Hoops, hard work and smarts run in Daigneault family
When his son was 12, Rick Daigneault’s grandmother was named woman of the year at the Leominster Italian-American Club. There were 350 people gathered. A handful of them spoke.
“Then Mark stands up,” Rick said. “He just knocks them down with his speech. Twelve years old. He had no stage fright. He was never afraid to speak with adults. He always had this mature process from the early stages of his life.”
When the former student manager under Jim Calhoun at UConn was named the head coach of the Oklahoma City Thunder last week at age 35, Mark Daigneault became the secondyoungest coach in the NBA. The Thunder traded Chris Paul this week. He is 35.
Calhoun, George Blaney, Ralph Willard have all spoken in recent days about how smart and what an industrious worker Daigneault is. Sam Presti, the man who hired him, expanded on Mark’s impressive communicative skills and how much experience he had accumulated at such a young age.
When the Hartford Whalers hired Paul Maurice at age 28, the secondyoungest coach in NHL history, one of his players called him “Doogie Howser, M.D.” after the TV show.
So why not call an M.D. about Mark Daigneault’s hiring?
“I was amazed,” his first
cousin Jaci Daigneault said, “but not surprised.”
Jaci, daughter of Rick’s brother Jack, was the 2011 Division III National Player of the Year. That’s the same year she led Amherst to the national basketball championship. And this year? Jaci, an all-state player from Guilford, graduated from UMass Medical School in Worcester and is doing her pediatrics residency at Massachusetts General in Boston.
Accomplishments at a young age clearly run in the family.
“I saw Mark pretty frequently when we were younger, mostly at holiday gatherings and in the summer at the Cape,” said Jaci, 31. “Besides my dad, he was the guy I always talked basketball with. Mark and my grandfather. An upcoming game, defenses or a move I was working on, just a lot of basketball talk.”
It’s hard to know exactly where to start with the Daigneault sports family, so we’ll start in the back of a truck in Leominster, Massachusetts. Jack Daigneault, a multisport letterman in high school, used to take his boys everywhere — basketball, football, baseball games. They’d pile into the bed of that truck.
Later, four of the boys went to Holy Cross. Three played baseball. Rick played on the junior varsity basketball team, too, for two years for Togo Palazzi before fully concentrating on baseball. Jack, the son, didn’t play at Holy Cross. A long-recognized orthopedic surgeon in the New Haven area, his path would take him into sports medicine.
Jack went on to get his master’s at Boston College and his M.D. at Albany Medical College. He arrived for his residency at Yale in 1985 and did a fellowship at Kerlan-Jobe Clinic in Los Angeles. That group took care of the Lakers and Rams.
“I had done one shoulder arthroscope in my residency and all of a sudden I did like five of them,” Jack said. “It was an eye-opener. I love the shoulder. I went back to Yale and brought that along with my training in sports medicine. I kind of morphed into a shoulder guy.”
Over the years, he operated on some high-profile athletes and found himself in the locker room with the likes of Yale’s Carm Cozza and the Rams’ John Robinson.
“I heard some fiery speeches that made me want to go out myself and hit someone,” Jack said.
Rec league, travel teams, AAU, he coached Jaci from the third grade until she was 16. There was a lowered hoop in their driveway and the first time Jack remembers showing 6-year-old Jaci how to shoot, she mimicked him with nice form. Swish. She had the gene.
“There were times when we butted heads a little,” Jaci said. “I also knew it took some grace and finesse for him to coach his daughter. I always worried if I was getting special treatment. I think that pushed me to show I deserved to be on the court. We got to a point in my junior year, probably, we both realized we maybe hit the point where I became a stubborn teenager and didn’t want to listen to my dad as coach.”
Jaci went on to play AAU for the Connecticut Breeze. She scored 1,326 points at Guilford High. At Amherst, she scored 1,299 points, gathered 654 rebounds and twice was named an AllAmerican. Amherst had been the first place Jaci visited with her family. Perfect September day, leaves in fall foliage, she envisioned herself there. A number of schools wanted her. Trinity, Hamilton, Stonehill, St. Anselm, Lehigh. In the end it was Amherst and a NESCAC education. Lynn Hersey recruited her, but G.P. Gromaki, who had recruited her hard for Hamilton, took over at Amherst her freshman year. It ended up working out perfectly.
Jack, meanwhile, would adjust his schedule, finish up surgery, or at the clinic. He had it timed precisely, 86 miles from Guilford to Amherst, 90 minutes.
“My dad was so busy, but he made it to every single game I played in my career, except maybe one,” Jaci said. “Obviously, it’s something so important to me that he wanted to be there.”
“In the 2011 NCAA Tournament, Amherst played Eastern Connecticut,” Jack said. “Before the game, there were the two point guards from my AAU team, Jaci and Jess Moriarty, shaking hands at center court. That was a great moment for me.”
Jack said Jaci’s not the most athletic, but she’s smart, didn’t fluster, didn’t make mistakes and had incredible hands. Long fingers, great hand-to-eye coordination. Perfect, Jack said … for an orthopedic surgeon.
Jaci laughs.
“I get some of my stubbornness from him,” she said.
She is going, instead, to pediatric medicine.
To listen to Jaci talk about the required discipline and time management she learned through basketball is something to behold.
“Basketball shaped my life,” she said. “I don’t think I would have been as successful in medical school and residency without it. It also has given me some of my closest friends in life. We have a text chain form my junior-senior year team, 11, 12 of us. We’re always chatting.”
Residency means a rotation through the ER, some outpatient, but mostly inpatient with neonatal ICU and pediatric ICU. While nearby hoops recently have been locked up because of COVID, basketball also has served as a stress relief. While in Worcester she played in a women’s league and when that fell apart played 21⁄ years as the only
2 woman in a Worcester men’s league. After graduation in March, she played in a Boston league with women’s players from Tufts and Williams.
Yes, basketball is in the Daigneault blood.
Rick said Mark as a kid would walk the family dog down the street to a hoop, tie the dog up and shoot and shoot. Together, they’d watch ESPN in the morning. He coached Mark on travel teams, remarked about butting heads. (“Not much,” joked Jaci, when I asked the difference between her dad and Rick.) Mark went on to become captain at Leominster High under Steve Dubzinski, now the school’s principal.
“Mark really was mature beyond his years,” Rick said. “My dad has owned an Italian restaurant (Il Camino) and Mark would come down to help me make pasta in the morning. All of a sudden, ‘Where’s Mark?’ He’s talking to our customers. Next thing you know he’s sitting there eating bread with them. They had no idea who this little 7year-old kid was.”
Knowing this, it’s less of surprise to find out the first day of freshman year Mark went to the UConn basketball office to apply in person to become a student manager. He waited two hours. None of the coaches arrived. Sure enough, Mark returned the next day and waited until they did. He was told only six would be picked. Mark was one of them. Blaney, who was the head coach at Holy Cross when the Daigneault brothers attended, especially took him under his wing.
The path from college student manager to NBA coach isn’t entirely unique. Frank Vogel, under Rick Pitino, and Lawrence Frank, under Bob Knight, traveled it. It does give bright young basketball minds a chance to observe and learn every day.
“Mark wasn’t picking up cups and towels and sweatsuits,” Rick said. “He delegated. He was in with Justin Evanovich (team manager/ walk-on player/graduate assistant at UConn). They’d watch film for hours and take notes. They did scouting reports. If a player wanted to shoot at 1 a.m., he was right there. He used to tell me about Ray Allen’s workouts.
“Smart? Yes. But it’s like Ralph Willard said, you don’t wish and dream. You work hard. The smarts came with grinding and a work ethic. At a very young age, he loved the game and spent time to learn it.”
Rick said Mark heard about an opening to become an assistant coach under Willard at Holy Cross through Dubzinski. Rick said Mark sat in on two weeks of practices and offered some written observations. Blaney called on his behalf. Calhoun pushed for Mark. Willard, who had a lot of applicants, told Daigneault, “You better take this job.”
“We had three special years because he was living at home,” Rick said. “When he went to Florida to work for Billy Donovan, we’d always talk on the phone but barely saw him. He was developing his career. Same when he coached in Oklahoma City for the G League team and assistant for the Thunder. We’d go out there two, three times a year.”
When the head coaching job opened after Donovan’s departure, Rick said he and his wife, Sandy, didn’t think he had a real chance.
“We thought this was typical Mark,” Rick said, “jumping in, learning the process before advancing. It turned out to be the right place at the right time. As a mom and dad, we are on Cloud 9. It’s hard for us to believe he’s an NBA coach in front of the world. But everywhere he has adapted and accelerated. Sandy and I knew he’d do it, just not at 35.”
It’s like cousin Jaci says. Amazed, but not surprised.