The Back Roads to March by John Feinstein

Author:John Feinstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

THE OLD COACH AND DIVISION 3

January 31, 2019, West Hartford, Connecticut

Jim Calhoun sat in the small cluttered office a few steps from the court inside the O’Connell Athletic Center, which is where the University of St. Joseph plays its basketball games. He was thirty miles from Gampel Pavilion, where he had been one of college basketball’s kings as the coach at the University of Connecticut, winning three national titles in twenty-six seasons.

Those thirty miles might as well have been a million miles in the basketball universe.

St. Joseph’s is an 1,100-student Catholic school that was founded in 1932 by the Sisters of Mercy as a college for women. The school had admitted its first class of men—about one hundred of them—in the fall of 2018.

Which is where Calhoun came in.

He had retired from UConn in September 2012 after a series of health scares and injuries that dated to 2003, when he’d had surgery for prostate cancer and returned to the bench sixteen days later. There had been another cancer scare in 2008, this time squamous cell carcinoma—a serious form of skin cancer. He’d fallen off a bike in 2009 during a charity race and broken a hip, and then he had spinal stenosis and a hip fracture in 2012.

He turned seventy in May of that year and knew it was time. He passed the reins to Kevin Ollie, a former UConn player who had been his top assistant, and went off to spend time with his grandchildren and work on his golf game.

Except, not exactly.

He still had an office in Gampel Pavilion and was often seen prowling around at practice. “I still had the itch,” he said. “It never went away.”

Still, given all the health issues, the three national titles, and the spot in the basketball Hall of Fame that had come his way in 2005, he resisted the urge to scratch.

Until the fall of 2017, when he got a call from an old friend, Bill Cardarelli, who had been the athletic director at St. Joseph’s for twenty-five years. The school was about to admit men in the fall, and Cardarelli wondered if Calhoun had any thoughts on who might coach the basketball team.

Calhoun had plenty of protégés he could have recommended. But the more he and Cardarelli talked, the more he kept coming back to one name.

“Me,” Calhoun said with a laugh. “The more I thought about getting back in the gym, working with the kids, competing—even at a completely different level than the one I’d coached on at Northeastern and UConn—the more I liked the idea.”

So he threw the name out at Cardarelli, who initially thought he was joking.

He wasn’t.

Because Calhoun was still on the payroll at UConn as a consultant, he couldn’t be named a full-time employee until the following September. That didn’t slow him down that winter. He saw sixty-three games as a scout, and nineteen players enrolled at St. Joseph’s in the fall as basketball players. On September 18, the school officially named him as the men’s basketball coach.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.