By Dave Morrison
It’s a popular story among the local basketball crowd about the night that Shad Sauvage and Eli Allen, after the long trek back to Lindside following a tough loss at Greater Beckley, stayed at their gym and shot free throws until well into the early morning hours.
It showed a dedication that would eventually lead to the state championship for Shad Sauvage, and two for Allen, recently named the state player of the year.
Lost in that story of dedication is the fact that coach Matt Sauvage stayed there in the gym with his players.
That should come as no surprise.
Sauvage has never taken the credit for the work of his players and the success that follows.
The success has been overwhelming. The Mavericks just completed a back-to-back Class A state championship run. Over the last two seasons the team is 53-2 and it’s 70-4 over the past three seasons. Of the team’s eight first-team all-state players, seven have come under Sauvage – Allen three times, Sauvage twice and Collin Fox and Josh Burks once. All have been in that three-year span.
He may not take and doesn’t want the credit, but his players know it. And they want people to know it.
“Nobody sees the work that he puts in,” Allen said. “He’ll stay up until 2:30 a.m. and wake up at something like 5 a.m. First off, I don’t know how he runs on no sleep. It’s crazy. He gets no sleep, stays up. He puts in all this work. He redid the locker room for us. We have one of the best locker rooms in the state. He’s always game planning. I can’t thank him enough. It’s (the Mavs’ success) 100-percent on him.”
“Nobody understands the amount of work coach puts into this program,” senior Josh Burks said. “He built our new locker room. He’s always in the mix, whether it’s big or small, he’s always doing something for the program. That’s the kind of stuff that nobody sees.”
He also has single-handedly put together the record book at James Monroe, best he could, and makes sure the media gets scores and statistics and records for his players, a one-man Sports Information Department for his program.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that Sauvage is also a teacher. At Greenbrier East, a good 45-minute – sometimes more depending on the weather – drive from Lindside. He also is a successful volleyball coach at Greenbrier East, one of the few state coaches in history to have coached a state player of the year in two different sports, if it’s happened at all.
In the summer he pulls double duty.
“Me and Shad would go in (early) and he would come in at seven-o’-clock in the morning and open the gym for us and he’d have to go to East,” Allen said. “He just puts in a crazy amount of work nobody sees.”
That’s the drive, the work ethic needed to win back-to-back state championships, a run that has seen the Mavericks outscore state tournament opponents by an average of 31.7 points over two years and six games.
It wasn’t always the top of the mountain for James Monroe.
Three years ago, with a young cast of green freshmen – Allen, Burks and Fox – and his son Shad, a sophomore, the Mavericks took their lumps. There were 90-45 and 97-44 losses to Shady Spring, a 86-63 loss to Bluefield and a 79-58 loss to Greenbrier West.
The natives were restless. But his players weren’t.
“We never doubted him, I can tell you that,” Allen said. “We went into every game, no matter if we were playing Shady and we were tiny, he motivated us, and we thought we could win every single game. He always remained positive.”
“He got us through it,” Burks said of his coach. “We understood that we weren’t the best team out there. We understood there were nights where we were going to play hard, and we might not win. That’s the one thing he always taught us, go hard, go fast, just get it done. I’ve gotten better as a player and all the kids around us have gotten better as players.”
James Monroe lost by three to Class AAA power Shady earlier this year, 55-52 but led for a long stretch and beat Class AA semifinalist twice, and Greenbrier West three times. The Mavericks dominated the Class A state tournament the last two years, this year dispatching Cameron, Clay Battelle and Tucker County by 34 points per game.
Sauvage has also had a successful volleyball career at Greenbrier East, in a sport he took up after college. He has coached for 20 years, and has been the head coach at East for 17 years and now coaches his daughter, Dia.
He has had 17 all-staters, coached the state player of the year in Chylyn Pate, has a state runner up team, was two-time coach of the year and has over 500 victories.
The Monroe County native, who played with standouts like Travis Jackson, Chad Johnston and Kelly Mann at Peterstown, thought about going out on top last season.
He said he would consider the future soon. But he feels the program is on a more solid foundation.
“The good thing right now in Monroe County is we ‘ve got a good program built up in the offseason,” Sauvage said. “They’re putting in a lot more work now. It used to be November through March, that was your season. Now they’re getting into the weight room, they’re getting in the open gyms, they’re putting in the work they need to put in. I feel like this younger group will do that just as strong.”
It’s not something his players want to consider.
“I can’t imagine it,” Burks said. “That would be a whole different story.”
It would be hard to write a sequel.
