Duane Witter, the head coach of the Farmington boys basketball team for the past 25 years, will be stepping down from the position, although he said he’s not retiring from coaching.
“I still think I have something left to give to coaching so I might reinvent myself,” he said. “Obviously you can’t pick and choose in coaching. An opportunity presents itself and you take advantage of it.”
Farmington finished 14-6 in the regular season, with a signature win over eventual Division II champion Windsor 74-70 on Jan. 29, and the River Hawks won their last five games of the regular season. Farmington, the ninth seed in Division II, lost 50-47 to Stamford in the second round of the state tournament.
“I feel really good about the work we did this year,” said Witter, who is retired from teaching physical education at Farmington. “Just like I did when I was teaching, everything kind of came together for me as a teacher that (last) year. This past season, everything came together. I knew during the season this was going to be it for me. I wanted to end on a positive note.
“The kids overachieved; they surprised me. We were able to do some things we had not done before. We were playing really well down the stretch. Unfortunately, we ran into a Stamford team that was really good defensively and we just didn’t shoot the ball well in the state tournament or maybe we would have gotten a little farther.”
In June 2019, Witter was diagnosed with leukemia but after treatment, he returned to teach at Farmington that fall and coached the 2019-20 basketball season that was cut short by the pandemic.
After being in remission for seven months, the leukemia returned and he had to undergo a bone marrow transplant, forcing him to miss the following school year and the pandemic-shortened season.
He returned to coach Dec. 16, 2021 in a game against Northwest Catholic.
Witter won 345 games in his tenure and his team won the Division III state title in 2019.
“It’s bittersweet,” he said. “I think it was time.
“The hard part is that it didn’t start out this way. My plan wasn’t to be Coach Witter. My plan was just to be a physical education teacher. Then the coaching thing kind of happened and it became who I am. I’m a dad to my two sons, husband to my wife, but everybody knows me as Coach Witter. It’s hard to step away from who you are.”