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07/20/2017 12:00 AMValley Regional High School will have to fill a major void in its athletics department with the recent retirement of Bunny Logan, who was the head coach of the Warriors’ boys’ tennis team for the past 13 seasons.
Bunny, a Guilford resident, came to Valley following an 18-year tenure with North Branford and a four-year stint at Branford. Bunny wound up having a tremendously successful run with the Warriors, who have been perennial contenders for the Shoreline Conference title—last winning it in 2011—and a mainstay in the State Championship by qualifying every year with her at the helm. In 2013, Bunny was recognized as the CIAC Boys’ Tennis Coach of the Year.
Bunny has always wanted her teams to succeed on the court, but she also wanted to have a positive impact in the lives of her players. Bunny feels that a coach’s role for student-athletes is more than just being an instructor of a sport. She also believes that coaches shouldn’t be copies of athletes’ familiar adult role models like their teachers and parents.
“It’s a lot more than just teaching the rules of the game, the technical side of it. I truly believe I made a difference in some kids’ lives…A coach should be a caring individual and has to care about their kids,” Bunny says. “In my experience, I’m not a teacher, and I’m not a parent. I’m something in between. I tried not to become their best friend. I still maintained respect as a coach. It was a positive experience. That’s why I stayed in it so long.”
Bunny began her tennis career at the age of 10 while growing up in Milford. Bunny’s mother wanted her to pick up some type of activity and tried to get her to learn how to play piano, but Bunny was born to spend her days outside.
“I learned to play tennis at 10, 11, and I took to it like a duck to water,” she says. “My mother wanted me to take piano lessons, and I had no desire to sit in the house all day. So my mother said, ‘Well, what do you what to do?’ and I said, ‘I want tennis lessons.’ I swear tennis has kept me fit. I play all year round.”
Bunny’s dedication to tennis led to her giving lessons and that, in turn, provided her with the opportunity to become a high school coach. Bunny remembers the day she was approached by then-North Branford Athletic Director Don Knickerbocker while teaching a junior summer program. Knickerbocker asked Bunny if she had ever coached before and insisted that she interview to coach both the boys’ and girls’ tennis teams. Bunny agreed, and she wound up taking great joy in building the tennis programs at the school. North Branford had never made states prior to Bunny’s arrival, but in 1992, its boys’ doubles team of Blake Hutchinson and Daryl Fryer won the Class M state title. Bunny was pleased with their achievement and felt especially happy when she overheard a fellow coach compliment her squad at the following year’s State Championship.
“It was a great thing, because it was a little school no one ever heard of,” says Bunny. “The next year after they won, I was standing by the draw sheet, and one of the coaches had his team behind him. He was looking at the draw and talking to them. They went down the list, and he pointed at North Branford and said, ‘This is the team you have to look out for.’ Oh, I was so happy about that. And they thought I was somebody’s mother waiting around, because nearly all the boys’ coaches back then were men. We made states from then on. Same at Valley.”
While it’s always been rewarding for Bunny to help her teams reach a level of prominence, she says that it hasn’t always been easy to get enough kids to come out for the squad. Since Bunny wasn’t a teacher like many of her colleagues, she had to rely on the student body’s general interest in tennis, along with word of mouth. Bunny says that was her biggest challenge as a coach.
“Tennis is not an easy sport, and it’s hard to recruit sometimes. It’s not a rah-rah sport. It’s not loud and cheery,” Bunny says. “The biggest challenge is recruitment, and it’s cyclic. In the days of Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert, they all came out in droves. Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull, but I’m sure it will come back around. When kids get tired of standing on the edge of a field or sitting in a dugout, they can come to the tennis court, and I tell them, ‘Every ball is yours here.’”
Bunny believes the best way to get kids to sign up for any team is to make the experience enjoyable, and that’s something she learned by attending national coach’s clinics throughout her career. Bunny says that what she learned from those clinics has proved invaluable to her, particularly her research of feedback from student-athletes.
“Coaches have to realize that they have to make the experience fun. The No. 1 reason any kid tries a sport is to have fun,” says Bunny. “When I was at the coach’s clinics, they gave the results of a survey of athletes all around the country, and the No. 1 reason kids go out for sports is to have fun. There are others like being part of a team and to get exercise, too. All of that counts, but fun is No. 1.”
Bunny always made sure that fun was a hallmark of her program wherever she coached, and Valley Regional Athletic Director Jeff Swan says that approach paid off for the Warriors. Swan knows that Bunny was a major asset to the school, and that all of her student-athletes liked working with her.
“She’s an excellent coach that was totally dedicated to the program,” says Swan. “She really cared about every single athlete. She gave her undivided attention to each of them. The kids just love her. It will be tough to fill her shoes, but we’ll do the best we can.”
In terms of what Bunny plans to do in the future, she will be keeping a close eye on Valley’s tennis players to see how they fare next season. It’s hard for Bunny to step away from the game after working alongside so many quality kids for such a long period of time, but she feels that the time is right for her to ride off into the sunset.
“Better to leave when they say, ‘Too bad you’re going,’” says Bunny. “Instead of them saying, ‘Thank God she’s gone.’”