Longtime East Ramapo coach Dave Sachs dead at 68

• Dave Sachs, 68, died of a heart attack Tuesday after coaching 44 years in the East Ramapo district.
• Sachs coached three sports in all but three years of his coaching career.
• Sachs came out of retirement this fall to coach the Pomona Middle School girls soccer team.

Dave Sachs dedicated more than four decades of his life to athletics in the East Ramapo school district before retiring in 2013. Yet when athletic director Bill Pilla needed a head coach for the Pomona Middle School girls soccer team this season, Sachs gladly offered his services.

“I just know the kind of guy Dave was, and it wasn’t even a hesitation,” Pilla said. “He is East Ramapo.”

Sachs, 68, passed away Tuesday after suffering a heart attack. News of his passing rocked the East Ramapo community and his closest friends.

“When you think about Dave Sachs, he’s a pro’s pro,” Pilla said. “He’s a guy that, from Day 1, had a vision of what kind of a coach he wanted to be, and he followed that all the way until the end.”

Sachs coached three sports for nearly his entire 44-year career in the district. Pilla and Rockland County sports historian Tom Doherty estimated that Sachs coached a team in 129 of the 132 seasons during his tenure.

Sachs accumulated more than 300 wins as a varsity boys basketball coach, and was an assistant on the 1982 Spring Valley team that won Rockland County’s only state championship.

“He had the success in boys basketball, but many, many, many of the teams — either on the varsity or the JV level — that he coached up there, they weren’t winning championships,” said Doherty, a former athletic director at Pearl River High School. “Anyone can keep coaching when they got the athletes and they’re winning the titles — that’s the easy stuff.”

When Sachs took the Pomona girls soccer gig this summer, he did not cut any players from the roster because he wanted them all to gain experience, Pilla said. Sachs chose to carry 32 players on a team he was coaching without an assistant.

“He would’ve coached anything,” Pilla said. “He’s one of those guys who probably goes on vacation and sees somebody playing a sport and is ready to tell them, ‘Hey, why don’t you try this?’ It doesn’t matter where he’s at, he was always a coach.”

Sachs is survived by his wife Karin and three daughters.

The funeral for Sachs will be held Thursday at Congregation Shaarey Israel at 18 Montebello Road in Suffern at 1 p.m. The shiva for Sachs will be held at his family home in Spring Valley on Thursday (7-9 p.m.), Friday (12-2 p.m.), Saturday (7-9 p.m.), and Sunday (12-4 p.m.).

Twitter: @Zacchio_LoHud