Cole reminds Hurley Sr. of Dan
When RJ Cole was a three-year starter for Bob Hurley Sr. at now-defunct St. Anthony High in Jersey City, N.J., he reminded Hurley of someone with whom the Hall of Fame high school coach was quite familiar.
“I would draw a lot of similarities with the way he played for me with the way Dan played for me at St. Anthony’s,” Hurley Sr. said by phone on Wednesday, referring to his youngest son. “They’re both left-handed, they’re probably the two highest-scoring seniors we had the last 25 years at the school.”
Dan Hurley, of course, just finished his first season as UConn’s head coach, and he’ll be coaching Cole for the next three seasons in Storrs. Cole, a transfer from Howard University, committed to the Huskies on Tuesday night. He’ll have to sit out next season, but will have two years of eligibility at UConn.
“He’s a terrific point
guard,” Hurley Sr. said of Cole. “As a player, he’s really physically filled out. He’s strong now, he can shoot it, he can facilitate and get guys shots. He can be a physical, on-the-ball defender, and he really gets to the free throw line.”
Cole put up phenomenal numbers in his two years at Howard, averaging 23.7 points and 6.1 assists per game as a freshman and
21.4 points and 6.4 dimes this past season as a sophomore. He shot 81.9 percent from the foul line this season and 38.9 percent from 3-point range.
Cole, the MEAC Rookie of the Year in 2017-18 and the league’s player of the year this past season, will now step up considerably in competition level.
“Dan’s influence on him will be very good,” Bob Sr. predicted. “He’s a point guard who can score, they have a lot of common ground. They’ll probably both complain they had me as a coach.”
That doesn’t seem likely. Cole said on Tuesday night that Hurley Sr. was an “amazing influence” on him in his three years at St. Anthony’s.
Cole comes from good basketball stock. His father, Rob, was a big scorer at Orange (N.J.) High and later at LIU-Brooklyn, averaging 18 points per game as a junior and 18.2 per contest as a senior in
1982-83. He and former St. Peter’s star Shelton Gibbs coached RJ on an AAU team from the time RJ was about 9 years old up until right before high school.
RJ originally went to a public high school in Newark while still playing AAU for his dad.
“His dad came up to me at the end of his freshman year and said, ‘I’ve got to become dad now. You’ve got to coach this kid,’ ” Hurley Sr. recalled.
Cole joined a bunch of his friends who were a year ahead of him at St. Anthony’s, including Jagan Mosely and Shyquan Gibbs, who are both rising seniors at Georgetown and NJIT, respectively, and with whom Cole remains close. Cole, who had always played up in age in AAU, jumped right into the St. Anthony starting lineup. But it was his junior year when he really emerged, leading the team to a 32-0 record, a state championship and a No. 4 national ranking.
“He took on all the responsibilities of a point guard,” Hurley Sr. recalled. “He guarded, he scored, he played really well.”
As a senior, Cole was one of the only seniors on the team, routinely going up against postgrad teams with fifth- or sixth-year players and finding ways to win.
Through it all, however, Cole wasn’t high on the recruiting radar. He had interest from the Patriot League and the MAAC, and some Atlantic-10 schools (led by St. Bonaventure but also including Rhode Island, coached at the time by Dan Hurley) jumped in during his senior year.
Still, Hurley Sr. believed Cole was severely underrecruited.
“We were confused by it,” the Hall of Fame coach noted. “So much of their high school recruiting is during the AAU season, and he was on an AAU team with a bunch of guys who were ball-dominant. He didn’t get the chance to be the primary ballhandler. All of a sudden, he looks like a 6-1 scorer, not a 6-1 point guard.”
Cole, St. Anthony’s salutatorian with a 4.0 gradepoint average, opted for the academic challenge of Howard, where he’d also be able to establish lifelong connections. It was a wise choice.
“He was probably the most well-known athlete on campus in the two years he was there,” Hurley Sr. noted.
Now, Cole will jump up to the bigger and better competition of the American Athletic Conference.
“I felt like it was time for me to move on,” he said on Tuesday night.
And he’ll be under the tutelage of a left-handed, former high-scoring point guard who also was once coached by Bob Hurley Sr.