Created by Culture

She comes barreling through the gym doors, accelerating as she goes, those little 4-year-old legs kicking up higher and higher. A pink hat covers her head, and beneath it, her eyes lock on to her target. The little girl gathers momentum, until finally she plows into the wide, eager embrace of Liz McKeon, her aunt, and is lifted off the ground in a massive hug.

That little girl? That’s Jim McKeon’s daughter. Her name is Maeve. Maeve Elizabeth, actually. Elizabeth after her aunt Liz, who’s also her godmother. 

Liz—or Aunt Lizzie, as Maeve knows her—is preparing to coach a basketball game, her 226th as Westfield’s head girls basketball coach. Jim, Liz’s brother and Westfield’s head boys basketball coach, has brought Maeve along this Saturday afternoon.

This is a big game, against the No. 13 team in New Jersey. But tip is still 20 minutes away. Plenty of time to say hello, plenty of time for Maeve to zip across the court a couple times. 

And, yeah, maybe she cuts through the Westfield warmup once. But that doesn’t bother Liz. This, after all, is Maeve. After the game, after Westfield dethrones No. 13 Gill St. Bernard’s, Liz says Maeve brought the Blue Devils luck.

Maeve typically watches games at home, via the YouTube live stream, with her mom and her 2-year-old brother. But if, during this rare visit to the gym, she looks perfectly comfortable, perfectly at home, it’s for a reason. Her last name is McKeon. And the McKeons are a WHS institution. They practically own this gym. 

Liz, 41, is in her ninth season at the helm of the girls basketball program. Jim, 39, is in his fifth with the boys. They grew up in Westfield and attended WHS. Liz played basketball, softball, field hockey. Jim played basketball, baseball, football. Liz captained all three teams as a senior. Jim captained the basketball team as a junior and a senior. Liz is a 1,000-point scorer and in the WHS Athletic Hall of Fame and, as a coach, steered the program to its first sectional championship and its first Group 4 championship and is now its winningest coach.

The undulations of a basketball season are exacting. Exhilarating wins. Draining losses. Complicated decisions. For the McKeon siblings, the burden is lighter, soothed because they have each other. They each have someone to lean on, someone to talk to, someone to vent to. Someone who’s there, going through the same things—someone who has, for about 40 years, been going through the same things.

“It’s like coaching with your best friend,” Liz says. 

“No one [else] knows what you’re going through,” she adds. “No one knows who you are. He knows me better than anyone.” 

They lived together as kids. They’re back alongside each other as adults. In between, they embarked on sinuous, twisting routes that eventually connected. 

Beginnings

The story goes something like this. 

A first-grade Liz enters her mother’s car one day after school, crying. A boy had made fun of her. Jim, stationed in the back, strapped into a car seat, sees his sister in tears. This is a problem. He has to fix it. 

So 3-year-old Jim tries to “rip out of his car seat to go take care of it,” Liz recounts now, the story passed down by their mother. “He always had my back,” Liz says.

The McKeon siblings grew up in a house at the end of Boulevard, attending Jefferson Elementary School and then Edison Intermediate School. From a young age, sports beckoned, and the pair followed. Liz and Jim sometimes slaked their persistent thirst for competition on a diet of neighborhood games like stickball and manhunt. There were also, of course, organized sports. 

Then there was the Westfield YMCA. 

“They would be there,” says Jay Cook, who met Jim in kindergarten, was the best man in Jim’s wedding (as Jim was in his) and is the godfather to Jim’s kids (as Jim is to his), “getting shots up and things like that, working on their game.”

The Y was their haunt. Jim describes it as a hub for everyone who played basketball, a place where pickup games materialized and where competition ignited. That seems a beautiful thing now, in an age where kids live choreographed athletic lives, their schedules dictated by the encompassing pull of elite youth programs. Spontaneous pickup games on a public court seem a fading art, relegated to the domain of movies and books.

But for Liz and Jim, those games at the Y were very real. 

Liz played with the boys. Why not? She was good enough. Watching those games made Jim want to enter the fray, despite his age disadvantage. Competitive as the siblings were, trips to the Y often turned into squabbles, arguments sometimes verging on physicality. But they never took anything home. 

“We would fight,” Liz says. “But if someone else came at us, we had each other’s backs. Like, ‘I can talk to my brother like that, but you can’t talk to my brother like that.’ And vice versa.”

The way Jim tells it, Liz was always better than him at everything. Academically. Athletically. She was his idol. “I always wanted to be better than her,” he says, “and I never was.”

“I always had somebody to chase,” he adds. “She set the tone for everything.” And not just for him. For everyone. “She was probably, I would have to say, the best athlete in the building for four years.”

Liz was three years ahead of Jim in school, which meant he was a freshman when she was a senior. Jim immediately made the varsity basketball team, and having Liz to help him acclimate was pivotal. He entered high school already knowing some of the seniors on the basketball team. His freshman class grew close with Liz’s senior class.

“I really think that’s when we started [being] more friends than just siblings,” Liz says.

They were both, of course, intense competitors. Possibly to the detriment of their bodies. Sandy Mamary, the current athletic director, but a trainer at the time, taped Liz’s ankles every day. Both of them. For years. But it was Jim who grieved her the most. 

Jim dislocated his shoulder five times in high school. “Five times and missed one practice,” he says, with a steely glint of pride. 

“Pain didn’t really register with him,” Mamary explains. “He just wanted to compete so badly.” She would warn him not to dive for the ball in baseball. Fat chance. “Why did I even say that?” she wonders. “He’s a competitor, he’s gonna dive for the ball.”

That competitiveness spilled over into other aspects of sports. Jim could be a little, ah, unruly. “We would always get technicals,” Cook says. “We didn’t have many sportsmanship awards when Coach McKeon was here.”

When Jim and Liz left WHS, they had each played three sports for all four years. Liz had a county title in softball. Jim had a county title in baseball. After so much time around the athletic programs, they left, as all students do, to pursue the next chapter in life. 

“Many athletes, you never lose contact with,” Mamary says. “They kind of just drop in and say hi or send a text.”

That was the McKeons. So they both came back. 

Eventually.

The Interim

Late in Jim’s high school career, the fun sputtered. Only in hindsight, he says, did that realization strike him. Sports veered into the realm of work. And not the work of two kids at the local Y playing endless pickup basketball, running themselves ragged. A different kind of work. A kind of work that sometimes made sports feel like a job.

“My dad is pretty demanding on that kind of stuff,” Jim says. “So I think he took a little bit of the joy away from me at that time.” 

Liz dodged those problems, in part, she says, because she came first. Their father “tried to live vicariously through my brother and I,” she says, “and he definitely put a lot more pressure on my brother.” His relationship with Liz and Jim (and their mother) has dissolved over the last 20 years.

Sports were always Jim’s thing. He had “a blast” playing them in high school. But he got worn down. Shifting his perception of sports deterred him from seeking to play past high school. 

“The joy was kind of taken, I guess, a little bit, is why I didn’t want to pursue” college sports, he says. In retrospect, he wishes he’d stepped to the next level. But, he says, he has no regrets. He’s happy where he is now. 

Liz, unlike Jim, did make the leap to college sports. She graduated from Westfield in 1999 and traveled 50 miles west to play Division I basketball at Lafayette College. 

Liz and Jim stayed connected when she left for college. They communicated through emails and letters—even by cell phone, using some anachronism called a T9 word. He would go watch her play. She came to Westfield for his senior day and once attended a state football game. When Jim got his license, he would drive to Lafayette and stay there. 

Basketball at Lafayette, though, was disappointing. Liz saw scant minutes her senior year and didn’t exactly love her basketball experience. The team suffered from coaching issues. 

“It wasn’t family-oriented,” she says. “Unfortunately, the things I’ve learned from there are things I would never do, or things I don’t want with my program.”

After Lafayette, Liz spent two years in graduate school at Boston University. Then she moved to Bristol, Connecticut, to work as a production assistant for ESPN on a show called Cold Pizza, a morning talk show. She stayed in Bristol for a few years, then transferred to New York City, where the show was produced. 

The show ultimately was canceled after a round of ESPN layoffs, but Liz stayed in Manhattan and started working for the NFL. For seven years, she lived what many might term a dream. She traveled, “all the time,” to enormous events, where she worked with sponsors as an event coordinator in the event planning department. She was allowed to bring a guest to the Super Bowl, and so Jim came to Super Bowl XLVI to watch the Giants beat the Patriots, 21–17, in Indianapolis. Liz calls that one of the best moments she’s shared with her brother. 

While Liz navigated new terrain, her job sometimes pulling her across the country, Jim stayed more local. Late in high school, he entered Project ‘79, something he credits with instilling in him a greater capacity for education. He attributes his successful graduation in part to the program.

But he was never the most dedicated student. He concedes that he perhaps didn’t apply himself academically at WHS. After graduating in 2002, he briefly eschewed college.

“School wasn’t in the forefront of my mind at that time,” he says. “So I went to work. Odd jobs and stuff like that.” He did carpet cleaning. Delivery. Construction. Trucking. “Anything really.”

Eighteen months and a glut of jobs after graduating high school, Jim enrolled at Kean University, originally to study criminal justice. He soon grew disillusioned with that profession. Too boring.

In the summers, he ran the recreation program at McKinley Elementary School and Jefferson, and from there he “kind of fell in with education.” He wanted to coach. Wanted to teach. So he got his physical education degree. (Jim wants you to know that it’s “physical education,” not “gym.” Don’t ever call it “gym.”)

His first step, on a path that quickly looped back to WHS, was Union High School.

The Return

Liz, after seven years at the NFL, migrated to an ad agency. She worked there for a year. “It was miserable,” she says. They had her working on accounts, but not the sports accounts she’d expected to oversee. The tantalizing prospect of returning to basketball dangled before her. 

“Basketball was such a huge part of my life, and then I kind of took a break from it toward the end of college, and I really wanted to get back into it,” she says.

Mamary’s phone rang one day. Liz was calling.

“She called me,” Mamary says, “and said, ‘I don’t think this is my journey. I’m interested in volunteering for the [Westfield Basketball Association]. Do you think you can help me with getting in at the WBA?’” 

Mamary smiles a big smile and leans forward, laughing already. “I said, ‘No. I need you more than the WBA does.’”

And so it began. Liz quit her job and, at Mamary’s offer, became a volunteer assistant coach on the varsity basketball and field hockey teams. A year later, in 2014, she ascended the coaching ladder in both sports. Basketball head coach. Field hockey assistant coach (she retired from field hockey last year; this is her first year exclusively coaching basketball).

But after quitting her career, she needed a full-time job. She entered the alternate route program to earn a teaching certification. The program, though, takes time to complete. Liz needed a way to make money. So she flitted from small job to small job. She worked as a nanny, at Pure Barre, as a part-time paraprofessional in Chatham. These were waystations, buoys that kept her afloat financially. “I was definitely on the last leg of my savings,” she says.

It was a trying period. Liz, though, stayed committed. She finished the alternate route program and found a teaching job: a position at the Lincoln School in Cranford, in the CAP program, which houses students from across New Jersey who “get kicked out of their high schools” and require a modified learning experience. Liz taught English there. Still does. 

“Everything worked out and happened for a reason,” she says. “I’m supposed to be doing this. I’m supposed to be a teacher at a behavioral school, and I’m supposed to be coaching these girls and giving back to the community that gave so much to me.”

By the time Liz arrived at WHS as a volunteer, Jim was already here. He beat her back. Chalk it up as a win for the guy who says he always wanted to be better than his sister and never was.

Jim worked at Union first, teaching and working as a low-ranking football coach. His time there fostered, if only in his heart, a rivalry. “They’re actually good at things,” he says, “unlike whatever you call the other school.” That other school? Scotch Plains-Fanwood. That thinly veiled taunt? A barb directed at the Raiders. The enmity spawned by a Westfield childhood clearly hasn’t faded.

Jim, being Jim, applied for the head basketball position upon arriving at WHS. “I wasn’t ready,” he says. “I wanted it. I wasn’t ready.” Mamary concurs. “He wasn’t. But he was the JV coach for a couple years. He got to work with an experienced head coach. Then it was time.”

Jim whetted his coaching blade with the JV team. Eventually he tacked on freshman football and freshman baseball to his list of coaching duties, before swapping baseball for JV softball four years ago (he’s won four county titles in a row, went undefeated last year, and this season will assume the varsity assistant coach position).

After a few years coaching JV basketball, the head coaching position opened up. Other people also wanted the job. It was a competitive process. But Jim stood out.

“When someone is interviewed,” Mamary says, “and talks with such passion—real passion, like, ‘this is something I have always wanted to have, I always wanted to do, I’m going to prepare, I’m going to do the job’—that’s tough to beat. It’s tough to beat someone who has that pride and that passion to do well.”

And that’s how Jim ended up here, now, planted on the sideline in his khaki pants and Westfield polo. 

He emits a gruff growl in the heat of games, the polar opposite of his sister’s high-pitched yell. Liz prowls the sideline in heels, often sinking into a deep squat, the trajectory of the game reflected in her face. Her chair, during the game’s 32 minutes, is the most useless item in the gym. 

“We’re spirited individuals,” Jim says, laughing. Their sideline demeanor differs. “But we’re cut from the same cloth.”

The Beard and the Game Film

The beard, Jim’s beard, is a marvel. It’s a phenomenon. Jim and the beard are inextricable. He is the beard. The beard is him.

“No matter where you are,” Liz laughs, “[People say], ‘Oh, your brother’s the one with the beard.’”

Jim always had facial hair. First it was chin hair, then a chinstrap (something he insists was once fashionable). He would always begin growing it on Thanksgiving and shave it the day after St. Patrick’s Day. An odd schedule. No particular reason for it. That’s just what he did.

In 2011, he stopped shaving. He hasn’t shaved for 12 years. The last time he shaved was the interview for this job. Only after losses does he touch it up—it can get scraggly during win streaks. “I don’t even know I have it anymore,” he says. “It’s just there.

The maintenance is intense. Shampoo. Conditioner. A blow-dryer. A special comb.  

Without the beard, people used to think he and Liz were twins. Not with it. Definitely not with it. “I don’t even remember what he looks like without it,” Liz says.

If they no longer look physically like twins, they’re still twins when it comes to a certain habit: the frequency with which they watch film. They are film junkies.

As one of Jim’s players once put it, “He probably watches too much film.”

“It’s on all day,” Jim says. “I don’t not watch film.”

The process begins almost immediately after a game. Jim watches the game with his wife on his home TV while he eats dinner. He used to use an iPad, but his finger smashed the “back” button as if magnetically attracted, meaning he would watch the same play seven or eight times. His wife barred him from watching games on the iPad. 

At school the next day, he “dissects” the film. By the time lunch rolls around, Jim will have watched the game three times. Then he’ll start breaking down opposing film. It’s a perpetual cycle. 

Liz does it a bit differently from her brother. She, like him, devours film. But she rarely watches a game more than once. Instead, she absorbs as much opposing film as possible, different teams playing in different games, hunting for tendencies and idiosyncrasies. “I’m obsessed,” she says, “with watching film.”

“I think her biggest asset is that she’s always prepared,” Mamary says. “Even when she was a student-athlete, she was prepared. And obviously now as a coach, she’s taken girls basketball to the next level.”

A Bond

The certitude mounted, and still Westfield kept playing.

It was last season’s North 2, Group 4 sectional championship, and Liz’s girls were thrashing Hillsborough, wrapping an arm firmly around the program’s first sectional title, until finally the only thing left was for the buzzer to sound and the celebration to commence. When it did, Liz celebrated first with her team. Jumping up and down, taking pictures, listening to Mamary’s customary post-championship victory speech.

Then she sought out Jim. “He was the first person that I went to,” she says, tearing up slightly. “He was so proud of me, and that just means a lot.”

He was there, one of the first on the court, clad in a nondescript Under Armour quarter zip and black sweatpants, enveloping his euphoric sister in an enormous hug. “You can’t get two people who want to see each other succeed any more,” Mamary says.

That extends to their programs.

There’s something distinctly fraternal about the relationship between the boys team and the girls team of a specific sport. You come to their games, root hard for them. They come to your games, root hard for you. You brush shoulders between practices. Same school, same sport, same ecosystem. 

That bond, with Westfield’s basketball teams, is tight. Probably tighter than with other sports. There’s a simple reason for that. 

The McKeons.

The boys and girls teams wear the same shooting shirt. If you’re a Westfield basketball player, you wear a black long-sleeve warmup shirt with “created by culture” running down the spine, regardless of whether you’re a 6-foot-8 skyscraper or a gangly freshman girl.

“We’ve actually made it a point to be a little bit closer,” Jim says about the two teams.

One year, back when Jim was coaching the JV team, Liz’s girls varsity team was preparing for the Union County Tournament championship. The JV season was over. Jim brought his players to practice with the girls team to brace the girls for the challenge. “That doesn’t happen very often,” Mamary says, in a tone that indicates it doesn’t happen at all—except with the McKeons.

The two head coaches collaborate on plays, sets, decisions. If Jim is watching a college or professional game on TV and sees something he likes, he’ll rewind it, clip it, send it to Liz. If he’s at one of her games and notices something, he’ll mention it to her as she’s walking into the halftime huddle. He’s also her informant when it comes to events at WHS—if something happens at school that she needs to know about, he’ll relay it to her.

They talk every day. “We’re always in constant communication,” Jim says. “We always have been. It’s nice to be in a field with somebody that you love and care about.”

Familial Support

The front row, at a basketball game, is for the real ones. The regulars. The ones who have earned the right to sit there, mere feet from the action, their feet resting on the same hardwood floor the players traverse. 

Patti McKeon is a front-row fixture. 

Jim and Liz’s mother still sits in the front row at every game, just like she did 20 years ago, when it was her children hustling inside the lines instead of pacing outside them. After the sectional championship, she crossed those lines, hugging her kids and beaming beatifically.

“She is my biggest supporter and biggest fan, and I would not be in the position I am today if it wasn’t for her,” Jim says. 

He says there’s a lot of people he’s thankful for, a lot of people who have helped him get where he is today. At the top of that list is his wife, Erin. She, like him, teaches at WHS, in the English department.

“She runs the house,” Jim says. She “is doing everything. Literally everything. And I get to do my passion.” His kids—Reid, 2, and Maeve, now 5—usually watch their dad’s and their aunt’s games live on YouTube. And because they watch the live streams on their TV, they “think we’re famous,” Jim says. “It’s pretty cool in that instance, because then you go home and you watch famous people on TV, and they think you’re right there with them.”

Another buttress of the McKeon family is Jim and Liz’s aunt, who often accompanies their mother to games. She also takes care of Jim’s kids when they’re not in school. 

“We’re a real close family,” Jim says.

Intertwined Lives and a Greater Mission

Liz is getting emotional. Face scrunching up, eyes watering, voice wavering. Atypical behavior for this resilient coach.

She’s sitting in a WHS conference room during Period 9 on a recent Monday, answering questions about life and basketball and her brother. Now she’s talking about what coaching means to her, what her program means to her.

“I just love these kids,” she says. “And they literally turned my life around, and I can’t imagine my life without them. And I know we talk about winning games and doing well, but I want to teach them what it’s like to be a strong, successful woman. 

“Because you get shunned. You’re considered a b—-, or you’ve got a loud mouth, or you don’t know what you’re talking about. But then guys—you’ve seen the male coaches I coach against—they’re on the court, they’re screaming inappropriate things. But we’re the ones that are looked at differently. And I want my girls to know that they can do whatever they want, and they can be strong, and they can be powerful, and they can be respected.”

It’s a greater mission than just coaching basketball. “It’s deeper than that,” Liz says. “It’s more than just the game. It’s the relationship.”

“I would do anything for my teams,” says Jim. He calls coaching his passion. He prides himself on having created a culture where players can talk to him about anything. 

The McKeons and Westfield are intertwined. As kids they played in its streets, on its baseball and softball diamonds, on its football and field hockey fields, on its basketball courts. There are people at the school they’ve known since high school. “There are times when I don’t even need to finish my sentence because I know what they’re gonna say,” Mamary says. That’s how embedded they are in Westfield culture. 

“They’ll give you the shirt off your back,” Cook says. “They’ll fight for you in any situation.”

Kid Jim never envisioned himself returning to coach. “I was a pain in the butt,” he says. Kid Liz never envisioned herself returning to coach. “Never in a million years,” she says. 

Somehow, some way, they’re both here. Now. Together.