“My wife (Marty) and I have talked about it and I know she has a list of things I’m going to be doing,” Bessey said wryly. “I told her once that I should write a book and she said she had the title: ‘The Season Never Ends.’

Less of a laughing matter is giving up a labor of love that helped Bessey defy the calendar.

“You wonder what you put in place of that,” he said. “It’s something that keeps you young. When you’re coaching, time can’t touch you.”

And the number of lives touched over that time? Beyond measure.

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