RUMFORD – The man who led Mountain Valley to its first Western Maine basketball championship in nearly a decade is moving on.
Ryan Casey, the varsity boys’ basketball coach for the last nine years at Mountain Valley, has resigned to take a new position as assistant principal at Mountain Valley Middle School.
Casey informed athletic director John Bernard of his resignation last Friday after the SAD 43 school board approved his appointment to the middle school. Like many school districts, SAD 43 does not allow administrators to coach athletics. Casey also had to resign as an assistant coach on the varsity football team.
“We’ve posted the positions and we will be taking applications and conducting interviews,” Bernard said.
The Falcons posted an impressive 137-37 record during Casey’s basketball tenure, making the Western Class B tournament in eight of his nine years.
They dominated the Mountain Valley Conference, a predominantly Class C league, but often struggled once they reached the tournament and faced teams from the Western Maine Conference, a predominantly Class B league. The Falcons lost five Western Class B quarterfinals in a row between 1997 and 2002 (they didn’t reach the tournament in 2000) before finally breaking through in 2003. That year, Mountain Valley upset higher-seeded Greely and Gorham to win its first Western Maine championship since 1994 and went undefeated before falling to Winslow in the state title game, 58-48.
The Falcons were unbeaten again during the 2004-05 regular season, going 18-0 before getting knocked out of the tournament by Greely in the quarterfinals.
Casey joined Jim Aylward’s football staff in 1992 and, as defensive coordinator, coached what was consistently one of the best defenses in the Campbell Conference for more than a decade and turned out numerous all-state players. Last year, the Falcon D’ physically pounded opponents while giving up just over seven points a game and played a pivotal role in winning the first football state championship in school history with a 21-7 victory over Winslow in the Class B title game.
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