Let’s hope Alosi can contain his intensity

EAST HARTFORD — When Dan Hurley, intense basketball coach, spotty left-hander, throws out the first pitch on Sunday at Citi Field, Mets fans should know he’s not a Mets fan. Or a Yankees fan. Or a Red Sox fan.

He’s a Kansas City Royals fan.

How’d that happen? “George Brett. Pine tar game,” Hurley said Wednesday before a meet and greet with UConn fans at Rentschler Field. “It was when the Yankees and Royals were rivals, and any team my father and brother liked, because I was a middle child, I just went opposite.”

So when Brett went crazy, you said that’s for you?

“I said ‘I love that guy,’ ” Hurley said.

Maybe it’s a good idea to keep the pine tar away from Sal Alosi.

When UConn announced Alosi as its director of human performance earlier Wednesday, my first reaction was “Good hire.” You didn’t need to be a judge at the Mr. Universe pageant to determine the Huskies were a weak team last season. Rail. Thin. Kevin Ollie seemed to recruit that way and they had a tendency to stay that way. A few — like, oh, Eric Cobb — on the contrary looked as if they needed to drop some pounds.

The second reaction? Not nearly as good.

When Alosi stuck out his knee and tripped Dolphins gunner Nolan Carroll along the Jets sideline during a punt return in 2010, as Carroll lay there on the ground — I’m not going to lie: My reaction was “What a jerk.”

Alosi, the Jets strength and conditioning coach, became tabloid fodder. The Jets determined he had instructed players to line up in a sideline wall to impede the opposition. The NFL fined the Jets $100,000. The Jets fined Alosi $25,000. They suspended him the rest of the season.

Jokes ensued; some funny, some not. Many were accompanied by the tune “Day Tripper” by the Beatles.

After Alosi had a particularly nasty altercation while at UCLA with Sean “P. Diddy” Combs five years later, TMZ would report that he had gotten into a fistfight with Darrelle Revis

in 2010 and that a female chiropractor claimed Alosi humiliated her and tried to stop her from treating some Jets players.

An old issue had also surfaced. Maybe you remember Randy Edsall’s first game as UConn coach, a 56-17 defeat. A standout linebacker on that 1999 Hofstra team was Sal Alosi. The following year he’d be named co-winner of the Mayor’s Trophy as best exemplifying sportsmanship on and off the field. In 1999, however, he was charged with third-degree assault for allegedly breaking into a dorm room with several teammates to assault three students. Alosi would plead guilty to a reduced charge of harassment.

Let that marinate before we get back to P. Diddy.

UConn is now on its fourth strength and fitness coach in a little more than a year. Ryan Boatright giving a shout to Travis Illian as the Huskies won the 2014 national championship seems like one hundred years ago. There was an emphasis on flexibility and stamina. There was an emphasis on this and an emphasis on that. Whatever the approach, the result always seemed be that the other team was bigger and stronger.

All the losses and all the beatings left a battered team.

“The healing has been real here,” Hurley said. “It’s hard having a lot of confidence and feeling good about wearing ‘UConn Men’s Basketball’ across your chest when you’re part of the worst couple of seasons in the last 25 years.

“We’ve got to change the culture in terms of the work ethic and commitment level but also, too, we’ve got to get these guys feeling better about themselves,.”

Fitness coaches can grow especially close to athletes. They are at the core of what they accomplish each day. Those who have worked with Alosi kept producing the same word: intense. One told the LA Times that on a scale of 1 to 10, he’s a 12. Another told about getting skewered for joking around.

“We will be educating our team about how to eat, how to sleep, how to hydrate, how to recover — establishing a game plan in all areas that can have a positive impact when it comes to on-court performance,” Alosi said in a statement about his 24hour-a-day wellness program. “There is a much greater commitment than just running and lifting.”

Hurley said the team he inherited got a taste of expectations during the spring, but it was a scaledback, postseason version.

“My season starts with my team in summer workouts,” Hurley said. “We’re about to get after it on Monday at a level that’s probably going to be uncomfortable at times as they adjust to the intensity level. It’s like watching Oregon play football, the pace.”

So how does Alosi fit into all this?

“A guy like Sal and his personality as a coach and the standard he sets for our program … of the five guys we brought in, where we’re at, he was a great, great fit,” Hurley said. “We were a team that wasn’t very physical last year, a little bit soft at times. It doesn’t look to pass the eye test.

“There has been a lot of turnover in our strength and conditioning in our last year and a half. This is a guy who is going to bring a ton of intensity and a toughness to a team that probably lacked it a lot of times.”

That’s got to be music to the ears of UConn fans tired of their Huskies getting pushed around by SMU and Cincinnati, or watching their teams fatigue in the second half. Alosi does have real basketball experience. After leaving the Jets, he worked a year at Bryant. And later he did individual work with pros like Derrick Rose, who swears by him.

But …

“There are some things in his career that he addressed with us when we brought him in,” Hurley said. “It felt comfortable this was a guy that has experienced a lot of things like we all have and has learned a great deal from his experiences.”

There was a lot of “He said, he said” in the P. Diddy affair. Diddy said Alosi tried to get his UCLA teammates to turn on his son, defensive back Justin Combs. After Alosi kicked him out of practice, Diddy confronted Alosi at the UCLA athletic facility. P. Diddy was arrested for attacking Alosi. Charges later were dropped. A bad look all around.

Look, everyone deserves a second chance. New assistant coach Kimani Young was arrested with 96 pounds of marijuana in 1999. He has spent the rest of his life making up for it. Alosi clearly has some anger issues. He may be a perfect fit for what the UConn basketball team need as far as fitness, but it’s on Dan Hurley to make sure he doesn’t do something really stupid.

There are too many marks in his past to call it an accident.

Alosi

JEFF JACOBS