RIGHT ON Q.
Pecora has Quinnipiac on cusp of NCAA tourney after nearly being out of basketball
AYEAR ago, the perch was exactly the same, but the view couldn’t have been more different.
A year ago, Tom Pecora would sit at the very top of Quinnipiac’s M&T Bank Arena and he would watch the Bobcats practice. He’d jot down observations, scribble a few thoughts, make a few suggestions filtered through eyes that coached basketball 40 years.
Sometimes those ideas would be used. Often they’d be ignored. Slowly, Pecora began to realize: Maybe this is what the end of the coaching road looks like. He’d been taken off the road by coach Baker Dunleavy. Then he’d been taken off the bench. This was his office now: the periphery. Hanging on.
He figured: Maybe it’s time to stop hanging on.
“I figured,” he said, “maybe I could be happy caddying and bartending for a few years until I was ready to retire for real.”
A year later, he is back at the top of the arena, and he’s marveling at 9:15 a.m. that some of his players are already down on the gym’s floor, an hour before practice. Up by the M&T ceiling there will soon hang a banner celebrating Quinnipiac’s first regular-season men’s basketball title in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.
“These kids bought in right away, they kept buying in, and as a coach there’s nothing more in this life you could ask for,” Pecora said. “It’s been an incredible thing to be a part of.”
Quinnipiac is 23-8, has won 15 of its 20 league games and will have the top seed entering the MAAC Tournament on Wednesday at Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. The Bobcats are three wins away from their first NCAA Tournament. Their coach is also in search of his. And he understands, better than most, just how precious an opportunity this is.
“If you believe in these things,” he said, “maybe someone was looking out, you know?”
He’d never been fired before. Not as a coach, which he’d been doing since Bob McKillop hired him at Long Island Lutheran in 1984. Not moving furniture across the country in his early 20s. Not when he worked the counter at Pellegrini’s Deli when he was 16.
“I was lost,” Pecora said. “If you’ve never been fired before, it hits you and you wonder about a lot of things. You wonder if you’ll ever get a chance to make it back again.”
Pecora had been axed at Fordham in 2015 on the precipice of seeing a massive rebuilding job bear fruit. He’d recruited future
NBA player Eric Paschall, stacked terrific recruiting classes, but the Fordham suits grew weary of waiting after 106 losses in five years. The dismissal hit him hard. He tried broadcasting for a bit.
Then Dunleavy offered him a lifeline back into the business. Just 34, he and Pecora shared a pedigree as former Jay Wright assistants — Pecora at Hofstra, Dunleavy at Villanova. The agreement seemed perfect: Pecora would be Dunleavy’s Don Zimmer, an experienced eye on the bench, while still maintaining his recruiting touch.
But as the years passed, the coach wanted to shake up his staff. He retained Pecora but slowly phased him out, ultimately all the way to the top row of the gym. Pecora dallied with a job at Bridgeport. And then realized: It ends for everyone at some point.
“I wasn’t happy,” he said. “But I was at peace.”
Then, on April 12, Pecora received a call. It was Quinnipiac athletic director Greg Amodio.
“Let’s have a beer,” Amodio said. Dunleavy had told Amodio that morning he was returning to Villanova to be on Kyle Neptune’s staff. That was at 9 o’clock. By 5, the job was Pecora’s.
“Sometimes,” Amodio said, “the best thing you can do in a situation like that is not overthink it. We had the right guy already in the building.”
Monday, Amodio interrupted the Bobcats’ practice so he could deliver some news: Pecora had been named MAAC coach of the year. The players’ jubilant reaction solidified what Amodio already knew: The right guy really had been the right guy. Last month, Pecora got a four-year extension.
Now, they get ready for A.C., and hope for a little something beyond. They go fueled by Matt Balanc, the league’s player of the year, who Pecora thinks might be responsible for both of them winning their awards.
“He’s harder on his teammates than I could ever be,” Pecora said. “And when you have a guy like that on the floor it makes my job pretty simple. Don’t get in the way.”
And enjoy the view.