Pincince brothers at heart of CT sports scene
New Haven football coach Chris Pincince has two younger brothers.
One is Tom Pincince, the interim athletic director at Central Connecticut.
“Probably the most responsible of the bunch,” Chris said. “I guess you could say he was always the smart guy.”
The other is Jon Pincince, an attorney in Rhode Island and an avid runner of extreme distances — 74 miles in 19 hours on his birthday last summer, for example.
“Always the active one,” Chris said. “He has a love for getting outdoors and doing crazy things to his body.”
The Pincinces were a big deal in 1990s Woonsocket, R.I., three sons following the footsteps of their father, Roger, in ways that decorated a room of the family home with rows of trophies.
Chris, dry and self-deprecating, said, “Woonsocket isn’t exactly a thriving metropolis.”
Roger, proud dad, said, “Well, it’s one of the biggest cities in Rhode Island.”
All three boys played baseball, basketball and football and, like Roger in the 1960’s, all were starting quarterbacks at Woonsocket High. Chris, Tom and Jon each were also honored as student-athlete of the year at WHS before setting out on education and career paths that have landed two of them at the heart of the college sports scene in Connecticut.
Chris, 49, has been coach at New Haven, where he previously worked two stints as an assistant, since February 2014. Tom, 46, worked in athletic communications at Fairfield, New Haven and Hartford before being hired to run communications at CCSU in 2002. He was named Central’s interim AD in December 2019.
“Their careers make a lot of sense to me, based on their athletic interests and based on what I know of them as people,” said Jon, 44. “I think what they’re doing fits both of their personalities very well.”
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
Chris is 42-23 in six seasons, leading the Chargers to the second round of the Division II NCAA playoffs in 2018. New Haven was 9-3 that season, 7-3 in 2019, and skipped last season due to the pandemic. The Chargers open the 2021 season Sept. 4 with a Northeast-10 game at home against Franklin Pierce.
“By the time we line up it will be about 21 months from the last time we actually played,” Chris said in
June. “We’ve been on and off with small groups to lift and practice, guys coming and going due to the virus, not unlike most programs out there in most sports. It’s been unique, that’s for sure. I think we’re in a good spot but I actually have no idea what we’re going to look like.”
Tom has had his own issues to navigate at Central, where he oversees 16 sports. He was promoted to interim AD — from assistant athletic director for communication and media services — three months before the pandemic hit. He’s been on the job with the interim tag for 18 months.
“I’m happy that I have the opportunity to sit in this chair today,” Tom said. “I’ve done my best to serve our student-athletes and coaches in the way I know how. Is it the same as other AD’s? Probably not. But my door is open for anybody to come in and discuss what happens here on a daily basis and I know I have done the best I can in this spot. If that leads to me being here permanently, great. If not, I can hold my head high knowing I’ve done the best I can and what’s best for our studentathletes and, to me, that’s what it’s all about.”
Tom’s office has been in the same building for nearly 20 years and he has lived in West Hartford all along, raising three daughters — Isabella, 17, Sophia, 15, and Lucy, 12 — with his wife, Kyle.
Until becoming a head coach at New Haven, Chris lived the nomadic life of long recruiting trips and long hours as an assistant coach, working twice at New Haven (1995-96, 199901), as well as at Fairfield (1997-98), Brown (2002), Ursinus (2003), Holy Cross (2004-07), Rhode Island (2008-10) and Elon (201013). He and Tom were roommates at Fairfield, where Tom worked after college in 1997.
Chris married Jennifer in 1999, while working at New Haven. The couple has three children. Their oldest, Zack, is entering his senior year as a baseball player at UNH. Owen, also a baseball player, is entering his senior year at North Haven High. Emma is entering seventh grade.
“It takes a village to raise a family in the athletic world, it really does,” Chris said. “My oldest son had lived in four states before he was four years old. Ultimately, at the end, he’s ending up graduating from a school where he was born. He was born at Yale-New haven hospital 21 years ago, graduated from North Haven, graduating from New Haven. Came full circle.”
Jon has the most interesting stories about family and athletics.
74 MILES IN 19 HOURS
Early in the morning of June 25, 2020 — his 43rd birthday — Jon set out on an 80-mile course from Northern Rhode Island, near the Massachusetts border, with the goal of finishing on the beach at the southern end of the state.
There were 11 segments with 10 checkpoints, where he would rest a few minutes, change clothes or shoes, hydrate, snack. Chris ran the second leg with Jon, about 10 miles. Jon ran for about 17 of the next 19 hours. With six miles to go, his wife Christine, a nurse practitioner, and Roger Pincince stepped in, urging him to stop.
“I was not in very good shape by that point,” Jon said. “I was having trouble staying on my feet, wasn’t keeping any food down. It was dark again and I was scheduled to go back into the woods, and the person scheduled to do the last leg with me was my daughter, Molly, who probably couldn’t carry me out of there if she had to.”
Jon was later hospitalized for a day for observation and rehydration. He has a 50-mile run planned for November, and he’ll attempt to complete the 80-mile course again next spring or summer.
Jon’s hobby has long been long-distance running. He has run several marathons. He had run over 30 miles. Eighty sounded ambitious but doable, and extreme enough to garner interest to support a cause. He linked up with Providence-based Nonviolence Institute, having been familiar with their work for years, and raised over $13,000. About two dozen volunteers — mostly family members — helped him on the day of the run.
“Think back to what we were going through in the spring of 2020 and the onset of the pandemic, everybody being locked down and anything, everywhere, being canceled,” Jon said. “The running community, like every community, saw [events] come to a stop. I happened to be doing a lot of miles at the time, and with more time on my hands I was running more. I wanted to do something that would maybe let people think about something else for a while.
“Organizations like [the Nonviolence Institute] that rely on events for their funds, like dinners and golf tournaments, they weren’t happening last year. It was a way to combine what I wanted to do running-wise with something that could actually do a bit of good.”
HUGE TEAM
Chris was a quarterback at Boston University. Tom was also a quarterback — and a babysitter — at Stonehill College.
By the time Jon enrolled at Stonehill as a freshman in 1999, when Tom was a junior, Jon’s wife-to-be was pregnant with their first child. Jon became a father at 18, with Christine giving birth to Becky, now 25, the first of their four children together (Jack, 22, Molly, 20, Charlie, 14).
“We both still had years and years of education ahead of us, so we relied a lot early on our immediate family,” Jon said. “Some days I would bring (Molly) to campus with me and either my friends, or Thomas and his friends, would baby sit her while I went to class. So she got an early education on college life.”
The Pincince family has always been a huge team.
“I’m really proud of what they do,” Chris said. “Most important, they’re awesome around their wives and their kids and their families.”
The Pincince boys battled fiercely on the family Ping Pong table during any down time in lives on the go. Roger coached all the kids in youth sports and attended most of their games. So did the Pincinces’ mother, Colette, Roger’s wife of 51 years next month. They began dating when Roger was a senior, and Colette a junior, at Woonsocket High.
Roger worked as a tax auditor, spending most days driving around Rhode Island.
“I think his hours were 7:30 to 4:30, but it didn’t matter,” Chris said. “If we were playing a game in the state of Rhode Island that started at 3:15, somehow he’d be standing on the sideline. He always had it worked out that, wherever he was working on the road, the day ended up wherever we were playing baseball, basketball or football.”
Chris graduated from Woonsocket High in 1990, Tom in 1993, Jon in 1995.
“I really looked up to my older brother,” Tom said. “He was really good — at everything. It was good to be his younger brother, but it was hard to be his younger brother. There were expectations to be really good.”
At B.U., Chris was teammates with Pete Rossomando, who coached New Haven in 2009-13 before leaving to become coach at CCSU. Chris knew he wanted to become a coach at a young age.
“Chris was always very focused on football and just had a different feeling for it than he did anything else,” Jon said. “Tom has been an organizer, and I don’t know if this comes from being a middle child, a mediator.”
Roger, 73, still plays golf several times a week and takes longer trips each year — South Carolina and Vermont, recently. He works part-time as a limo driver, shuttles to T.F. Green Airport in Warwick and Logan in Boston. He also plays in two softball leagues.
“We have some guys who are 80 years old, and we play doubleheaders every Sunday,” said Roger, who pitches and plays first base. “You have to have about 20 guys on the team, because somebody gets hurt every Sunday. … One of the guys used be really good, allservice as a shortstop. He’s 85 years old and he’s still playing. He’s not bad. We moved him from shortstop to second base because he doesn’t move quite as well as he used to.”
Roger and Colette now live in Cumberland, R.I., and still attend just about every game a Pincince is involved in. They chase 10 grandchildren, who are or were heavily involved in sports, around New England. They attend many New Haven and CCSU football games.
“We’ve always had this built in way of being together as a family,” said Jon, who lives in Cranston, R.I. “We’d see each other at sporting events so often, so it’s never been necessary to plan other get togethers, a dinner, a party. But for the longest time, those things weren’t happening (during the pandemic). So it makes you realize how dependent we were on those events.”
New Haven’s opener is Sept. 4 against Franklin Pierce. The Chargers play at Stonehill — Tom’s and Jon’s alma mater — Oct. 23. Tom hasn’t been able to attend many UNH football games lately, but these events are Pincince reunions — just like countless youth swim meets, softball tournaments and baseball tournaments in New England.
“We make it a family affair,” Roger said. “We found last year to be difficult. We were kind of stuck at home, like everybody else, bored. Hopefully we won’t get back to that.”