Scarborough High School is home to many sports accolades – regional titles, state titles, etc. – each unique in its way. But even among all those hard-to-come-by achievements, one stands out, and it belongs to Norm Gagne.

Gagne is the boys hockey head coach, and he’s the second-winningest boys hockey head coach in America. That’s right: Across the entire country, only one other coach has piled up more victories than Gagne, according to the National Federation of State High School Association’s Record Book. 

That other coach is Bill Belisle, who helmed the Mount St. Charles Academy outfit in Woonsocket, R.I., from 1976 to 2014, amassing 960 wins (specifically, Belisle’s overall record is 960-159-35). At the end of the 2015-16 season, Gagne stood at 704-296-34. Edward Burns, who coached in Arlington, Mass., from 1948-1997, holds the No. 3 spot, at 695-167-62.

At 71, Gagne, who lives in Westbrook with his wife, is still going strong.

“I grew up playing on rinks and ponds,” Gagne says of his youth in Auburn. “A lot of the parochial schools in the community had hockey, and my father coached one of those teams. All of the kids played hockey, even though we didn’t have a high school team then.”

Edward Little, where Gagne attended high school, did establish a team eventually. But Gagne was multitalented, playing standout football, baseball and basketball. Basketball, of course, is that other winter sport, and when the Red Eddies first took to the ice, Gagne found himself faced with a dilemma.

Three of his close friends all played hockey, and their dad, a member of the school board, had been instrumental in ushering the sport in at EL.

“I was at their house for dinner, and the father looked at me and said, ‘Norm, we’re starting a hockey team this year. You ought to be our goalie.’ I looked at him said, ‘What?!’”

Gagne was a perfect fit for the position. A first-baseman, his reflexes in general – and especially his quick glove – would transfer nicely onto the ice. But the basketball team needed him, too: He posted huge numbers his freshman year, played JV his sophomore year and was set to go varsity as a junior.

“I went to both practices,” he says. “We had basketball tryouts right after school, and at five o’clock, we had hockey practice…I did that for two weeks. Finally, the coaches asked me what I was going to do, and the hockey coach said, ‘You’re going to be my starting goalie, if you stay with hockey.’ So I chose hockey.”

The EL basketball team didn’t win a single game during Gagne’s junior or senior years. The hockey team, on the other hand – nevermind that it was brand-spanking-new – logged two solid seasons, standing up to the toughest squads in the state.

“We were pretty darn good for a group that was just starting out,” he says. “We were playing perennial powerhouses in St. Dom’s, Lewiston and Waterville. Those three schools shared the championship every year.”

Gagne’s memory for hockey is astounding.

“For a bunch of rag-taggers, we beat Lewiston, 3-2,” he recollects. “We tied St. Dom’s, we beat Waterville in Waterville – it was just an amazing start for us.”

“I started out, in my first year, with no mask,” Gagne says. “And I look at kids today, with their equipment, and I go, ‘Holy crap!’”

Gagne never took a puck to the face – not unprotected. When he did finally don a mask, the thing seemed to attract shots: “Why I didn’t think I was going to get hurt, I don’t know. It just didn’t occur to us. After high school, I was playing in the Northern Amateur League, and I got hit in the right eye.”

The impact didn’t cut Gagne, but he did start to bleed internally. He laughs to tell the tale: “After that period, my father came down, said, ‘You all right?’ and I said, ‘I’m having trouble seeing.’ He gave me the keys to the car and said, ‘You should go to the hospital; I’m going to watch the rest of the game.”

“I ended up being in the hospital for a week,” he says. “I had patches over both eyes.  Then I went back to practice a week and a half later and got hit in the left eye!”

So Gagne had the pedigree to coach hockey. He first came to that endeavor in his late 20s, when his father asked him to help head up the Walton Junior High team, in Auburn. He left that behind for a second stint as a college student, however, enrolling at UMPI. His baseball coach there, Pete Story, eventually left to become the athletics director at Gardiner High School.

“And when I graduated,” Gagne says, “he hired me. I happened to run into him in a restaurant in Winthrop. He says, ‘Come and see me tomorrow.’”

But the Tigers hired him to coach freshman football, of all things. For two years, he did that. Then, Kennebec Ice Arena opened.

“That was ’74, I think,” he says. “They started a club league, and I got asked to coach. I told them, ‘I’ll do it for one year.’ I never left the rink after that.”

Gagne, in fact, wrote the proposal that resulted in the Maine Principal’s Association’s sanctioning of the club league as a varsity league.

“So then we had Winslow, Gardiner, Biddeford, Mt. Ararat, Cape Elizabeth, Kennebunk, Cony – a lot of different teams.”

Gagne masterminded the Tigers from 1973-1985, winning three state championships (’81, ’83, ’85). “I’d gone to three or four more state championships, prior to winning in ’81,” he says. “And I was starting to feel like I wasn’t going to win one. I was getting beat in overtime; it was ridiculous. ‘What’s going on?’”

He moved to Waterville after that – actually, he initially declined a job offer there, but Principal Skip Hanson enlisted the rest of the school’s coaching staff to badger Gagne at regular intervals one day, and he reconsidered.

“Skip wanted me, I guess,” Gagne says, chuckling. “I went to see my father, he was on his deathbed in Lewiston. He told me, ‘You got to go to Waterville. It’s Class A, it’s a powerhouse.’”

Waterville had been down on their luck, missing the tournament the year before Gagne arrived. And when he did show up, “(The administration) asked me, ‘How long will it take to win a state championship?’ I told them it would take at least four to five years for me to instill my system. In that fifth year, ’91, we won.” The Panthers picked up two more titles, in ’96 and ’01, under Gagne’s guidance.

Asked to describe one of his more memorable coaching experiences, Gagne jumps to his stint at Waterville, to a ’97 game vs. St. Dominic:

“Everybody that played in this game remembers it. Everybody that was at that game remembers it,” he says. “Going into the third period against St. Dom’s, in a playoff game – whoever won was going to States – we were down 5-0. 

“I walked in the locker room, looked at the kids and said, ‘St. Dom’s has already punched their ticket to States. They’re going. You got to decide, right now that, if they’re going to go, you’re going to make them earn it. It’s all up to you. You go to decide that you’re going to fight to the end. I don’t care, we’re not going to match lines, we’re just going to go after them: We’re going to beat them to every loose puck, you’re going to win every one-on-one battle, and you’re going to shoot every chance you got. You’re going to put so much pressure on them that, if they crack, you’re going to have a chance.’”

Well, St. Dom’s didn’t crack easily. Half the third period elapsed before Waterville final scored. “One,” Gagne says. “Then it was 5-2, 5-3, and it did get to 5-4. I said to the kids, ‘You get this next one, and it’s over for them.’ We scored with two or three seconds left in the game. Pulled our goalie and scored.”

“I got them all together before we started overtime, and I said, ‘We’re going to do this in the first minute. [St. Dom’s] is in shock.’ And we scored in the first 30 seconds.”

Gagne’s never lost his flair for locker-room oratories: “I think the biggest thing is his talks before games, between periods, and after games,” says Cam Nigro, a Scarborough senior, and one of Gagne’s stars these past four years. “He knows just what to say and how to push us to get us going. If we’re down, he knows how to get us to keep our heads up, and if we lose, he knows how to put it in the past and to learn from our mistakes and get better.”

Gagne pulled double-duty in the mid-1980s, working with UMO hockey legend Shawn Walsh on that college program, which would, of course, go on to win two national titles in the ’90s.

“(Walsh) was coming up to Maine, and he called me and said, ‘I heard you was the guy to get a hold of. I wanted you to come up and work the summer hockey school with me,’” Gagne says. “So I went up for three, four, five years. He asked me, after my second year at Waterville, if I wanted to come up and coach with him, and I just never had the will to travel all over. I was settled in.”

He’s even been asked to go pro, in Sweden. “They called me right at Waterville High School. They said they’d give me an interpreter, an apartment, everything, but I chose not to go.”

From Waterville, Gagne went to Gorham for a year, then to Lewiston for three years. There, he took the Blue Devils to three consecutive State Finals. Alas, the team came up short each time, falling first to Cheverus, then to Biddeford, then to Biddeford again. After that, he moved on to Scarborough, where, of course, he’s already won one state title, in 2015.

Given how successful Gagne’s been, his coaching philosophy bears elaborating upon. “I always coached the way I taught in the classroom. I use the part/whole method: Coaching parts of the system, along with skill development, then put it all together.”

He instills his boys with a set of basic rules: “You always have two outlets,” he says, by way of example. “I teach them that, through drill work.”

“In the offensive zone, you can be creative, but I show them how you start a play, then develop from that, and show them their options. As they get better at that, they create their own.”

On defense, though, Gagne’s defenders learn to simplify. “You give them just two things to think about, one or two. I tell them to keep it simple. Those kids have to perform under pressure. If you give them too much, they can’t. I learned that my first year of coaching. I tried to give them everything I knew; it didn’t work.”

“He starts grooming his players from the beginning,” says Nigro. “He looks for talent and potential, and works from there, from freshman year on, so that, by senior year, we’re the best we can be.”

Likewise, he learns his kids’ strengths and weaknesses.

“If I had a kid who really played good defense, but wasn’t a goal-scorer, I would put him in situations where he could defend for us – maybe on our third line, where it’s important to be a good defensive player to give our first two lines a rest.”

Clearly, Gagne coaches to situations. In practice, for instance, he’ll instruct his boys to attack the net from an off angle, an ugly angle; he won’t want them to try to score, he’ll want them to try to generate a quality rebound. “Drill it for the far pad of the goalie, see if you can kick it out for somebody coming in on the other side.”

And he tries to pass on his passion for knowledge of the game to his players. “They’re students of the game. I tell them, ‘I want you to know the game like I know it,’ and they buy into it.”

Finally, Gagne imbues his boys with a sense of team.

“Nobody cares how many goals you score, how many assists you got. It’s: Did you win? We pound that into them. Today, too many parents, it’s about their kid. We have to keep reminding the kid, it’s not about them, it’s about the team. It’s a tug of war.”

“I understand parents wanting their kid to be a star. But they have to understand: We see their son every day in practice. We know his strengths, and we know his weaknesses. Sometimes, parents won’t see his weaknesses.”

Nigro underscores Gagne’s emphasis on group unity: “He’s all about building team chemistry.”

On the bench, Gagne takes a field marshal’s approach, trusting his assistants – Jake Brown and Dan McGovern, at present – to make rolling decisions on offense and defense and lending his expertise to both halves of the game as needed.

Gagne expresses great pride in his current crop of seniors, including Nigro. “Matty Caron, Cam Nigro, Sean McDonald – these guys know the system. They run that system to a T.”

In getting to know his kids, Gagne connects with them. They become important to him and he becomes important to them. That link is what’s kept him going all these years.

“I use hockey as teaching kids life skills,” he says. “I get calls from former players, out of the clear blue, and it sometimes brings tears to my eyes. The kids saying, ‘I want to thank you for turning me around.’ I had a guy call me, who was in the Army, and he said, ‘If it hadn’t been for you, making me make a choice between drugs and hockey, and taking me to rehab, I wouldn’t be here today.’ This is why I do it.”

“I’ve certainly learned a lot from him on and off the ice as a player and a person,” Nigro says. “He teaches us more about the game than you can imagine and there aren’t many other people you will find that know the game like he does.”

Scarborough head coach Norm Gagne, bottom left, presides over his talented bench in the playoff semifinals this year vs. Cheverus. Gagne lives in Westbrook.

Gagne consoles a St. Dom’s opponent after 2015’s knock-down, drag-out State Championship, which the Storm took from the Saints 2-1 after nearly five periods of brutal combat.

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