Mike Thomas
Graduating class: 1987
Inducted into Hall of Fame: 2014
Hall of Fame Category: Athlete
By his own admission Mike Thomas will tell you he was never a great high school athlete. But ask the people and coaches who have played with and against him and you will hear one thing, Mike Thomas was a winner and that winning was contagious in virtually every sport he played. All you have to do to verify this is to look at his senior year.
Having played basketball and baseball in his first two years at Fairhaven, Mike planned to continue on that same two sport path, but when he was approached by a man named Sam Galvam, Mike’s training habits changed dramatically.
Galvam, coach of the school’s newly-formed boys’ soccer team was busy scouring the halls of the high school on a scouting mission. Mike was an athlete but he wasn’t very interested in a sport he knew very little or even cared about. But Mike did know and like Galvam so, reluctantly, he agreed to fill a roster spot. Galvam told Mike he wanted him to be the goal-keeper and, on opening day, Mike was the starter. Galvam opted to play the first in the varsity level and with a band of one or two legitimate soccer players and a “dozen-or-so athletes”, soccer made its varsity debut in time for the 1986-87 season.
Fairhaven finished the regular season with a record of 7 wins, 3 losses and 2 ties. One of those wins was a 3-0 victory over GNB Voc-Tech that locked up a share of the conference title for these 2 teams and a trip to the postseason tournament. Mike was a big part of that success. Only once in those dozen regular-season games did Mike allow more than two goals and in 10 others he allowed no more than one. Overall, Mike averaged an incredible 21.5 saves a game and authored five shutouts, including the big one against the powerful Bears. In a South Sectional Div.3 Tournament game against a potent Sandwich team, Fairhaven was eliminated in a 1-0 loss despite 23 mostly acrobatic saves by Mike. His overall performance that year earned him a spot on both the South Coast Conference and Standard-Times All-Star teams and Honorable Mention on the Boston Globe team.
Picking up where he left off in soccer, Mike played a key role in the basketball team’s drive toward a state championship which fell one win short of a title. In his second full season with the varsity, Mike played the role of sixth man and came off the bench to replace a big man. He was the leading scorer off the bench, averaging six points a game. He also averaged four rebounds and finished the season as the team’s best free throw shooter, converting 80 per cent of his foul shots.
The basketball team finished the regular season with a record of 18-2, won five of six tournament games and captured SCC, South Sectional and Eastern Massachusetts championships before losing to undefeated Frontier Regional in the State Division 3 title game.
In baseball, Mike played centerfield and capped his three-year diamond career by leading his team in hitting (.403) and was among the better defensive players in the South Coast Conference.
Overall, he played three years of baseball and basketball and one—the first—of soccer.
After graduating from UMass Dartmouth, Mike went into sports writing and currently is the sports editor of the Fall River Herald News. Born in Acushnet, Mike currently lives across from the street where he was born and grew up and he is the father of two girls, Lily (10) and Abigail (8) who, like their father, are both athletes.