NOW IT’S OFFICIAL
Hall Of Famer Officially Signs On At St. Joseph
Jim Calhoun is the University Of St. Joseph men’s basketball coach.
The last of the ifs, ands and buts were removed on Tuesday afternoon. Jim Calhoun is no longer a consultant, he's a basketball coach again.
“[Coaching] is clearly feeding some- thing I need,” Calhoun told The Courant recently. “I'm addicted. I'm addicted to basketball. I'm addicted to kids. There was a void in my life, a terrible void.”
Calhoun signed his contract to coach the new men's program at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, a start-up Division III program. The Blue Jays, anticipating their small gym on campus will be overwhelmed by the crowd and media, will play their first game at Trinity College on Nov. 9 against William Paterson at 7 p.m.
The signing ceremony was staged in the lobby of the O'Connell Center on Tuesday afternoon. However, the decisions and contractual maneuvering needed to make it official were in place more than a month ago.
Calhoun, 76, has 873 victories, 13th in college basketball history, at Northeastern and UConn, where he won NCAA championships in 1999, 2004 and 2011, and has been a Hall of Famer
since 2005. He retired from UConn in September 2012, and worked as an analyst at ESPN, but the itch to coach again began to get him. When St. Joseph athletic director Bill Cardarelli sought Calhoun’s advice on starting a program, the conversation veered in an unexpected direction — Calhoun becoming interested in doing the job himself.
Last fall, he joined the school as a consultant and Glen Miller, a longtime assistant at UConn, came on board as director of operations and the two began scouring area high schools and prep schools for talent. Calhoun left no doubt he intended to coach. By April, they had assembled a roster and Calhoun, who still held a full-time advisory position at UConn, began talks to flip roles.
Going forward, the plan has been for him to be a full-time employee at St. Joseph with a part-time role at UConn. Miller will be his assistant.
“From the first day we started working with Coach,” school president Rhona Free said in a statement, “it’s been momentous for all of us – especially our current student-athletes. In terms of recruiting all students, not just student-athletes, he has had what we call the ‘Calhoun Effect,’ and we all enjoyed his talk where he emphasized that for all students, academics are the top priority.”
As the school transitioned from all-female to co-ed, the enrollment of new students, male and female, exceeded all expectations.