New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Ex-Husky Austrie rooted in Fairfield County
STAMFORD — College basketball took Craig Austrie all over the country and professional basketball could have taken him all over the world had he followed his days at UConn by choosing an overseas career in 2009.
But he’s long been rooted, personally and professionally, in Fairfield County. He married his college love, Heather, another basketball lifer from that corner of the state, in 2012. A typical day begins with Austrie leaving their Fairfield home, dropping off their two daughters at school, heading to his Stamford place of business and returning in time to tuck those kids in.
Austrie, one of Jim Calhoun’s point guards in the up-and-down run of 2005-09, gets around in a monster white pickup truck that fits both his family’s larger-thanlife personality and the blue collar work ethic of his father, Vincent, who years ago would run a construction business by day in Stamford and, by night, drive 100 miles to rebound for an hour as his son put up extra shots in an otherwise empty Gampel Pavilion.
Basketball continues as a main thread to a full life for Austrie, 34, who runs Craig Austrie Basketball IQ Skills, training youth players of all ages in a space he rents on Largo Drive. He spent about a month with the Springfield Armor of the NBA’s developmental league in 2009, but soon went about using the sport as a vehicle to establish himself in other ways at the heart of a community he’s called home since birth and probably always will.
“I got released, came back and started training a few kids,” Austrie said last week, sitting beside his wife in the gym. “One turned into two, two turned into
three and the next thing you know I had a program and could actually make a career out of it. Who would have thought I’d still be in basketball? But there’s nothing better than being able to pass my knowledge around to the younger generation, and they’ve gravitated to my style of play and my knowledge of the game. I try to build the entire program around being smart and having a high IQ. Being able to do that has been really fun.”
Austrie was the calm and cool for some charismatic — and very good — teams. The Huskies were upset by George Mason in the Elite Eight and finished 30-4 when he was a freshman in 2005-06, when he started as Marcus Williams served a firstsemester suspension. He started 23 games as a senior — many early with Stanley Robinson taking time off, many late with Jerome Dyson injured — on the 2008-09 team that lost to Michigan State the Final Four in Detroit and finished 31-5.
He finished his college career with averages of
20.9 minutes, six points and 2.2 assists, playing 131 games, starting 69, one of the top highlights being his length-of-the-court drive for an overtime buzzer-beater to defeat South Florida in 2007-08 to push the Huskies winning streak to nine.
While a beard with some grays now covers part of his baby face, Austrie is still largely the same guy — though leading elementary kids and high school players through hour-long workouts has brought a new dynamic to his personality.
His wife? She’s always been high-octane in every pursuit (basketball and otherwise) and every conversation, and she still is.
“Type A and super energized,” she said.
Heather Austrie, then Heather Coombs, was one of three triplets — with sisters Lauren and Ashley — who led Trumbull High to an FCIAC championship as seniors in 2005, when Craig Austrie led Trinity-Catholic to a second state championship and was named Connecticut Gatorade Player of the Year while averaging 22.5 points, 5.1 assists, 4.3 rebounds and 3.1 steals.
Craig went off to UConn after initially planning to attend UMass and Heather, joined by her sisters, played basketball at Division I Fairleigh Dickinson for a season before transferring to Southern Connecticut. Heather was part of the 2007 team that won the NCAA Division II national champion. Lauren and Ashley played volleyball at Southern.
Craig and Heather were aware of each other in high school, began chatting over Facebook as college freshmen and soon started seeing each other. Their first date took place at FDU. Craig first went home to do laundry in Stamford, then made his way to Teaneck, N.J., and they played 1-on-1 basketball outside Heather’s dorm.
They spent many weekends together, when basketball schedules would allow. Heather, having given up basketball for student teaching as a senior, was at many 2008-09 UConn home games and in attendance that Saturday night at Ford Field when Craig’s career came to a close. By then, they were engaged to be married.
Today, Heather is doing “everything I didn’t study in college.”
She laughed. Heather left teaching a few years ago and started Heather Austrie Management. Her professional life revolves around building the social media profiles and presence of various businesses, from restaurants to educational non-profits to plastic surgeons and beyond. She used to train Craig’s female clients but now works behind the scenes on everything organizational.
Years ago, the Austries would drive around Fairfield County placing flyers advertising Craig’s services on car windshields, blast emails to basketball programs within driving distancing, exhaust every basketball connection, stop by area schools to introduce themselves to coaches. Today, the approach is different.
“It’s our social media presence that has propelled us to the next level and a lot of it has to do with Heather because she has an expertise in that and knows how to get out to the correct people,” said Craig, who studied political science at UConn and started his training business with a $50 loan from his father to cover insurance. “She helped me start my page. Once it got going, it started taking off. I’ve always been business oriented. It was instilled in me. And being at UConn, with Coach Calhoun and how he made the program, all that stuff was being soaked in, and it really wasn’t that difficult to get going. As long as I was organized — and my wife is here to help — it was pretty easy to get going.”
The couple’s outreach is enormous. Heather has 1.1 million TikTok followers, Craig 442,000. Craig has
222,100 Instagram followers, Heather 81,800. Together, they receive up to 100 random social media messages a day from all over the world, responses to basketball moves posted by Craig and to snapshots of life and humor posted by Heather.
One of Heather’s pinned TikToks: “When people ask me why I don’t want no more kids, and they ask me which one was your hardest one? Which one is it? My mother-inlaw’s. My mother-in-law’s kid is the hardest one.”
Craig is a helper, though. He contributes to Heather’s business by editing video and developing marketing concepts.
If anyone has mastered the balance of work and play, it’s the Austries. It seems like there’s a camera rolling to capture their every move, and that of their daughters. Payton, 7, and Kali, 6, are already basketball fanatics.
“I’m the better shooter,” Heather said. “I will beat him shooting any day. But I pray our kids get his handle.”
Heather’s sisters both live in Trumbull. Lauren married a former college baseball player and they have two children. Ashley married a former college wrestler and they have one. Craig has two younger sisters — Kelly, who was the basketball student manager at UConn in 201517, and Ajha, currently a UConn student.
Austrie’s father and mother, Christine, still live in Stamford. He’s always driving this way and that in his pickup or Heather’s white Lexus, for the next family gathering. He speaks regularly to UConn coach Dan Hurley and Taliek Brown, another Huskies former point guard who is now the program’s director of player development. He also keeps in touch with Doug Wiggins, who trains youth players in the Hartford area, and a couple other former UConn teammates.
“Playing with some of the players I played with and being on some of the top teams in the country, you look back and it’s remarkable,” he said. “You don’t appreciate it when you’re there. But looking back years later, it’s like, ‘Man, I really accomplished things a lot of people can’t say they accomplished — making the Final Four, playing in the six-overtime game, hitting the game-winning shot, being able to play with NBA players. It’s something I really cherish and, hopefully, one day I can tell my kids and grandkids about what I did.”