The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Hurley’s sideline antics aimed to ‘instill passion’
BRISTOL — Believe it or not, there was a time not long ago when Dan Hurley was a relative choir boy on the sidelines.
The past two seasons at Rhode Island, Hurley had NCAA tournament teams filled with poised, veteran players. He didn’t need to get too animated on the sidelines to spur his team on, as he had done his two seasons at Wagner and his first four years at URI. And he laid off the referees a lot more, as well.
“That all goes out the window this year, by the way,” Hurley told Hearst Connecticut Media prior to this season. He wasn’t kidding. Hurley’s histrionics on the sidelines have been an earlyseason highlight to an overall positive start in his first year at the Huskies’ helm. We’ve all seen the gifs of Hurley running 30 feet from the bench to help Josh Carlton off the ground behind the basket, or the wild chest-bumps with Jalen Adams that quickly ended so Hurley could shake Jim Boeheim’s hand, or any number of animated moves or facial gestures over UConn’s first 10 games.
We’ve also seen three technical fouls and an ejection as Hurley’s “disagreements” with referees have gone a little overboard at times.
It’s entertaining, and it’s certainly sincere, not forced. But is it a bit over-the-top? UConn fans love it, but it may behoove Hurley to tone it down just a little bit. Heck, even his wife, Andrea, wants him to.
Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen immediately, however.
“When you’re trying to instill passion in a team,” Hurley said on Monday morning after a Q&A session at the Bristol Boys & Girls Club, “and a personality, a toughness, a fearlessness, an aggressiveness, an attacking mindset in guys that haven’t displayed it, you end up really emphasizing it — and, at times, over-emphasizing it — to draw that out of them. Once that gets instilled, I become a lot more calmer figure. We’re just not at that point right now. You watch our teams the last couple of years at Rhode Island, when we got good and had our culture established, I certainly wasn’t as animated.”
About 150 fans and local businesspeople watched Hurley field questions from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, a Bristol native, then take a few questions from the crowd. Hurley broached the usual topics — the hard times he had as a player at Seton Hall, his days as a coach at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, N.J., his connections with players, his penchant for rebuilding programs (“I like to fix things. Not around the house. I’m useless there”) and the reasons he chose UConn.
One audience member asked about the multiple flagrant-foul calls in Saturday night’s 79-71 loss to Florida State that caused
a few too many video reviews by the refs and wound up stringing the game out more than 2 1⁄2 hours. The reviews were a result of a crackdown on “hook-and-hold” penalties that automatically become a flagrant foul, since they have led to shoulder injuries in the past. Hurley treaded carefully. “That was brutal the other night,” he noted. “I understand the rule, but why go to the monitor every time? If you see it, just call it. Does it have to be a flagrant? We lost because Florida State is really, really good and we’re not too good yet. (But) that night is really bothering me a bit.”
Afterwards, Hurley talked more about the hook-and-hold rule.
“There’s obviously a lot of things these guys have to watch,” he said to reporters. “Referees have a really hard job. The level of athletes that are now playing the game, how quickly it moves ... I understand. I don’t know if there was an inordinate amount of dislocated shoulders from arm pull-downs. I never thought that’s been one of our biggest issues in college basketball, in terms of rules, until they showed us the video (prior to the season). We’ve had it happen to us a couple of times now with three different players. So, obviously, I’ve got to take more accountability to make sure that stops getting called against us. We’ve got to have better discipline.”
Hurley, of course, notched a technical foul late in Saturday night’s game, his third of the season. The first two came in a Nov. 16 loss to Iowa, resulting in his ejection late in the game. Saturday night’s “T” probably didn’t sway the outcome of the game, though the timing could have been better.
“That was obviously some frustration there with things that were going on,” he said on Monday. “I wanted that one.”
Hurley may want some others as the season progresses. And some officials, no doubt, will be more than willing to oblige.
“I’ve got to set the tone with my intensity and urgency, and I have to understand what spots I have to pick,” he said. “I think it’s really good to play these 10 games, get a week off, kind of regroup and try to take a deep breath and analyze where we’re at.”