By Garth Shanklin
Sports Editor
When the final horn sounded on West Clermont’s 2019-2020 boys basketball season, it didn’t just end the Wolves’ winter campaign. 
It also ended the coaching career of one of Clermont County’s longest-tenured coaches, Craig Mazzaro.
Mazzaro began his head coaching career at Amelia High School in 1992. He prowled the sidelines for the Barons until the end of the 2008-2009 season before returning in 2011. Prior to that stint with the Barons, Mazzaro held other positions with the Barons and McNicholas High School.
“It’s been 35 years of teaching,” Mazzaro said. “I just finished up my 24th year (as a coach). There are not too many people who do this coaching stuff without being told to walk out. Everything was fine. Usually when a coach leaves there are hard feelings somewhere. It was just time to go.”
The 2016-2017 season marked Mazzaro’s final season at his alma mater. The school merged with Glen Este to create West Clermont, and Mazzaro has served as the Wolves’ coach since.
“I have a picture in my basement of every team,” Mazzaro said. “There aren’t too many days that go by that you don’t hear from somebody or think of something that happened.”
During his 24-year career, Mazzaro has won nearly a dozen coach of the year awards across four different leagues: The Queen City Conference, the Fort Ancient Valley Conference, the Southern Buckeye Athletic and Academic Conference, and the Eastern Cincinnati Conference.
“There were some leagues we were in where we had no chance,” Mazzaro said. “[The] first league I was in was with Woodward and Taft. Then we got into the QCC American with Oak Hills and Western Hills.” 
After moving to the FAVC, Amelia found themselves in a league with Oak Hills and Winton Woods. When the league split and the Barons joined the Buckeye Division, they were pitted against the likes of Anderson and Turpin, teams Mazzaro would eventually face in the ECC.
Facilities at the old Amelia High School (now part of the current West Clermont Middle School) posed challenges for the teams that called the building home, but Mazzaro said the players simply didn’t let that stop them.
“We always had the littlest gym and the worst practice opportunity, but the players overcame that,” Mazzaro said. “We never used that as a crutch or anything.”
Mazzaro spent 21 seasons coaching in a building that had just one gymnasium for six teams. The team may not have had much on-court prep time as their opponents, but the Barons were ready nonetheless.
“Other teams could prepare better, but we always came up with something,” Mazzaro said. “Watching tape, lifting weights…same amount of time, we just weren’t on the floor. That was a lot to overcome for those kids, and they always did it.”
When they were on the floor, Amelia benefited from a palpable home-court advantage as seemingly the entire surrounding area showed up to support the Barons.
“I don’t know how many people could fit in the gym, but they were all in there,” Mazzaro said. “We didn’t lose too many in that gym.”
With the roster turning over completely every four years, different athletes took it upon themselves to maintain that tradition, according to Mazzaro.
“I always had guys that stepped up,” Mazzaro said. “It was almost like they took turns. Sometimes they didn’t have great junior years, but when they got to be seniors…It was a very good tradition, and that’s all the players.”
In addition to his players, Mazzaro also was quick to praise several other people who helped him throughout his career. Between regular-season games and summer work, Mazzaro estimated he had coached roughly 1,000 games since he started in 1992. He wasn’t alone for those games, as he had assistants with him on the sideline every step of the way. 
“Gary Hardewig helped me for, I think, 11 years,” Mazzaro said. “I never had an assistant leave like, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ They either all got better jobs or grew older and couldn’t do it anymore. I always had a lot of quality guys that are helping. There’s no way you can do this by yourself. You’re with those people.”
In the past few seasons, Mazzaro’s coaching staff has included Jerry Doerger, Jim Stahl, John Patrick and Doug Brown, all four of whom have had head coaching stints throughout the tri-state. They would spend time in the summer attending various camps and summer leagues. Amelia hosted a summer league of its own for roughly a decade.
“It was never a money-making thing, we just wanted to get the kids playing,” Mazzaro said.
In a normal year, Mazzaro would be leading his team through open gym workouts in May to get ready for June action. Typically, teams begin play the first weekend of June.
“We always went out almost every weekend,” Mazzaro said. “We either hosted a shootout or went somewhere, and during the week we’d have workouts too. It’ll be the first time in 30 years that I’m not doing that.”
That frees up Mazzaro to spend more time with a family that has supported him from the start of his career.
“You can’t do this without a good support system at home,” Mazzaro said. “My two daughters were cheerleaders. My son was a soccer player. They make a tremendous sacrifice too…It’s a whole lot of time when you’re not home.”
Late last season, West Clermont held a ceremony honoring Mazzaro for his 300th career win.
“They gave me a big jersey and the whole deal,” Mazzaro said. “My grandson got to come out on the court with me. The whole family was there. That was a night that brought it all down. There aren’t too many people that win 300 games and get honored like that. That was nice.”
West Clermont athletic director James Collins, who played for Mazzaro at Amelia, played a big role in organizing that ceremony. Mazzaro noted he wouldn’t have continued his career past the merger if Collins hadn’t made the move to West Clermont with him.
“He said, ‘You want to go do this at West Clermont?’ I said, ‘Nah, I”m done,’” Mazzaro said. “I thought that would have been a perfect break. Twenty-one years at one place. I would not have done that without him. He’s been a great support throughout that too.”
Mazzaro also tipped his cap to the students and staff at both Amelia and West Clermont.
“We always had tremendous student support,” Mazzaro said. “They made it so fun. We were very hard to beat in that gym, and in this one too. A lot of people helped out under the radar, people that you never see. They just helped out doing things.”
It’s not just current students. Toward the end of the final season of basketball in Amelia’s history, various former players reached out or showed up to support the team.
“One of the last games at Amelia, we probably had 40, 50 kids there that came back and said something,” Mazzaro said. “If they weren’t there, they wrote, sent me something. Lot of good memories that way.”
A lot of those memories are stored in Mazzaro’s basement. Over the last few weeks, he’s turned one corner of the room into an Amelia/West Clermont showcase.
“There’s tons of pictures, a lot of plaques and stuff the team got me,” Mazzaro said. “I’m looking at a picture of game one, me holding a cake for my first victory. I’ve got the 100, 200, and 300 [career win] balls.”
Mazzaro has a photo of each of his teams on the wall. He also has books filled with stats, stories, and other information about them.
“Every year at the end, I would personally put all our clippings and pictures and stats in a book,” Mazzaro said. “I have 24 of those books. If you wrote an article on us, I guarantee I have it somewhere.”
He also has some mementos from the old Amelia High School gym, including a carpet from the bench area and one of the league championship basketball signs that hung on the wall.
“Every time we won [a league title], they put one up in the gym,” Mazzaro said. “When we left, they were throwing them out. I took one, put all the years on it.”
Under Mazzaro, the Barons won at least a share of the league title each of the five seasons the team played in the SBAAC. In that same five-year stretch, the Barons also picked up three wins against rival Glen Este.
“We always had really good success against Glen Este,” Mazzaro said. “We never really treated it any differently. We just stepped up, we just went over there and played…Those were always good, fun games.”
Mazzaro can re-live any of those games, along with hundreds of other games from his coaching career thanks to an extensive video library. He estimates roughly 400 games worth of tape can be found in his basement, with the balance on Hudl.
That shift to online video hosting is one of several changes to the game itself that have happened since Mazzaro started coaching. For starters, sports specialization has become more rampant now than in years past.
“I never bought into and still don’t buy into the kids specializing,” Mazzaro said. “You only have so many years to be a kid. I always hated when a kid said, ‘I’m not playing baseball, I’m going to just play basketball.’ That’s not right.”
Mazzaro also noted a disconnect between parents and the realities of college recruiting.
“Parents and kids have a misconception about how you get recognized,” Mazzaro said. “They think it’s ‘Hey, I got 12 points tonight. Someone’s going to call me.’ That doesn’t work at all. It’s through the process and everything else.”
Another difference is the addition of the three-point line, which changed how some teams and players approached the game. Mazzaro never wanted to pigeonhole any of his teams into one type of shot or offense.
“I always took whatever our team could do,” Mazzaro said. “This year, we were a terrible three-point shooting team. We won a whole lot of games by teams shooting 25 three-pointers and we shot 45 free-throws because we got the ball inside. You just have to go with what your team can do, not what you think or what you see on TV. Every team is different.”
As different as each team was, the man in charge remained the same. That continuity allowed Mazzaro to accomplish a goal he had set for himself from the beginning.
“Not too many people get to do this for 24 years or 35 years,” Mazzaro said. “When I started, I kind of had the goal that no one was ever going to tell me I had to leave anywhere. No one ever did.”