Brown leaves Narraguagus post, retires from basketball

It wasn’t the daily trips from his home in Bangor to practice in Harrington that were tiring for Ron Brown.

It was traveling to places like Eastport and Lubec after starting dialysis at 5:45 a.m. that was too much for the Narraguagus boys basketball coach.

Brown, who suffers from kidney disease, resigned last week and said Monday he has retired from basketball after more than three decades of coaching at all levels in Maine, from youth to high school varsity, collegiate to professional.

“It’s time,” the 54-year-old Bangor native said. “I’ve been lugging this disease around for 20 years. … It’s time for me to enjoy the time I have and enjoy my family.”

Brown said although his health is good now, he plans to explore other options this fall for dealing with his kidney disease, including another transplant.

Brown had a transplant in 1989 but the kidney failed in 1999. He estimates he spends 800 hours a year in the hospital undergoing dialysis, a procedure that filters impurities out of blood – a procedure usually performed by the kidneys.

Brown took over the Narraguagus boys basketball job in 2002. It will be the final coaching post in a career that took him from a Bangor YMCA league in 1969 to a freshman basketball position in Indiana, then to Penquis High in Milo.

In 1979 Brown became the coach of the Bangor Lumberjacks, a Continental Basketball Association team.

Stops since then have included Machias High, Searsport, Bangor Christian, Piscataquis of Guilford, John Bapst of Bangor, Central of Corinth, Hampden Academy and Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor. Brown said his teams have played in 11 title games. He had a career high school record of 185-116 before he joined Narraguagus.

In 2003 the Knights went 4-14; this year they were 11-7 and Brown was named the Downeast Athletic Conference Coach of the Year.

“The kids are just the best kids,” he said. “They did everything I asked them.”

Brown was hired in 1998 to coach the Calais boys but two weeks later resigned when his kidneys failed – but this time, he said, it’s for good.

“I’ve not going to change my mind,” said Brown, who has already had a few phone calls with offers to coach since word of his retirement started to spread. “The only thing I didn’t accomplish that I set out to as a kid was I never made it all the way to the NBA.”

In recent years Brown has written several books and worked as an analyst for Maine Public Broadcasting’s television coverage of high school basketball tournaments.

He also published Maine Roundball Magazine and ran a Web site which Brown said started as a way to draw advertising to the publication.

Brown said he plans to keep the Web site going through the NBA Finals and the Summer Olympics in Greece and then will likely shut it down.

Brown and his wife, Shelly, are exploring purchasing a camp on the water somewhere. He is also working on two books, one about high school coaching and the other a compendium of great moments in Maine basketball history.

“I’ve got other things to do. Now it’s time to see how good I am at doing them,” Brown said. “I’ve been lucky, comparably speaking. It’s kind of sad, but only kind of.”

The big question for Brown, who along with wife earned the Maine Association of Basketball Coaches’ Contributor Award in 2002, is how he will deal with life after basketball.

“I think it might be too hard,” he said, “to even watch for a while.”