Giving back
For many of Jim Calhoun’s new players at St. Joseph, his annual food drive hits close to home. On Monday night Calhoun, with the help of Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, returned to Pope Park. Nearly all of his players on the Blue Jays are from Connecticut, several from the Hartford area, so the drive had special meaning.
HARTFORD – The players followed Jim Calhoun into the recreation center at Pope Park and set upon the bags and bags of groceries.
Taking up their positions, where players such as Kemba Walker, Shabazz Napier, Rudy Gay or Andre Drummond once did, they began giving back — not just to the community, but their community.
“I’ve done things like this for other programs, in other states,” said Bloomfield’s Mike Sagay, who is playing at St. Joseph as a transfer student, “but for me to come back home and do it here, it’s much more sentimental, it means much more because it’s home.”
Calhoun started his holiday food drive in Hartford just after he won his first national championship at UConn in 1999. Two decades later, turkeys with all the fixings for a holiday meal have been distributed to 12,000 families in need.
On Monday night Calhoun, with the help of the City of Hartford, Mayor Luke Bronin, ShopRite and Omar Coffee, commanded a new work force — his players at St. Joe's, the Division III startup that lured the coach from retirement. Nearly all of the Blue Jays are from Connecticut's cities and towns, several from the Hartford area.
“It means a lot,” said f reshman Delshawn Jackson Jr., a North end kid who played at Prince Tech. “I've always talked about giving back to my city and my community. It brings a lot of smiles to peoples faces.”
During the life of this event, Calhoun has helped raise $2 million for area food banks. This year, he and his new players handed out another 500 bags of groceries.
“It's a humbling experience to be here giving back to the city I grew up in,” said Tyree Mitchell, from Hartford and East Hartford, who al s o played at Prince Tech. “Giving out turkeys and stuff to people who need it, now everybody can have happy holidays. We're just coming out as one family.”
Calhoun, 76, was inspired to start this event by the late Reggie Lewis, who played for him at Northeastern and did a holiday food drive in Boston while he was playing for the Celtics. Once he started it up, Calhoun continued it even after he retired as the Huskies' coach in 2012.
Now he has a new group of players to coach and teach, and this is one of the life lessons.
“For a lot of us, we see the opportunity to give back,” Calhoun said. “I remember Caron Butler saying to me, ‘Coach, my family was once in a situation like this.' I hope it's going to make an impact on these kids to use your basketball to do something much beyond that.”
St. Joseph, which went coed this fall, hired Calhoun as a consultant and eventually as coach, and brand new men's basketball program, with mostly freshmen, is off to a 6-3 start.
Five different players, including Jackson last week and Noreaga Davis this week, have been the Great Northeast Athletic Conference rookies of the week.
No surprise, their coach has brought attention to the little-known school, and given players like Sagay, who began his career at Boston College and played at IUPUI in Indianapolis before coming home, the stature to make a difference.
“Having players from the area like this,” Sagay said, “it's a big deal for people to come in here and see us giving back to the community we're from. That goes a long way because it shows that we're just like them, they can do whatever we can do.
“For the little kids here, it's an example.”
The Blue Jays are heading to Florida to play two games in a tournament at Daytona Beach.
“We've struggled now, recently,” Calhoun said, “we've played a couple of really good teams. Our inexperience is showing, but I'm not a great guy for — people telling me I should have patience, I don't, and I won't. I just think they're learning some lessons. A lot of them think I could put my hand on their head and now they're Kemba Walker.
“It doesn't work that way, but they're learning the work that goes into it.”