Andrea Everson Renfroe returned to Syracuse this month from her Florida home to attend an aunt’s funeral, but she extended that visit for a few extra days when she learned of a tribute to her old basketball coach at McChesney Park.
Thursday evening, the indoor basketball court at McChesney’s Armand Magnarelli Community Center was formally named in Dennis Bardenett’s honor. Hundreds packed the gym for the ceremony, held just before two teams made up primarily of players from Nottingham High and Liverpool played in the summer ACTION League boys’ championship game.
Renfroe was there with her parents, Mart and Kathy — her dad, years ago, played basketball with Bardenett — and two of her four siblings. Bardenett, during his remarks, remembered the family with such affection that he brought Renfroe and her sister, Marquita Everson, to center court.
Joined by almost every person in the gym, Renfroe instantly stretched her arm toward the ceiling when city parks commissioner Syeisha Byrd made this request of the crowd:
“If your life was affected by Mr. Bardenett, raise your hand.”
Organizers — who wore T-shirts proclaiming, “Thank you, coach” — say Bardenett’s impact is vast and ongoing. He and his wife Terri raised their four boys in the same North Side home where they’ve lived for 46 years. Bardenett began coaching almost a half-century ago, a career that has included girls and boys teams in many varsity, JV or modified sports from Henninger High, where he was a teenage standout in basketball.
Beyond that, he’s been a baseball and basketball youth league coach and was a pioneer in bringing youth soccer, years ago, to his larger city neighborhood. Through that sport, on many levels, he’s made deep connections in the city’s immigrant communities – children whose commitment and achievements he reflects upon with wonder.
“I tell every kid I coach, ‘You’re my best. You’re my favorite,'” Bardenett said, and it was clear from Thursday’s turnout:
They never stop believing it.
He still coordinates sports competitions at the New York State Fair, and above else is synonymous with the McChesney ACTION League, where thousands of children have played competitive basketball for decades — primarily in summer leagues, but also in basketball camps or winter leagues.
As for his day job, Bardenett — who turned 69 on Saturday — is retired from a career with Onondaga County Child Protective Services, which meant his work called on him to protect children at high risk.
“Dennis has done more things for more kids, under the radar, than any human being in the city of Syracuse,” said Bob Piraino, a childhood friend who just retired from coaching baseball at Onondaga Community College.
Renfroe, a Marine Corps veteran who works now as an auditor, offers a living example. She met Bardenett when she was maybe 15. She had just transferred from Nottingham to Henninger High, a teenager going through what she calls “some family ups and downs,” and she wasn’t sure she would make the team after trying out for the Black Knights girls basketball varsity.
“He saw something in me,” Renfore said of Bardenett. What she discovered about herself once she played for Henninger remains pivotal, she said: Bardenett’s insight still resonates in choices she makes today.
“I live by that,” she said. “So many people miss gold because they’re only looking at the surface. He had the gift of always seeing the gold.”
Over the last few months, the biggest challenge faced by planners of Thursday’s ceremony was hiding it for as long as possible from the self-effacing guy they wanted to honor. As deputy parks commissioner Chris Abbott pointed out, everyone knew Bardenett would squash the idea if he got wind of it before it really got rolling.
The plan started with a call from former parks commissioner Pat Driscoll to city councilor Rasheada Caldwell, who first met Bardenett at the ACTION League when she was 10. The clandestine effort soon wrapped in Bardenett’s wife Terri and their four grown sons — David, Mark, James and Thomas — all of whom grew up around the McChesney gym.
“Dennis matters because if you were a kid that played for a city school, a county school, a new American, a kid of means or no means, Dennis was the constant reassuring presence when you played in the ACTION basketball leagues, learning soccer or playing baseball,” wrote Driscoll — who was out of town for the ceremony — in a text message.
As for Caldwell, who led the council effort to lock down official city approval for the court-naming, she’s known Bardenett for most of her life. “He always puts kids first,” she said, and at a moment of civic change in generational leadership — with even the youngest children from the postwar “Baby Boom” moving into retirement age — the name on the hardwood will serve a lasting purpose.
“It’s important,” Caldwell said, “for kids to know how things started.”
Bardenett said that “never in my wildest imagination” did he believe such an event might happen. He learned of it not long ago – to advertise it, planners had to tell him it was coming. His response was using Post-it notes to needle his wife by extending the court-naming into everyday household items — such as the Dennis Bardenett couch, or the Dennis Bardenett coffee table.
He came home later that day to discover his 6-year-old granddaughter CiCi had switched out his name on those tags, and replaced it with hers.
That, to him, is the most fitting tribute, since he sees his grandchildren — CiCi, Max and Millie — as the highlight of his life, or at least tied with Terri and his four sons.
While Bardenett is a warm and joyous guy, his career has sometimes overlapped with pain. With child protective, he regularly met children who endured abuse and suffering. While coaching, he worked closely with young people of sweeping potential who were later lost to violence or addiction. The cumulative impact, over the years, could easily have left him cynical.
The result was the opposite. While the tragedies stay with him, he speaks of so many children — facing daunting obstacles — who found a way to build successful lives. Terri, a retired city schoolteacher who dedicated her working life to the same ideals, said Bardenett keeps his eyes focused on one thing.
“He’s always looking for a better situation,” she said, speaking of every child he’s ever met.
Building on that same perspective, Bardenett said this of coaching: Over the years, he’s come to understand “how wins and losses that seemed to mean so much mean so little.”
With all the kids he coached, what matters most is what they learned — and how they are today.
At the ceremony, Bardenett recalled his parents, Tom and Helen Bardenett, and how his mom essentially willed him through a kind of odyssey to earn his college degree. He thanked Terri and their boys, always his bedrock. He spoke with gratitude and affection of many friends and mentors, particularly the late Joe Mazella, a legendary coach at Henninger.
After watching a video of tributes from many luminaries, he told the crowd he probably had a story to tell about every person in the gym.
He was right, as I found out with a few quick interviews. I started with his sons, who said their father’s warm demeanor as a dad was essentially mirrored by way he coached — and how they always felt as if they had extra brothers and sisters because so many neighborhood kids were in and out of their house.
Or Robert Merriett, who played for Bardenett in the ACTION League and later fell into a struggle with addiction. “He never gave up on me,” said Merriett, who now works at Wegmans and is nine years into recovery.
Or Alex Zapf, introduced to soccer as a little boy by Bardenett — and a guy who grew up to be a tireless coach and disciple of the game.
Or Patty “Sooky” Joyce-Jeschke, who played in the late 1970s on a middle school girls’ championship squad at Blessed Sacrament — the first team Bardenett ever coached — and said the humble guy you see now is the same coach she knew then.
Or 18-year-old Larry Nesci, an ACTION League participant who spoke of how Bardenett taught him the importance of pushing away negative and self-defeating emotions when you’re on the court.
Or city parks supervisor Jesse Brantley, who sat at the scorer’s table and tried to describe Bardenett’s impact on his life, but found himself too overwhelmed to speak.
“He’s the man,” Brantley finally said, which was enough.
A day or so before the crowd gathered in the gym, Syracuse native Caylon Newby — an Atlanta educator and rap artist who performs under the name “C-Nube” — told me by phone how he and a buddy, as sixth graders, decided on a long-ago Saturday morning to skip a Grant Middle School detention period. Their wandering took them past McChesney, where Bardenett spotted them outside and convinced them to come into the gym.
The moment, to Newby, remains unforgettable. Like so many others, the appeal of the ACTION League — especially the meaning of Saturday morning games — guaranteed that Newby and many of his friends went home early on Friday nights, rather than heading toward many other places they could have gone.
“He treated me like a son,” Newby said of Bardenett, who became one of many supportive adults at the heart of Newby’s life. What he discovered at McChesney, he said, helped propel him through college and into the career that he has now.
Multiply that impact by thousands of lives, and you appreciate why Bardenett’s name is on the court.
The longtime coach, for his part, maintains the gratitude ought to go the other way. Just before Thursday’s climactic moment, when his sons and grandkids pulled back the tarp above his name, Bardenett told the crowd that he needed to be sure to thank his family.
He raised his hands toward the whole place, because family means McChesney.
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