When Fenwick girls basketball coach Dave Power hung up his whistle at the end of the season, he did so after a 45-year coaching career and, with over 1,000 wins, as the third most winning basketball coach in Illinois High School Association History.

The Oak Park school named the locker room after him in 2020 and the basketball court after him at the girls’ game against Oak Park-River Forest on Feb. 10. His teams win three championships, one with Immaculate Heart of Mary High School in Westchester (1987) and two at Fenwick (2001, 2007), and he’s the only varsity girls basketball coach Fenwick has ever had.

But those aren’t the things he wants to remember.

“It’s all about the people,” he said in a Feb. 23 phone interview, while preparing for a Feb. 24 sectional game against Trinity High School, River Forest. “I’m going to miss people. I’m going to miss the camaraderie and the after-game talks.”

He’ll miss his coaching colleagues, he said, and the people at the scorers’ table and the referees and the parents. Most of all, he’ll miss his players.

“You ask yourself, ‘Did you do right by them?’” he said. “I think most of the time I have. I’m sure sometimes I haven’t. But it’s like I tell the girls: Give it your all and let the chips fall where they may. Sometimes kids are misled. They think if you work really hard, there’s going to be a big reward for them at the end. Sometimes that’s not true. But if you don’t give it your all, the chance of that happening is very small.”

Power, 70, grew up in suburban Glen Ellyn. As a child, he liked science and collected butterflies. Until, he said, he went to his older brother’s high school basketball game when he was 8 years old. He saw the packed gym, the concession stand, the cheerleaders — and he packed his butterfly net away and picked up a basketball.

He thought he was good, until he was in junior high and played a game of driveway one-on-one against his sister, Margie. She won, but, he said, he was taking it easy on her. So she challenged him to give it all he had, and she beat him again.

“She was the best athlete in the family,” Power said. “And she had nowhere to play. This was 1965, before Title IX. I guess you could say I developed a little bit of empathy.”

Power started coaching in the mid-1970s, just after Title IX, and has never looked back, coaching girls sports as he moved from the Proviso Township high schools to Immaculate Heart of Mary to Fenwick, starting in 1992-1993, the first year girls were admitted.

That first year at Fenwick, the school only had freshman girls. They played a varsity basketball schedule anyway and only won one game.

“It wasn’t long before they were consistently winning 30 games a season,” said Erin Power, Dave Power’s daughter. Erin was the starting point guard on Fenwick’s 2007 state championship team and went on to play at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a master’s degree in social work. Now she’s her father’s boss, serving as chair of Fenwick’s health and physical education department. “He was able to do something pretty astonishing from what he was handed. … He really was on the cusp of Title IX and transforming girls basketball and girls sports into something that people really wanted to see.”

Erin Power said her father’s success comes from his knowledge of the game, but also from way he relates to his players.

“He’s an exceptional person,” she said. “He absolutely loves his kids.” By that, she means his players.

Dave Power said that looking back, he sometimes wishes he spent more time being a dad to Erin than being a coach when she played for him, but he also can’t stop talking about what a great player and person she is.

“She’s a one in a million,” he said. “I believe she’s the greatest point guard to lead a team to the state championship.”

Erin Power said that her father was kind of like a dad to the whole team. Especially when it came to his sense of humor.

“He’d tell some pretty bad dad jokes,” she said. “He’s really skilled at recognizing when girls are stressed, what they need is not to be belittled or have their mistakes pointed out. What they need is a lightening of tension.”

She can see it now when she looks at pictures from her playing days with the team in a huddle, laughing.

Dave Power said he can’t really speak to the differences between coaching girls and boys, but he can say that the girls he coached never had their heads turned too much by basketball. Even the ones who had the skills to play in college or even the WNBA didn’t see it as a route to fame and fortune.

“I would say they used basketball,” he said. “Basketball didn’t use them. Basketball doesn’t define them.”

A couple have played in the WNBA, and other are surgeons, doctors, lawyers, teachers and mothers. A few have had daughters come to Fenwick and play for Coach Power.

“The girls, if they feel you care about them, they’ll go through a wall for you, they’ll give it their all,” Power said. “If they don’t feel you care about them, they won’t give you the time of day. They have to play for the love of the game and love for their teammates. They don’t have to love me, but I make sure they know I do really care about them, and that basketball is a game. It should be fun.”