What UConn gave me — and what it needs in return
It was 50 years ago last September that I arrived on the UConn campus in Storrs as a freshman, a National Merit Presidential Scholar from Stamford High School with no thoughts beyond academics. But all that changed within a week of the first day of classes after I wore an orange T-shirt emblazoned with “Stamford Track” in black lettering on it, given to me by a friend in my advanced honors calculus class. The class was taught by the late UConn mathematics professor Louis DeLuca, himself a Stamford graduate and a supporter of UConn athletics who knew many members of the athletic department staff.
On Friday of the first week of classes in fall 1972, Professor DeLuca called me aside and asked me if I was interested in tutoring two UConn football players in calculus. I said yes, went to the division of athletics, and took the job. This job led to many others in the division, both in tutoring and in athletic administration, which I held when I was an undergraduate and a graduate student.
I got to know many people whom I otherwise would never have met, and I got to see the evolution of the department in the formative years before it became what could be termed “big time.” From my perspective, I always saw the athletic department finding ways to work hand-in-hand with the rest of the university for the good of the whole.
During the early 1970s, following the calculus tutoring job, I worked for several years with coach Andy Baylock, one of UConn‘s greatest scholar-coaches, in the evening study halls that he ran for student-athletes, particularly freshmen, in which he taught study skills, years before a formal program was set up within the division. Coach Baylock has taught within the department of physical education, has been a football coach and head baseball coach, and is now director of UConn football alumni/ community affairs. He has had an expansive educative influence on the university environment and extended community.
A few years later, I shared the office of Coach Baylock and another of UConn‘s great scholar-coaches, the late Bob Kennedy, former men‘s track and cross country coach who was a noted expert on biomechanics and who coached Olympic athlete Andy Bessette at UConn.
My experiences are two of many examples of how eclectic individuals in the division of athletics are: they are not a separate “non-educational” entity from the university, but are an integral part of it. I think of all of these things now in light of UConn‘s historic national championship in men’s basketball amid a backdrop of budgetary problems for the university and how to solve them.
The enormity of the impact of this achievement cannot be fully assessed at this point, but it is likely to be tremendous, not just for the division of athletics but for the entire university, and for Connecticut as a whole. At this crucial point in the university’s history, we must remember how this first post-pandemic national championship in men‘s basketball came about: by different parts of the university working together. Without Coach Dan Hurley and his staff and the talented student-athletes that he brought to the university and taught over the past five years, this achievement would not have been possible.
But without the guts, vision and perseverance of one of the university‘s greatest scholar-administrators, President Emeritus Susan Herbst, Coach Hurley would never have gotten to the university. This national championship, and all that comes from it, will become part of her legacy as well. My greatest hope as a UConn graduate is that this national championship will inspire Gov. Ned Lamont to realize the full value of the university to the state of Connecticut and that he and the legislature will work with our trustees and officials to help ensure financial stability for the university for many years to come.