The NCAA Basketball Tournament, the less popular Men’s part, crowned the University of Connecticut as Champion for the second straight year.
UConn didn’t just beat their six opponents in the marathon event, they crushed them. They averaged a 23-point margin in their victories. The final 75-60 win over Purdue was almost a moral victory for the Boilermakers.
The UConn Huskies’ coach, Dan Hurley, is part of a fabulous basketball family. His dad, Bob Hurley, was the master of high school basketball in New Jersey. He coached the now-closed St, Anthony High School of Jersey City, which ceased operation in 2017. The Catholic school was tiny, usually with less than 200 students, but over 39 years of coaching, Hurley’s teams won 26 state titles.
Bob Hurley’s two sons played for him. Son Bobby was a fantastic high school guard and went on to become a First Team All-American at Duke, playing for Mike Krzyzewski. His Duke teams won two NCAA championships.
Dan Hurley, the younger of the two boys, was not the player that Bobby was but started at Seton Hall. He played against his brother once in college.
Bobby was a first-round pick by Sacramento in the NBA. His playing career never reached the heights expected probably because his car was broadsided after his rookie year and his recovery took almost nine months.
Both sons gravitated to coaching. Dan became an assistant at Wagner College, a small, private, 2,000-student school on Staten Island that still competes in the NCAA’s top tier of teams.
Eventually, Bobby ended up there too. After a few years, Dan became Head Coach at Rhode Island and Bobby at the University of Buffalo.
During this period, UConn became a basketball powerhouse in both Men’s and Women’s NCAA. In 2018, Dan took over the head coach job from Jim Calhoun who was forced to retire for health reasons. Bobby, meanwhile, left Buffalo to become head coach at Arizona State.
At the tournament, Dan seemed almost maniacal on the sidelines, constantly arguing with the referees. He even drew a warning for attempting to taunt Purdue’s star center, Zach Edey, as he was jogging past him. But Dan’s players seemed to love him, judging by how they hugged him after crushing their opponents.
The last player on the bench was Dan’s son, Andrew. He did not have an athletic scholarship and probably would have played for a smaller school like Wagner, but he chose to play for his dad and contribute to the team in practice. He got into all of the Tournament games when his father cleared the bench.
Will the family coaching dynasty continue? Who knows. But Hurley is a name synonymous with basketball success, even if they don’t have a shoe named after them.
Question: Could you have played for your father?
3 Comments
Neither my father nor myself, were into participating in sports.
We worked together in the family shop ’till he passed.
He did coach me in the die shop, just like he was taught as an apprentice in Europe.
No mercy…
“Take this block of rough metal, these files, vernier caliper and square, and bring back a 1” square cube.
The good ole days. Simple times.
I wish he was still here to scream at our apprentices and set them straight!
I learned from my Dad and Uncle Aaron through their stories when I was young, around the dinner table, catching fly balls, hitting tennis balls to each other. When I joined the business we argued often which forced me to sharpen my thinking. I saw him deal with health issues but keep putting one foot in front of the other. I saw him deal with vexing family issues which exhausted him.
I had great respect for his tremendous persistence. Working with him was hard but I am very happy we did it together.
Interesting question. I think “playing for” a coach requires respect for his/her position and ability in it, as well as personal integrity to do one’s best in every situation. I come up with two such scenarios in which we overlapped like: schoolwork, and hunting rabbits with my dad. From helping cover the ground within range of his shotgun before I was old enough to carry a gun, until our last hunt when he was early seventies, those are good memories. Sitting down once a week to review my graded school papers, which I was trained to fold up and bring home in my back pocket every day, probably did the most to instill in me the drive to do my best. Dad was a grade-school teacher who knew what worked.