Most of Binghamton University’s athletic history is located in the Events Center or the West Gym. The Events Center displays the banners and trophies of the various Bearcat accomplishments, while the Binghamton Athletic Hall of Fame calls the West Gym home.
But there’s another location on campus that houses a wealth of BU athletic history: a small office in Academic B. This small office is where former Binghamton basketball coach David Archer now works.
After three years as an assistant coach, Archer became head coach of the Division III Colonials in 1983. That season, Archer’s squad racked up 16 victories, a program record at the time.
“The best experiences were really the teams we had in the mid-80s which surprised everybody,” Archer said. “Binghamton had never had winners and we became winners, some other years losers, but it was a great thing to build — I loved it.”
Archer — who is currently the coordinator for BU’s undergraduate education minor — served at the helm of the Colonials for eight seasons. He compiled an 87-118 record as head coach and led the Colonials to two consecutive third-place finishes during the 1984-85 and 1985-86 seasons in the competitive SUNYAC conference.
“We made the team part of the community, which it had never been before,” Archer said. “Every year we played a Division I team — Army, Colgate, Cornell. We started to get local kids who wanted to play and stay.”
Archer left the program following the 1990-91 season as Binghamton began to make the transition to Division II and eventually Division I. Although he hasn’t coached at the collegiate level for 24 years, Archer still vividly remembers some of his top moments at the helm of the Colonials.
“Probably the two biggest wins we had were when we were seeded eighth [in the ECAC Tournament in 1985-86] and we played at number-one Albany on a Tuesday night,” he said. “They used to have their football team sit behind the opposing bench and spit on [the Colonials] the whole game. We were able to defeat them by making a couple of foul shots at the end and it was a huge upset. The next Wednesday, we did the same thing to Hartwick and that put us in the finals.”
After leaving the Colonials, Archer served as a school teacher as well as the mayor of Endicott from 1992-99, but his most memorable accomplishment came 34 years ago, when he founded the Basketball Coaches Association of New York, where he currently serves as executive director.
“Indiana had [a coaches association] and that was the hotbed of high school basketball,” Archer said. “So what I did was find a friend that I had in each area of the state, we met and formed this group. Now it is professional development, we run clinics, we honor kids. … We’ve left a big footprint.”
From there, Archer rose to national prominence in the basketball circle, founding the National High School Basketball Coaches Association. Archer was the first president and currently serves as president emeritus of the organization.
“We are attacking problems nationally like transfers, illegal recruiting, things that every state faces,” Archer said. “So we meet several times a year as a national group and go after those same kinds of problems.”
Currently, Archer sits on the board of directors of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. Through this position, he has worked closely with some of the top coaches in all of college basketball.
“I’m the only person representing high school coaches in the country [on the board],” Archer said. “So there’s [Kentucky head coach] John Calipari, Mike Brey from Notre Dame, Jamie Dixon from Pittsburgh and there’s Dave Archer from Endicott, New York. I’m the only regular, everybody is somebody. So we meet with the NCAA and talk about all the recruiting issues and the scheduling issues and the tournament issues and there I am.”
“At the Final Four, for instance, they’re hounded by fans etc., etc., they don’t hound me,” Archer added. “So [Kansas head coach] Bill Self will say ‘let’s talk about this’ or ‘let’s go over here where they can’t see us’ and I talk with Bill Self.”
Archer has become an influential voice among the basketball community and is grateful for the opportunities life has given him.
“It’s unbelievable,” Archer concluded. “What has happened is that through all these twists and turns things have kept getting better and better.”