For 36 years, Keith Dickson has kept Saint Anselm men at the top
Jan. 21—MANCHESTER — When you look at Keith Dickson's resume, you wonder how Saint Anselm College has managed to keep him as its men's basketball coach for so long.
If you eliminate the 2020-21 season that was wiped out by COVID-19, Dickson is in his 36th season as Saint Anselm's head coach and entered Saturday's matchup with Southern Connecticut State with a 694-357 career record. He has directed the Hawks to 30 winning seasons, including 17 seasons with at least 20 victories.
"Did I envision I'd be here this long? No, but when you find a place that fits your values ...," Dickson said following Wednesday night's 79-67 victory over Southern New Hampshire University. "Everything the school believes in I believe in. And I've had an opportunity to coach really good, quality people who care about education, and we've been able to win almost my whole career. Without any of those pieces, I'm not sure I would have been as happy as I am.
"I don't think I envisioned having this kind of success for this long. It's not like our school is a sports factory."
Dickson grew up in Rockland, Mass., and played point guard at the University of New Hampshire from 1975-79. He scored 1,202 points at UNH and is 14th on the program's all-time scoring list.
He began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Biscayne College in Miami (now St. Thomas University). Dickson said he wasn't sure he wanted to pursue a career in coaching at that point and took the grad assistant position to help pay for graduate school.
After moving on to Bentley College, where he was an assistant coach for four years, Dickson left coaching, moved to California and worked in private business. That's when the coaching bug bit.
"St. A's was hiring their first full-time assistant and Bob Brown (Saint Anselm's head coach) hired me," Dickson said. "After one year, he left and I was fortunate to get the job.
"Things don't happen like that anymore. Ted Paulauskas (Saint's Anselm's athletic director) brought me in and said, 'Do you want the job?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'OK. Come back and see me tomorrow.'"
What made the hire a little easier, Dickson said, was the fact that he served as Saint Anselm's women's soccer coach while he was also an assistant basketball coach at the school. "I didn't know anything about soccer and we did well," Dickson said. "Thirty-six years later, he we are. Still here."
Dickson, a Bedford resident, has guided the Hawks to nine NE10 titles and 21 appearances in the NCAA Division II tournament. You could make a case that the program's best season came in 2018-19, when Saint Anselm finished 26-6 and advanced to the Final Four.
"I think from the beginning I figured out what kind of player we needed to play the way I thought Saint Anselm could be consistently successful, so we built a system on player development," Dickson explained. "Finding kids who were committed to getting better. The weight room was always big to us, and then the way we play offense, our kids get better over the course of their career, so you have to find the right kind of kid who feeds into that.
"When it's going good, it's sort of like one year rolls into the next. The younger kids become the older kids."
Dickson has pursued Division I jobs during his time at Saint Anselm. He always seemed to be mentioned as a possible candidate when the UNH job opened up.
"Yeah, (UNH) got real close once," Dickson said. "That's when Jeff Jackson got it (in 1996). And then I interviewed at Dartmouth. That's when Paul Cormier got it the second time. Those are the only two jobs I've even interviewed for. Both in the state of New Hampshire. I wasn't going to go anywhere. I don't even know if I would have taken those jobs.
"When I got hired, I didn't want to have a good team, I wanted to build a quality program. I guess that's what you strive for. We've been pretty good for a long period of time. It's hard to do."
