WEST HARTFORD, Conn. — In typical fashion, Jim Calhoun is 207 words into a meandering description of his new job when he is stopped with a pressing question: Does he have any basketballs at his disposal?
The 75-year-old coach ponders the query. “Hmm,’’ he says. “That’s a good question because it’s not like it used to be. The girls’ basketball is different now.’’ And then he dismisses the worry. “I’m sure we can get some basketballs when we need them.’’
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Indeed, basketballs are not a pressing need for the basketball program because currently there is no men’s basketball team. More accurately, there isn’t a single men’s basketball player on the University of Saint Joseph campus. Actually, come to think of it, there is not a single male undergraduate around. The 894 students who make up the undergrad population are all women.
The Sisters of Mercy opened their doors to USJ in 1932, combining their Catholic mission with the dream of providing liberal arts education to women in the Connecticut area. For more than three-quarters of a century, the university stuck to the sisters’ plans. Not until 1991 did a layperson even serve as president. But squeezed by the financial realities facing many women’s-only colleges, Saint Joseph’s will admit its first male students in September.
In November a collection of them will play basketball for a Hall of Famer.
That Calhoun, a three-time national champion who stepped away from UConn in 2012, cannot give up his game is not unusual. Retirement parties are meant to be repeated in sports, and the list of coaches, bored of their golf games, who have recycled their careers is long. Bill Snyder retired as the football coach at Kansas State in 2005, only to return to the same position three years later. He’s 78 now and preparing for another season on the sideline. The late Rollie Massimino, then 72, once showed me his plans for a pseudo Gucci Row at Northwood (now Keiser) University by ripping off a desk calendar page, flipping it over and drawing little rectangles in a row, labeling each with the name of his preferred guest.
But Calhoun’s route to a rebirth is unprecedented. In the past five years, the College of Saint Elizabeth, Chatham University and Wilson College all have gone coed, each adding men’s basketball to its athletic department rolls. Combined, their head coaches had zero wins before walking onto their respective courts. Jim Calhoun has 873.
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Yet here he stands inside the O’Connell Center, just to the left of a banner that declares, “Welcome Jim Calhoun.’’ Dressed in a blue sweater, he looks healthier than he did when he stopped coaching five years ago, and he is. His surgically repaired knee, hip and spine have left him with a cowboy’s amble, but the cancer scares are gone and he says he’s feeling better than he has in years. He leads the way to his office, through a nondescript brown door, past the plastic mail bins hanging on the wall, to the third door on the left. He has decorated the place — there’s a picture of Kemba Walker memorably crossing over Pitt’s Gary McGhee on one wall, photos recalling the three national titles UConn won under his direction decorate other spaces and a framed collection showcases the winningest coaches of all time. Calhoun ranks fifth.
The walls are cinder block painted white, and the space is sparse — one skinny window, three chairs and two desks. Calhoun claims the desk nearest the window; associate head coach Glen Miller occupies the other, the one facing the cinder-block wall.
As Calhoun settles into his seat for an interview, he chuckles. He knows how crazy this all looks. More than one person, including dear friend and former assistant George Blaney, tried to talk him out of taking the job. But to Calhoun, it makes perfect sense. “You don’t need the crowd and you don’t need the adulation,’’ he says. “What you need is fulfillment.’’
And then Calhoun meanders back in time, from his own journey from Braintree, Mass., to the Hall of Fame in Springfield, a trip that takes just 90 minutes to complete by car but took Calhoun a lifetime to achieve. “When my dad died, people told me, ‘You gotta get out of here,’ and they were right. I did,’’ he says. “Basketball got me out.’’
That is why, if you know Calhoun even a little bit, the idea of him coaching a men’s basketball team at what is currently a women’s college makes perfect sense.
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He was playing baseball when a neighbor relayed the news. His father, his hero, was dead. Jim Calhoun Sr. died of a heart attack in 1957, and the 15-year-old Calhoun, the eldest of six children, instinctively declared he would take care of the family. He walked away from a basketball scholarship to Lowell State after three months, returning home to work as a stonecutter. He’d make grave markers by day and play ball at night, turning over all of his earnings to his mother, Kathleen.
But after two years of watching Calhoun toil, his high school coach pulled him aside and told him his sacrifice would cost him his future. If he didn’t leave soon, he’d be stuck as a laborer in Braintree forever. The coach, Fred Herget, helped Calhoun secure a full scholarship to American International in Springfield, Mass., and in return Calhoun led the Division II school to its first national tournament.
Those two crystallized moments —his father’s death and Herget’s help — would drive Calhoun’s adult life. He was constantly running from one and toward the other, an irascible Bostonian who coached with a ferocious intolerance for mediocrity yet at the same time nurtured lifelong relationships with his players to ensure their successes. He coaxed winners out of one downtrodden program after another, leading Dedham High School to a 38-1 mark in two seasons, turning Northeastern into four-time NCAA Tournament participant and catapulting UConn, a school known for regional success, into national prominence.
Along the way he became an icon and a Hall of Famer, but beneath it all, he was the kid who lost his dad and worried if he would ever make it. Calhoun wasn’t so much insecure as he was insatiable, on a constant quest to secure his future, always aware that midnight could come and turn him back into a stonecutter.
He left UConn not necessarily because he wanted to, but because he felt he had to. His health was a mess. He’d had knee surgery, hip surgery and a third bout with cancer. “I was so beat up,’’ he says now. He announced his retirement in September 2012, leaving UConn no time and little choice but to honor his idea of a succession plan, promoting his former player Kevin Ollie to head coach. That worked well for two years, with Calhoun along for the ride as the program patriarch when Ollie led the Huskies to a national title in 2014. But Ollie needed to establish his own identity and that wasn’t easy, what with the old coach inviting a bigger media cluster every time he walked into a room. Calhoun purposefully started to fade into the background, but he is not necessarily suited to the role of wallflower.
He maintained a position at the school — he is the special assistant to the director of athletics, which is why he remains technically a consultant at Saint Joseph’s until his contract expires in March — and serves as a sort of a UConn ambassador. He meets with alumni groups, schmoozes donors, essentially makes a living out of being Jim Calhoun. But he soon discovered he was the world’s worst fan. “You’re awful at this,’’ his wife of 51 years, Pat, once chided him during a game. The Huskies, Calhoun recalls, were up 8-2, and he was stewing. “We’re in trouble,’’ he told Pat. “We’re taking horses- – – shots, and they’re missing layups.’’
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So he signed on with ESPN, hoping that being able to analyze games would work better than simply watching them. He liked it enough but after every game ended, Calhoun left with the same niggling feeling. “It wasn’t mine,’’ he says. “Not egotistically, but I had nothing to do with the process. i was like everybody else. I’d call the game and go home.’’
He waxed nostalgic about, of all things, “s- – – – – January days, with all the snow and slush,’’ days he found were always made better by a bus ride or a flight to a game, by a practice or a film session with a player. The old stonecutter in Calhoun surfaced, the one who knew no other way than to work hard for his future. Instead of feeling liberated by a schedule free of obligations, Calhoun would go to bed disgusted that he’d wasted another day.
While Calhoun was languishing through retirement, Rhona Free was reconfiguring an entire university.
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Leaving a holiday party last month, Free and her husband, Peter Boardman, enjoyed a good laugh. She’s been the president at Saint Joseph’s for more than two years, but never has she found so many people interested in her job. “What’s Coach Calhoun doing? Have he and Coach Miller found any good players? All of these people who thought of us as a nice place that graduates quality nurses now have all these questions,’’ Free says with a smile.
Free has no problem calling herself an opportunist and makes no apologies for jumping at the chance to bring Calhoun to campus. Not that she had any such delusions of grandeur when the school announced in June it would become coed and add men’s sports to its Division III slate. Boardman has worked at UConn since 1984, and the couple attended games regularly, even stood in the throng when the team returned home from winning national titles. Free considers Calhoun a legend and when she suggested athletic director Bill Cardarelli reach out to his longtime friend, she was merely hoping Calhoun would have some suggestions. “I knew he had some wonderful players who had made their way in life through athletics,” Free says, “and I was thinking maybe he could recommend someone to us.”
Calhoun took the meeting with Cardarelli for the same reasons. His daughter-in-law, Amy, is a USJ grad, but he knew little about the place and had been to campus just once. “I never thought about it,’’ Calhoun says. “Why would I?”
But Cardarelli, who started his career on Calhoun’s first staff as an assistant in 1986, knows Calhoun as well as anyone. As he pitched his vision for Saint Joseph’s, he soon found Calhoun matching his own enthusiasm. Eventually Cardarelli gently prodded Calhoun with a simple question, ‘Do you miss coaching, Jim?’ “I did,’’ Calhoun says. “And this whole thing captivated me.’’
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The opportunistic Free plowed through the door Calhoun had left ajar. The coach made it clear that he didn’t need the money, which made negotiations a lot more reasonable, and once the sides figured out a way for Calhoun both to honor his UConn commitment and to work at Saint Joseph’s, the announcement was made. The press conference was held in the Crystal Room at Mercy Hall, a stately room where white-gloved undergrads once enjoyed their formal dinner. With chandeliers hanging overhead and the Blue Jay mascot waiting to greet him, Calhoun made his grand entrance to a standing ovation. “I expect sometime around 2 or 3 o’clock today, I’ll be in a gym somewhere working on the future of the Blue Jays,’’ he said, concluding his remarks.
He wasn’t exaggerating. Calhoun hasn’t stopped moving since the announcement last September. Where once he had a secretary, graduate assistants and a personal assistant to do his bidding, Calhoun now shares one secretary — Mary Cooper — with coaches of the other sports. So a man accustomed to getting information at the snap of a finger has learned how to do things on his own. “I’m not quite the chief cook and bottle washer, but I’m pretty close,’’ he says. “By the way, you have an 11:15 with the president today. See? I’m also my own sports information director.’’
Calhoun immediately hired Miller, who was stunningly let go by Ollie in March. The move was a typical loyalty gesture from Calhoun, but Miller also spent six successful seasons coaching Connecticut College and knows how to navigate the Division III waters.
With an assist from his son, Jimmy, the former president of Converse, Calhoun has designed uniforms. The prototypes hang in the office, though he’s not thrilled with them just yet. The less identifiable USJ is emblazoned on the chest. He’d prefer Saint Joseph’s, but “there are so many Saint Joseph’s — schools, colleges, local parishes.’’
The uniforms dangle from a picture of what can be best termed as Calhoun’s vision — a new on-campus sports facility. The current gym seats a cozy 1,200, and the building also houses all of the coaches’ offices, the weight room and the pool. He hopes to have a new building in two years, so he has been meeting with alums and interested parties to raise the money.
Actually, the entire program is something of a vision, existing only in Calhoun’s mind. On the team’s webpage are drop-down menus for the roster, schedule, statistics, history and records. None of those exist, of course, adding truth to Calhoun’s favorite recruiting pitch: “Score one basket and you’re our all-time leading scorer.’’
Calhoun has only devoted a snippet of time to haberdashery and architecture. Mostly he’s been busy traipsing around New England, trying to find players to wear the jerseys and play in the gym. Accustomed to butting heads with the blue bloods for top-50 talent, he purposefully scouted Amherst and Babson, two of the best Division III programs in the region. He wanted to retrain his recruiting eye for the sort of talent he’ll be evaluating now. He frequents showcase tournaments that he didn’t previously know existed — he spent eight hours inside the gym at Wellesley one day and four more in South Kent — searching for players who are maybe a few steps too slow or a few inches too short and international players who are more projects than game-ready. Names are scribbled on a whiteboard hanging on his office wall, but they are merely a wish list. There are no scholarships in Division III and thereby no signing day. “If you asked me to name one player I’m going to coach next year, I couldn’t,’’ he says.
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The men who choose to come will be among the few males on campus. Free initially planned to admit just 50 men in the inaugural class, and although she says she’s willing to take in a few more, she intends to go slowly. There are male graduate students on campus who can serve as resident advisers, and through a consortium with other area colleges, some male undergrads take classes at USJ. But those who arrive in the fall will be pioneers, enrolling in majors the school has added to accommodate the new student population. (Previously, Saint Joseph’s specialized in social work, nursing and education but will now offer study in criminal justice, sports management, actuarial science and computer data science.)
Calhoun knows he’s asking his players to take a gigantic leap, but he hopes they see an opportunity much like he did. For the guys Calhoun recruited to UConn, basketball was a career path, the stop on campus a layover to reaching that dream. Calhoun is more like the players he’s recruiting now, kids who need basketball as a conduit to a career. “I see myself reflected so much in their stories,’’ he says. “And I tell them these four years are just the kickoff. Use basketball, come here and then go have yourself a life.’’
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Now for the big question: How in the world is Jim Calhoun going to stomach coaching a start-up Division III team that doesn’t exactly seem destined for victory? Patience is not exactly the man’s greatest virtue. Calhoun so despised losing and more, ineffectiveness, that on occasion he would call timeouts simply to let his underperforming players stew, sometimes not even deigning to speak with them.
He knows he will have to lower his initial expectations, and perhaps his voice. “I’m not sure if some of the language we’ve used on the sidelines will fly with the Sisters of Mercy,’’ he chuckles. But though he admits to being anxious, he’s not nervous. He has done this before, after all. Every stop in his five-decade career essentially started the same way, with a team that needed a chance.
Just like a stonecutter from Braintree.
(Top photo by Dana O’Neil)
