Hoops coach nets top honour
Mike Hurley of Pelham named Ontario Basketball Association coach of the year
W, for wins, and L, for losses, don’t rank that high in Mike Hurley’s alphabet, and they never have.
The 2019 Ontario Basketball Association coach of the year is much more interested in the letters D, for development, and P, for process.
“Winning and losing is an outcome. Process is what matters,” the 44-year-old father of two from Pelham says. “Learning how to do things the right way. Discipline. Structure. Skill acquisition.”
Working well with others, to the point of jelling as a team, likewise is a quality that can’t easily be quantified by a final score.
“Sometimes players even see eye-to-eye with each other or get along off the court, but they need to come together in the game,” he says.
“Having coaches that jell with players, having players that jell with coaches.”
All along the way players learn life skills that will serve them well off the court as well.
“That translates into being successful in life,” adds the Brantford native and self-described “basketball nerd” who first picked up a basketball shortly after moving to Pelham as a four-year-old.
Hurley isn’t exaggerating when he suggests the sport has held him in its grip ever since.
“Basketball has literally been involved in every single part of my life,” he says. “It helped me get through school. It helped me get through the loss of my dad, who was a professional athlete.
“Basketball was the vehicle that kept me going. Basketball, basically, has brought me all my friends in life.
“I’m still friends with people I played with from a young age, people I have met over the years. Those are all my friends.”
The E.L. Crossley Secondary School graduate’s courtship of his wife began on a basketball court at Niagara College. He was playing on the Knights men’s team, when Andrea Flindall, a graduate of Lakeport High School in St. Catharines, was playing on the women’s team.
They now coach together, their son T.J. and daughter Sarah both play basketball. Talk about coming full circle, a circle shaped like a basketball, of course.
“Now, it’s just become a family affair. Everything I know is surrounded by basketball.”
Hurley, who played out his post-secondary eligibility with two seasons at Brock University after three years at Niagara, is “very humbled and very honoured” to be singled out from the among the more than 2,800 coaches in the running for the award.
Many colleagues, good friends and people who coached against throughout the year were among the runners-up.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of worthy coaches, so to be honoured with that distinction is really humbling,” he says.
Hurley coaches both of his children and says that’s not always easy.
“Anybody that knows me and my teams knows that when it comes to basketball and the team, my two kids, my son and my daughter, are one of 10 players,” he says. “They’re not my kid at that point, so they actually get it a little bit harder than the rest.
“I’m a little bit quicker on them laying the hammer down.”
Reason for this is twofold: Hurley knows his children can take it and it shows the other players on the team that he is not playing favourites.
One of the philosophies that guide his coaching philosophy is building relationships with each player
“I have tough conversations that have to take place in sport.”
If there is a line between teaching and coaching, Hurley has yet to see it.
“I think they go hand-in-hand. They’re the same thing essentially,” he suggests. “I would call any coach a teacher, any teacher a coach.”
Credit for helping him transition from playing a game he knew instinctively to breaking it down for others to understand goes to all of his coaches over the years.
“I call myself all the time a ‘basketball nerd.’ I love the game. I’m a sponge. From the time I was young, I’ve had very good coaches, all the way through high school, all the way through college, university.
“When I got back into coaching, I gravitated toward great mentors.”
Hurley, the coach, is the sum of everyone who had a part in mentoring Hurley the player.
“When I started surrounding myself with great basketball mentors, I started learning how to teach it,” he says. “I know that, I know how to do that, I was able to do that as a player.
“Now, I know how to teach it through a process: step A, B, C, D.”
If Mike Hurley could only single out three mentors in his OBA coach of the year acceptance speech, he would be hard-pressed to trim a long list of deserving candidates.
“There have just been so many over the years. It would be too hard to pick only three.”
At Crossley, his high school coaches were Taylor Gamble, Fred Stock and Vito DiMartino.
“All three were awesome. They helped me through that difficult time of high school with my dad passing,” he recalls. “All three were great to me and allowed me to become the player that I became. And all three taught me totally different things all under the same roof. It was amazing going from one coach to the next.”
Steve Atkin, the late Ralph Nero and Randy Conlon, his coach at Niagara College, also had a hand in influencing the future OBA coach of the year.
“He (Conlon) was good. He let me just play. He almost let me be a coach-player on the floor,” Hurley says. “He probably saw that coach in me.”
Ken Murray was his university coach.
“He pulled me over to Brock and gave me a captain’s spot.”
Other mentors include Mark Walton, women’s basketball coach at University of Guelph, and Mihai Raducanu of No Limit Performance, former McMaster men’s basketball and Niagara River Lions head coach Joe Raso as well as Ganon Baker, who is regarded as one of the top basketball skills trainers in North America.
This year Hurley coached two teams in the Pelham Panthers Basketball Association: his son’s under-15 team, which finished third in Ontario, and his daughter’s under-14 squad that ended the season fifth in the province.
In 2017-18, he coached the men’s basketball team at Niagara College as well as two Pelham Panthers squads
“This year was a little bit easier to navigate,” he says, chuckling at the understatement.
Stepping down as head coach after leading the Knights to a 13-7 record and fifth-place finish at the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association (OCAA) championship was a difficult decision.
“I was hard because I did really like it. I said to everybody, I had two things, and one had to give, it was either the men’s basketball job or all of the grassroots stuff I do. I couldn’t do 80-hour weeks like I was doing last year.
“I can do a 50- or 60-hour work week, but I can’t do an 80-hour work week. That’s just suicide almost. It’s not good for a healthy life balance.”
Hurley recalls how he arrived at a decision by using his hands as a scale. “This one is paid over here, and that’s attractive, but this one over here has my kids, so that was an easy choice.”
Niagara College associate athletics and recreation director Michele O’Keefe says Hurley’s dedication to development makes him more than worthy of the OBA coaching honour.
“This is a great honour for Mike Hurley, a true testament to his commitment to basketball development,” she says. “Mike is being recognized as one of two coaches of the year our of 2,800 basketball coaches in Ontario.
“The Pelham Panthers, the Niagara Peninsula and Niagara College is fortunate to have someone so devoted to our young athletes.”
Recognized as the province’s female coach of the year is Linda Quinn of the Toronto Huskies under-14 girls team.