Bergen's reward was watching students grow
Tom Bergen has a simple explanation for his 42 years coaching and teaching at Lake Park.
"I'm a little traditional," said Bergen, who is retiring from the Roselle high school, "and I don't know how people can't feel a reward for watching young people develop and grow and become the adults that they are and see their skills improve and not look at that and be proud of the fact that they have exceeded what you wanted or have accomplished what you've asked them to."
The learning went both ways, something Bergen always understood, even if his students might not have.
"Kids kept teaching me," he said. "That was always something that I picked out of it is you would always learn something from the kids. They kept me young. They kept me thinking all the time and kept me on my toes. That's something they don't understand that I appreciate from them. That was a reward in itself."
Just don't ask him to pick a favorite in any category. For someone who's coached for so long, there are just too many.
"I've thought about it quite a bit, and there's teams that were favorites. There's kids that were favorites. There's moments that were favorites, and there's a lot of them. To sit there and say, well, this one, I can't. I just have really good memories about a lot of teams and a lot of kids and a lot of people that I've worked with. I can't identify just one," Bergen said.
Bergen has so many memories because he didn't say no very often.
Boys basketball, girls track, boys gymnastics, girls basketball, boys and girls basketball all appear on Bergen's Lake Park résumé, most of them as an assistant coach.
He also did a stint as a Hersey boys basketball assistant for three seasons.
"Tom's wealth of experience will be missed," Lancers athletic director Pete Schauer said. "He was always willing to work collaboratively with his coaching colleagues and share this experience and knowledge with our younger coaches."
Take his three seasons as an assistant in girls track, for example.
"I did that because they didn't have anybody at the time," Bergen said. "And then one year I coached gymnastics. It was the same thing."
He has been the Lake Park girls volleyball coach since 2010.
The 6-foot-9 Prospect graduate developed his coaching philosophy while playing Big Ten basketball at Michigan.
"I always wasn't perfect, but I was always trying to improve and learn more. I was never satisfied myself with being where I was, especially when I started coaching volleyball. I mean, I had to learn a lot," he said.
His experiences included playing in the 1976 national championship game against an undefeated Indiana team.
"That was very intense," he said. "Sadly, we lost."
But even a loss offers opportunity to learn.
"I was able to see a lot of top-level athletes as I went through," he said. "My senior year was Magic Johnson's freshman year. You know, Kent Benson, (Tom) Abernethy and the players I had on my team, Rickey Green and Phil Hubbard. And you understand what it takes to be excellent.
"And those are the things you try to get younger people to understand, that these are things that are required for you to achieve at the next level."