By Elizabeth Barhydt
Members of the 1976 Greenwich Catholic Middle School boys basketball team gathered April 24 at Greenwich Town Hall for a 50th reunion honoring the Chargers’ New England Catholic Middle School championship season. The team went 32-1 and won a regional tournament that drew teams from six states. First Selectman Fred Camillo, who played on the team, presented a proclamation declaring April 27, 2026, as CMS Basketball Champs Day in Greenwich.
The reunion brought together former players, coach David D’Andrea, former Greenwich Catholic principal Peter Borchetta, Greenwich Catholic Head of School Rebecca Steck, State Rep. Steve Meskers, family members and friends. Some teammates traveled long distances: Mike Reilly came from Florida, Matt Fox from Minnesota, Dwight Rochester from Maryland, and David Hogan joined by Zoom from California. The gathering included formal remarks, a state citation from the Greenwich legislative delegation, a message from Bishop Frank J. Caggiano, player recollections, and a moment of silence for teammate Russell Bailey, who died several years ago.
The Town Hall meeting room had its own basketball history. It once served as the Greenwich High School gymnasium, before the high school moved to Hillside Road in 1970. It was not the Chargers’ old gym. That gym is now part of Greenwich Country Day’s new high school, making its own basketball history these days. But the Town Hall room still gave the morning a particular resonance.
The floor is different now. The lines are gone. The echoes have been repurposed into meetings and motions and votes. But when the 1976 Greenwich Catholic Middle School basketball team came back together, something of the old sound returned— the rhythm of sneakers, the cadence of a whistle, the camaraderie of a group that once moved as one.
They were boys then. Thirteen, fourteen. Now they are men with lives scattered across the country—Florida, Minnesota, Maryland, California—but they carried something back with them, something intact.
Not the record, though that still holds: 32-1. Not even the championship, though that mattered. It was what happened in between.
Fred Camillo remembers it in pieces, the way memory tends to work. Not one moment, but a pattern. A demand.
“The coach, Dave D’Andrea, really worked us hard and told us that we would be in better condition than any team we faced and that they would be tired at some point during every game and we would not be because of our conditioning,” Camillo said. “There were even a few days where we had double sessions, before and after school.”
You can see it. Their gym. The late afternoon light. The repetition.
“We spent a lot of time together during that very long season,” he said. “It would start right after school with an hour and a half in the homework room before the 4:30 practice and then we would do it all over again.”
There is nothing romantic about that. It is work. It is time. It is showing up when you do not feel like showing up.
And then, over time, it becomes something else.
They began to win.
They pressed teams full-court. They ran until the other side could not. They played older teams and did not seem to notice. Somewhere along the way, they became the only Catholic middle school team to win that regional tournament. They did not know then what that would mean later.
“All championships are memorable for those who were lucky enough to be part of a team that won one,” Camillo said, “but when you win a regional tournament like we did and go down in history as the only Catholic school to do that, it makes it extra special.”
That is the headline version.
The deeper version is there too.
They stayed together. Many went on to St. Mary’s. They played again. They kept calling each other. Years passed, then decades. The world changed around them—careers, families, loss—but the line back to that team never broke.
Rebecca Steck, Head of School now at Greenwich Catholic, read a message from Bishop Frank J. Caggiano, who congratulated the team on the anniversary and recognized the friendships that outlasted the championship itself. “Fifty years ago as a group of young men from Greenwich Catholic Middle School, you made history on the basketball court when you won a major championship,” Caggiano wrote, “but what you have built off the court – bonds of brotherhood, loyalty and faith – have proven more enduring than any championship trophy.”
It gave language to what the men had returned to honor. They had come for the team. They had come for the coach. They had come for the season. But they had also come for the evidence that something formed in childhood can survive adulthood with its meaning strengthened rather than diminished.
Chris Dehnel can trace it precisely.
He was a co-captain. He went on to play at Eastern Connecticut State. He became a newspaper writer. He had the kind of basketball career that ends the way most do—one final game, one last possession, and then it is over.
“In my final college game, late in the fourth quarter, I got a perfect pass right on my chin. I shot such a perfect shot that the net curled up,” he said.
It should have been enough. It usually is.
But then something else happened.
“The game is over, my career is over, and where do my thoughts go? They go to this team, because this team got us going.”
That is not nostalgia. That is origin.
You begin to understand that what happened in 1976 was not confined to that season. It was formative. It shaped how they saw work, how they saw each other, how they understood what it meant to be part of something that required more than talent. It required belief.
“The feat proved a valuable lesson for 13 and 14-year-old kids who made history,” Camillo said. “Teamwork, chemistry, hard work, and belief in one another made us champions on the court, and better people off of it.”
Those are words that get used often. They are easy to say. They are harder to live. Yet here they were, fifty years later, still in evidence.
They greeted each other the way people do when time has not fully intervened. They filled in the gaps. They told the same stories, the same way. They remembered who took the last shot, who made the pass, who said what in the huddle.
They also remembered who they were.
“While many of us have gone our separate ways over the years and live all over the country, we share this special bond,” Camillo said. “When we reconnected last week, it was a special time for all of us. We have now pledged to stay in touch on a regular basis and are even planning our next in-person get together.”
It sounds simple. It is not.
Most teams do not last like that. Most drift. Life pulls at the edges until the center gives way. This one did not.
Maybe it was the conditioning. Maybe it was the hours in the gym. Maybe it was the expectation set early—that you would give more than you thought you had, and then give a little more.
Or maybe it was something harder to name.
A coach who believed in preparation. A group of boys who learned, without even realizing it, that the point was never only the game.
Back in that room, the old Greenwich High School gym that is no longer a gym, they stood together again. The lines on the f loor are gone. The baskets are gone. The scoreboard is gone.
Their own old gym is elsewhere.
But what is real remains.
They built it themselves.
And it is still holding.
