Livingston Manor’s high school basketball team gritted out another Western Sullivan League championship, its third in a row. Though not able to duplicate the undefeated seasons performed by Wildcat basketball teams during the previous two season, the 1962 championship team, led by seniors John Hoos and Harold VanAken and junior Richard Welch survived a surprising overtime loss to arch-rival Roscoe early in the season along with a late-season cliff hanger with Jeff-Youngsville to take the league championship. Despite losing star players from the previous undefeated seasons through graduations, the boys again advanced to the Section IX sectionals in March under the guidance of Coach Silvio Pesavento. For Coach Pesavento, this was not the first time having a WSL championship team depleted of regulars through graduation only to follow with another winning team.

Silvio Pesavento came to Livingston Manor Central School in 1952, taking over coaching the basketball team from high school business teacher Leonard Welter. During the first six years as coach of the basketball Wildcats, Coach Pesavento built up a record of 82 victories against only 14 loses, including the 1958 team that won the WSL championship with a 13 – 1 record. However, due to graduation, Coach lost nine of his ten players that year, including four of the five starters, leaving only Peter Mavoides the remaining member of this championship team. Filling the basketball sneakers of 1958 graduates Mile Fisher, Bill Fredenburg, Gene Barnicott and John Welch would need to be up to underclassmen moving up from the Jayvee basketball team. But what a team it was. The Jayvee squad itself had compiled an impressive record the past two years, winning WSL Jayvee championships both seasons while only losing one game in the process. These untested young players that would now compete at the varsity level for the 1958-59 basketball season were juniors Bill Vick and Barry Foster along with sophomores Richard Robinson and John DuMond. Though the Wildcats basketball team finished behind Roscoe that year, these players were the nucleus for the championship years that followed.