Tanner Grover, 29 of Boothbay Harbor, has faced an uphill battle all his life, and has done it with style, grace and a positive attitude. Diagnosed at an early age with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Grover has spent his life in a wheelchair.
Grover’s latest challenge, this past winter, was coaching the Boothbay Region High School girls’ varsity basketball team. This year the Lady Seahawks went 16-2 in the Mt.Valley Conference (finished 17-3 overall) and were the top seed in the West C tournament.
Grover was drawn to basketball as a young boy, watching the Celtics with his father Merritt. “He is a big Celtics fan,” Tanner Grover said.
All his elementary school friends played basketball. “The way the school was set up, after school you would go across the street to the Y and hang out. Socially, my friends played and I liked to go and watch,” he said.
That love for watching turned into a passion for the sport. In high school, he became interested in coaching and had a great mentor in I.J. Pinkham, the head boys’ basketball coach.
Grover started studying the game through watching games on television, reading books, watching training DVD’s and attending coaching clinics. “Once I got interested in coaching, I turned it up a notch,” Grover said. “I like learning about the game. The game is always changing as players evolve.”
While a sophomore at Boothbay Region High School, Grover started coaching a boys’ travel team through the Boothbay Y. He worked with that group of players for about 10 years. In 2007 under head coach Pinkham, they advanced to the State Class C championships, where they lost to Calais.
Grover was a student coach at Boothbay Region, under Pinkham. “I learned a lot from I.J. Pinkham, especially in regards to organization and the importance of a daily routine that you can measure yourself by,” he said.
When asked how Pinkham measured improvement, Grover said, “I.J. has it all mapped out. The key is to be consistent. That is why he has so much success. He has his practice plan from a year ago and will say this is where we were last year, and this is where we are right now. As a student of the game, it was very helpful to see how it is done. Without that input, I don’t think I could run my program with any degree of success.”
Fresh out of high school (2001), Grover took on the ambitious task of organizing and coaching an AAU boys’ basketball team, made up of high school players from all over the state.
He ran The High Volume Athletics AAU club for three years. Grover said the team was designed to give aspiring kids a chance to play at the next level. In 2005, the team won the State AAU championship in the 16 and under age division.
Grover took the team to tournaments in Massachusetts and New York, and then on to the national tournament in Fort Bend, Ind. “There were guys playing in the tournaments that now play for the NBA,” Grover said of the talent his Maine boys faced.
A highlight of Grover’s young career was coaching against U-Conn women’s coach Geno Auriemma, who was coaching his son’s AAU team in the tournament.
“I think I made my own opportunities out of high school,” Grover said. “I went to college part time, so I never pursued a higher coaching position until a year ago. I was fortunate in landing a girls’ basketball job.”
Grover said he was aware some employers may have thought they were taking a risk hiring him, “but those who know my background were pretty confident.”
Grover was no stranger to the girls’ basketball program at Boothbay Region, having assisted the varsity team in 2011-12 (12-6 record), and helping out with the team in 2010-11 (9-9), while also assisting boys’ coach Pinkham. The year before that (2009-10) Boothbay was 2-16.
The freshman on the high school team were in junior high when Grover first started working with them three years ago.
Grover inherited a team that hadn’t experienced much success and that lacked the “confidence that they were capable of going out there and playing and competing and winning close games. That first year, that may be what I brought to the table, a shift in attitude,” Grover said.
When asked what he did as a coach to change players’ attitudes into thinking more positively, Grover said, “When I was a little kid, one of the first things I ever learned from another youth coach mentor is you’ve got to come up with seven positive comments for every negative comment.
“For some reason that ratio helps instill a positive attitude in team chemistry. I’ve always been conscious of that. It gives players the confidence they need to play the game the right way and be successful. I think confidence and positive reinforcement definitely plays a larger role in how they actually perform.”
“You really paid attention to them,” Grover’s mother Tricia told her son. “They wanted to work, they wanted to get better; you gave them the tools. You took them to camp and gave them the attention. That made them want to play for you. You ran a summer program. I think they were craving the attention. You brought more than what the other coaches were doing. Because you committed to them, they got on board. They got on the Tanner train.”
While Grover gives all the credit of the Lady Seahawks’ success to the hard work of his players, it was he who laid the groundwork for that success. While the boys’ basketball program at Boothbay had a finely tuned feeder program, the girls program did not. Grover started working with the girls behind the scenes, developing a youth feeder system.
He took them to summer camp. “At camp they played against teams they never thought they could play against. That gave them confidence,” Grover said.
The past two years, Grover has planned the Seahawks’ summer program as a volunteer assistant. This summer he has 20-25 games planned, and Boothbay will be attending two summer camps. He is also organizing the third annual Boothbay Lobster Jam Tournament in July, which features teams from all over New England. The tournament is expanding to 12 teams this season, with each team guaranteed three games.
“I.J. Pinkham worked outside the season with younger kids. Through him, I saw that it was the way to improve the system.” Grover said. He plans a youth clinic next spring from grades 3-8, and will be helping out with girls’ travel teams this winter to help boost his program.
When asked how many hours he works during the season, his mother said from the kitchen of their Boothbay Harbor home, “every waking hour.”
“It is a full-time job,” Tanner Grover said, adding that in the offseason, “I don’t slow down. I’m constantly looking at books and tapes, to get better.”
Grover said the biggest improvement he saw in his team this season was they “really learned how to finish a game. We were in a lot of close games that we had the lead in the fourth quarter. I think a lot of teams don’t know how to close out a game. This team did and it blew me away. If we had the lead in the fourth quarter, I was pretty confident we were going to win.”
That scenario played out in Boothbay’s quarter-final win over St.Dom’s. The Lady Seahawks went into a stall with three minutes to play, with Grover calming talking to them through an amplified microphone, “Relax, you’re OK, relax.”
This year, for the second year in a row, Waynflete bumped Boothbay out of the West C semi-finals. “They have girls shooting legitimate jumpshots,” Grover said. “We’ll have to do more off season conditioning, so we can play at their pace. If that is the bar, then we have to do what we can to meet the bar. “I’ve put in a lot of work, but I have a lot more work to do.”
Grover graduates three seniors from this year’s squad. “They are three key players, but we’ve got a nucleus of young talent,” he said. “This year has been valuable for them, as they have learned a lot from the seniors. I expect them to be a tournament team next winter.”
Two of this year’s three seniors have been offered opportunities to play in college; Sarah Caron at Wheaton, and Alex Clarke, who has not committed, at a D2 school in Kutztown, Penn.
Before and after games at the Augusta Civic Center, a large group of people came up to Grover and gave him a modified high 5, in the form of a knuckle bump. A modest Grover said the community has been “overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people are happy for me to get this opportunity. I don’t feel this team or the players are about me. I’m just one piece of the puzzle.
“I want to inspire girls to achieve things on the basketball court. This is their time. Someone much wiser than me said high school is the fastest four years of your life, you might as well enjoy it.”
“Being successful as a member of a team, to be a part of something larger than yourself. We are in the beginning stages of that in Boothbay. It is a good jumping off spot for girls’ basketball. I am happy to be a part of it.”
This year the Seahawks posted a 17-3 record.
“I think when you have a season like this, going in the number one seed, and you don’t come up with a banner or something for the trophy case, what you do come up with is some lifetime relationships, regardless of whether you have something to show for it,” Grover said. “Even though this team did not come up with a title, everyone involved knows the time and energy that went into it and that they were involved in something special.”
Of the future, Grover said, “make no bones about it. I want a gold ball.”
The future looks bright for the Lady Seahawks, with both the seventh and eighth grade girls’ teams making it to the Busline League finals. The 8th grade team were runners-up to GSB, and the 7th grade team won the championship. Grover had a little hand in their success as well, working with them in camps, and coaching a grade 7&8 fall league team in a 10 game season. “It was a good opportunity to work with some younger kids,” Grover said.