The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘He’s the model’
As Wright retires, UConn’s Hurley aims to emulate success
Choking back tears during a news conference Friday morning, Villanova men’s basketball coach Jay Wright officially left the bench.
After 38 years, the past 21 spent turning the Wildcats into the class of the Big East and two-time national champions, Wright, 60, realized he wasn’t all-in anymore. He had become slightly disengaged, a little worn out.
“Not at the top of my game,” is the way he put it, despite winning another conference championship and reaching another Final Four this past season. “We always tell our players, you’re either 100 percent in or you’re against us. … We could never ask the players to give 100 percent if I’m giving 70 percent. So I just knew it was the right time.”
To run an elite Division I basketball program is to embrace insanity, really, particularly in the increasingly complicated era of the transfer portal and the name, image and likeness movement. Coaching paychecks are massive, of course, but the pressure and pace of the ever-evolving job requires a sacrifice-all-else approach. That’s what UConn coach Dan Hurley was discussing Thursday evening as he left work. With another recruit having been added to the program earlier in the day and the season having ended over a month ago, he was asked if he was still going 100 miles-per-hour every day.
“105,” Hurley said. “You have to understand what it is. It’s a 365day-a-year job. Every day when you’re driving to the facility, you’ve got to expect to deal with myriad issues both with your staff and with your players. As long as you have that expectation going in, I think you’re all right.
“But you can’t ever get away because you can plan a three-day vacation and usually your phone starts ringing upon landing or the next morning with a crisis in recruiting or a current player or a staff member’s been offered another job or a player has been injured in a pickup game. It never ends, truly.”
Only the best of the best get these jobs and only a fraction of those coaches are so good for so long. They are the Hall of Famers,
typically.
Though he later returned to coach Division III St. Joseph, Jim Calhoun retired from UConn at 69. Roy Williams retired from North Carolina at 70. Mike Krzyzewski left Duke at 75, with the final 32 of his record-1,202 victories coming during a season-long celebration tour because he had announced his retirement months ago.
Wright is a youthful 60, smooth, marketable, seemingly unflappable, the guy who coolly walked the sideline after his first national championship was earned with Kris Jenkins’ buzzer-beating 3-pointer in the 2016 title game. He knew this was his final season and only told a select few, then worked feverishly to finish his job, which meant helping a small Villanova inner circle on a transition to new coach Kyle Neptune.
Wright never made coaching look like such a grind.
It is. For everyone. Hurley turns 50 in January. He is known to be one of the most emotionallycharged coaches in the business. His RPM needle: redlined, constantly. Can he see himself walking away at a relatively young age, like Wright, or coaching well beyond his 60th birthday?
“Full speed, all gas, no brakes until I lose the passion and enthusiasm I have right now,” Hurley said. “I have a lot I want to accomplish as a coach. I’ll put it to you like this: I won’t be retiring until I’ve given everything I have in to accomplishing some of the things that Jay has. For me, Jay accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish and everything you could accomplish in the game — Hall of Fame, national championships, Big East championships, so many players in the NBA, ran one of the best programs in college basketball. He’s rewarded himself with being able to walk away knowing he accomplished everything he set out to do. Now he gets to enjoy his life.”
Wright leaves with 642 career victories, championships in 2016 and 2018, four Final Four appearances, eight Big East regular season titles and five conference tournament championships.
“I’ve tried to emulate, in terms of strength of culture and building a great program, where young men come in and develop holistically,” Hurley said. “He’s the model in terms of building of a program and having the best culture in college basketball. I don’t think it’s been close, to be honest with you, the culture he’s built and the success he’s had. As he retires, he was probably the current best coach in the business.”
Wright’s team were 13031 in Big East play over his final nine seasons.
“His conference record to me is more impressive than his national championships,” Hurley said. “It’s a lot harder to win the amount of Big East regular season games, home and away, the way these wars are, then having a hot couple weeks in March.
“And I think he reinvented his program. Early in his career, Jay maybe recruited McDonald’s AllAmericans and went for the most talented guy and I think that shift toward recruiting to his culture and style of play was what allowed him to take things to him being the best coach in the country.”
Hurley has known Wright since the 1980s, when Wright was an assistant and Hurley was a kid. Wright, then an assistant at Rochester, Drexel and eventually Villanova under Rollie Massimino, recruited many players out of the St. Anthony program coached by Hurley’s father, Bob Hurley.
Dan Hurley coached against Wright’s Hofstra teams as an assistant at Rutgers in 1997-01, and Wright later recruited many of Hurley’s St. Benedict’s players. He landed two at Villanova — Frank Tchuisi and Corey Stokes. And, of course, they’ve gone head to head seven times since Hurley started at UConn, with Villanova winning six of those games, including a Big East semifinal in March at Madison Square Garden.
“Jay is all class, but he’s a killer,” Hurley said. “He’s a ruthless competitor. Jay coaches the hell out of his players. For them to play with the level of discipline they play with, you can imagine how demanding he is in practice and what their preparation is like.”
Hurley has been at UConn four years and brought the program back to Big East and national relevance. He has yet to win an NCAA Tournament game, though. There’s a lot remaining on his to-do list. The complicated thing about coaching, though, is that checking items off doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to the end. It just hits you, eventually, some sooner than others.
“Your goal posts are always moving,” Hurley said. “If all I want to do is become a Division I head coach, OK, I’ve got that. Now if all I want is to coach an NCAA Tournament game, OK, now I want to win in the NCAA Tournament. Now I want to win the conference. The goal posts never sit still no matter what you accomplish, whether you’re Coach K or Jay Wright or a first-year coach. You may be satisfied for a week, 10 days, but that next thing is always calling you.”