‘No man could have done more for UConn’
Beloved men’s basketball coach and ambassador dies at 91
Donald “Dee” Rowe, who coached UConn men’s basketball into the national spotlight and spent more than 50 years spreading good will and cheer around, and on behalf of the university, died early Sunday in Storrs. He was 91.
“No man could have done more for UConn,” said Jim Calhoun, who was urged by Rowe to take the men’s basketball coaching job in 1986. “Everything, Gampel, the Werth Center, everything UConn built has Dee’s fiber running through it.”
Rowe coached UConn from 1969-77, winning 56.9 percent of his games, leading the Huskies on a memorable run to the NCAA Round of 16 in 1976, and he was an assistant coach with the 1980 U.S. Olympic team that ended up boycotting the Moscow Games, but he is best remembered for his later role, as adviser, fundraiser, mentor to coaches and players and cheerleader for all things UConn.
Never moving from his home near campus, usually dressed as if he’d just stepped from the display window of the finest haberdashery in town, he was a regular visitor to sporting events and practices, and he was beloved.
“More than anything I can think of,” UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma said, “the people in my program over the years that have played here and coached here considered him their personal cheerleader, as I’m sure every other student athlete that’s ever played at Connecticut, every other coach that’s coached at the University of Connecticut considered Dee their personal cheerleader. They could go home at night knowing that no matter what else was happening in the world, how their team was doing, they always knew that Dee was there for them.”
Rowe, born in Worcester, Mass., Jan. 20, 1929, graduated from Worcester Academy and Middlebury College. He once recalled, “I was a screw-up.” But his high coaches had steered him in the right direction, and when he began coaching, he was the type of stayed in his players’ lives forever. For example, Bobby “Snake” Taylor played only one year for Rowe at UConn, but remained a friend for life.
“My father had died when I was 13, and Dee became my father figure,” Taylor said in a 2016 interview with The Courant. “He was the most important male in my life, because he didn’t give up on me when he very easily could have, because I had let him down. And when I had successes, I wanted him to know. I think about him every day.”
In 1955, Rowe returned to Worcester Academy as baseball and basketball coach and athletic director, winning nine New England prep school championships. UConn hired him after a 5-19 season in 1968-69, and he immediately turned the program around, tying for the Yankee Conference title his first year. Before the final game against Rhode Island, three players were arrested and one fell ill, but Rowe employed a slow-down strategy and pulled off a 35-32 win he cherished the rest of his life.
“It was the greatest day of my career,” he said in 2016. “You talk about a team playing a game where they did exactly what the game plan was. It was a chess match.”
To every coach he ever met, Calhoun, Auriemma, Larry Brown, even Dan Hurley, Rowe pushed them to play a 2-3 zone defense, his favorite, and his “stack offense,” which was considered innovative in the early 1970s.
“Once we won a game playing a 2-3 zone for a little bit at the end,” Auriemma said, “and I never heard the end of it.”
Rowe coached the Huskies through turbulent times in the 1970s, assembling his best team, with Tony Hanson, John Thomas, Jim Abromaitis, Randy LaVigne, Jeff Carr, Joe Whelton, Al Weston. They reached the Sweet 16 before losing to Rutgers, and the national recognition helped when the Big East formed in 1979 and invited UConn.
After Rowe retired in 1977, he became an advisor to athletic director John Toner and a fundraiser. He was on the search committees that hired Calhoun and Auriemma, who remembered having lunch with Rowe when he came to interview.
“He just kept talking about ‘this is a special place,’ ” Auriemma said, “‘This is a special place.’ And I thought, man, it didn’t look so special when I walked around campus, but he convinced you it was. I remember going home and telling my wife, Kathy, ‘You’re not going to believe these people that I met on this interview.’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, well tell me about it.’ I couldn’t stop talking about Dee.”
A year later, on a walk around campus, Rowe convinced a somewhat skeptical Calhoun that UConn was the place he could make his mark.
“From the day we talked down by the churches on campus and he told me I needed to accept the job,” Calhoun said, “he never told me anything but the truth, what I could do. And there was never a hint of ego in it about him. He was always my greatest booster, PR man. He was confidant, mentor, consultant. He just meant so much to so many people.”
As Calhoun and Auriemma were winning championships, and other programs rose, Rowe was a constant companion for coaches. Baseball remained a passion, and he was in the bleachers for most home games.
“Every Husky knows Dee Rowe as the chief ambassador of UConn nation,” coach Jim Penders said. “I know him as an original mentor and great friend. I, like so many others, am a better person for knowing his love for his family, for those he coached and for those he inspired. His immensely positive impact will remain forever.”
UConn football coach Randy Edsall heard from Rowe frequently, too.
“Coach Rowe would come by my office every Friday,” Edsall said, “or call if he couldn’t make it in person, to say good luck to me and the coaches for our Saturday game. He always had just the right words for every moment.”
Rowe was known almost everywhere, and quickly made friends where he wasn’t. When Dave Gavitt, Big East commissioner, coached the Olympic Team, he invited Rowe and Larry Brown to be his assistants, but the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games. In 2012, Rowe accompanied Auriemma and the U.S. women’s team to London.
“And by the time the two weeks was over,” Auriemma said, “he knew everybody over there, he knew everybody in the USA Basketball community, they all knew him, and it was like he was part of the travel party, not just the guest.”
Said Calhoun, “Everywhere I’d go, people would ask, ‘How’s Dee, How’s Dee.’ ” That tells you more about him than anyone.”
Rowe met his wife, Ginny, at Middlebury College, spotting her from his window as she walked past his dorm and saying, “I’m going to marry that woman.” They were married 64 years, with seven children and 17 grandchildren, before Ginny died in 2018.
“Dee is one of God’s children, and everything flows from that,” basketball Hall of Famer Bob Cousy, a lifelong friend, told The Courant in 2016. “And we see so little of that in our society. His entire life, he has reached out to assist others. He is as saintly as any friend I’ve ever had.”
He was also like a grandfather to the UConn women’s basketball team. On his 88th birthday, they had a cake and a party hat for him at practice and he danced around to their music.
“You know what cool is?” Auriemma said. “Cool is a state of being. It’s something that surrounds you. And Dee was really cool.”
In 2017, Rowe received the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Naismith Basketball
Hall of Fame. Almost to the end, Rowe would make it to his office at Gampel Pavilion, where he’d work the phone, talking to former players and other old friends. He loved to tell stories, and he spoke at countless events to raise money for anyone who needed him.
“UConn nation is grieving the loss of an icon,” AD David Benedict said. “As a coach, mentor, and most importantly a friend to so many, Dee has touched many of us in so many ways. I feel totally inadequate to be able to fully express what Dee meant to the University of Connecticut. But Dee will be forever woven into the fabric and a part of who we are and what we stand for. Over the course of a lifetime, we are all blessed to come into contact with people that leave an indelible imprint on your life. Coach Rowe will forever impact my life, and I can only hope to continue to lead this athletics department at UConn in a way that would make him proud. There’ll never be another ambassador for the University of Connecticut like Dee Rowe. There just won’t be.”
Rowe fought off cancer several times in his 80s, but his health had been failing in recent months, and he died at home Sunday, surrounded by family. Memorial details will be announced at a later date.
“It’s just such a cruel twist of fate that Dee should pass during these times,” Auriemma said. “Because I really don’t think Rentschler Field would be big enough to host an event for Dee, because people would be arriving from around the world, not just Connecticut or New England or the United States.”