Episode 124: Hoop Dreams
Coach Tom Moore is entering his 20th season (during two stints) on the UConn men’s basketball coach staff and has been part of four national championships with the Huskies. He has been involved in college basketball at every level – a head coach in Division I and III and an assistant coach in Division I and II. He talks to us about the similarities, and differences, between Dan Hurley and Jim Calhoun and what it is like coaching in the age of NIL and the transfer portal. Moore also looks back on his background growing up in Central Massachusetts and how being a sports writer was his original calling in college.
Link to Episode 124 at Podbean
Transcript
Mike: Well, hello everybody out there in UConn Country. This is Mike Enright from University Communications along with Izzy Harris, also from University Communications. And we have an exciting episode, Izzy, today of the UConn 360 podcast.
Izzy: We sure do. It’s almost that time of year, Mike.
Mike: It’s almost that time of year, UConn basketball season, when everybody just gets, there’s a little more excitement around campus, there’s a little more pep around campus.
And we’re really lucky to have somebody today as our guest on the podcast who’s been a special part of UConn men’s basketball for a long, long time. Tom Moore is the assistant coach on Dan Hurley’s staff, one of the assistant coaches. Hard to believe he’s entering his 20th year as part of the UConn men’s basketball program.
He’s been part of four national championship staffs, two under Jim Calhoun and two under Dan Hurley. I’m going to ask him a little bit about what are the differences and what are the similarities between those two coaches. He was here from 1994 to 2007 and returned in 2018, when Coach Hurley took over the reins of the program.
He’s been a part of college basketball at every level, head coach in Division I and III. an assistant in Division I and II. He’s coached a bunch of guys that have gone on to the to the NBA and play professionally all over the world. So Tom, welcome to the podcast.
Tom: My pleasure. Great being here, Mike and Izzy.
Mike: So you’re BU graduate. And if I recall, you were a journalism major. So how does a journalism major from BU wind up being part of this national championship program? Tell us a little bit about your high school career and how you’re involved in basketball during your college years.
Tom: Well, how long do we have for the podcast?
Mike: We can go as long as, there’s no limit. And Izzy’s a great editor, too.
Izzy: I am.
Tom: Boy, it’s a long story, I think like most people’s. Life stories, right? In the past that we choose in the past that we seem to be pushed on. I was a kid growing up in a small town, Millbury, Mass., played every sport all year round with all the kids in the neighborhood.
Took a liking to basketball more than the others, probably around fifth or sixth grade and couldn’t get enough of it, loved it. Came to the reality when I was about 14 or 15 that I was not going to be on the Boston Celtics, much to my chagrin, my parents chagrin. And so you start thinking in high school, like, what do you want to do?
And why do you, you know, why am I going to, what college am I going to pick and why am I going to pick it? And I thought at the time, like sports was so big, a part of my life. And if you, you know, this Mike really well, that like sports reporting was a noble profession in the late seventies and early eighties.
Mike: The great Boston Globe staff.
Tom: Oh my word.
Mike: Yeah. It was like an all star team.
Tom: Yes. It was, it was like, you know, no internet, no phones. And yet in. Milbury, we had the Worcester Telegram in the morning, and we had the Evening Gazette in the afternoon. And I’m saying, what can I do around sports now that I know I’m not going to be playing them?
And I figured I’d write about them. I go with a cool job, you get to go to games, you, you know, and then write a story about the games. And so I picked Boston University because of their great journalism program. I threw myself into journalism my first three years. School paper. It’s called, it was called the Daily Free Press.
Don Van Notta was the editor of the Daily Free Press back then, who’s gone on to really great things at ESPN as a, and as an investigative reporter and just was around it worked in the sports information office. And so I get to my end of my junior year and my friends who were seniors are graduating At their graduation, I’m watching them walk across the stage at 700 Commonwealth Ave. at BU and they move their tassels over and I’m sitting there like a year from now. That’s what I’m doing. I’m graduating. And I’m like Do I really want to do this? You know, after three years and I started to say I’m going to be in the Lynn Daily Item. I’m going to be like taking scores of Lynn Classical vs. English or writing obituaries or something.
And I’m like, it just like, it wasn’t there for me. And I started to sort of pivot. And I said, what, what would really excite me? And I had a great relationship with the BU basketball team from just covering them doing stats. I knew. Coach Mike Jarvis fairly well. He was the head coach at the time. But I knew Karl Hobbs and Billy Herrion were the two assistants at the time.
Mike: Wow, that’s quite a staff.
Tom: Exactly. And I went to them. Billy was from Oxford and I’m from Millbury, so they’re both Central Mass towns. And I just was like, hey, is there any way that somebody who didn’t play but loved it could ever go into college coaching with a journalism degree and they were great.
Billy was great. Karl was great and they even had me sit with Coach Jarvis. He was great They were like, yeah, you know You’ll you won’t start as high up as guys who’ve played Division I because they’re gonna have a lot more contacts. They are gonna have coaches that will that will you know, sort of grant them opportunities right away. But like, they said to work camps and network and start At the Division III level and you know and make your way and that sort of triggered it I went from there and got a job at Worcester State College as an assistant coach 1987-88, I made $875 for the year, for that season, $875.
I split a $1,750 stipend with another guy, so I had to be a long term sub in the Worcester Public School systems, I made, I think, 90 a day doing that, and then at 2 o’clock, I’d drive over from my job over to Worcester State. But I loved it. I was coaching college basketball, and I was recruiting. I was on the floor for practice.
I was doing scouting reports. And then my second year, to make it even better, now I’ve got to try to move up. Right, because I’m a Division III assistant, so my second year I’m sending letters and phone calls out to anywhere I can go to try to get to the Division II or Division I levels, like a GA or something.
And I get nothing. I just get denied everywhere. But Assumption College, in Worcester, the guy says, we’re all out of positions, but I’ll take you as a volunteer if you want. You could really help us. I said, yeah, I’m going to do this because I’m going to go from Division III to Division II. So in my chosen field, after two years of being on the workforce, I made $875 total.
Because $875 year one, zero in year two. But I kept the public school teaching job. And. Then I got the head coaching job at Worcester State in my third year. And there’s another funny story about that. I was one of three finalists for the head coaching job. I’m 24, right, so I’m like, I’m a long shot, because I don’t have any head coaching experience.
Rhey interview the three of us, they offer it to another guy. He goes, I need to sleep on it. He comes back the next day and tells them I don’t want it. So now it’s me and another guy. They offer it to the other guy. So I’m clearly, I’m clearly three of three, right? He says the same thing. I got to talk to my wife and give me a couple days because this was only a part, still a part, time head coaching job was a part time job.
He turns it down. So they turn to me, you know, and I was the head coach there for five years before I got my opportunity in 1994 at UConn.
Izzy: Well, not playing for the Boston Celtics is a tough pill to swallow for sure, but it seems like everything turned out just fine for you.
Tom: You know, Izzy, I was 14, right? So had I been on the Boston Celtics, right? This was 1979. Bird, I think, got there right around 80 or something, Mike? I would have been, I look at it like I would have been a great, like he was a 3, I would have been a 2.
Mike: You would have fit right in.
Tom: Perfect, right? I think a lot of young people, I went through with my daughters, I have daughters now 27, 25, 22. All young people as they go through life at that age, there’s so many things coming at them that they’re trying to figure out. It’s funny how, which way life takes you.
Izzy: Bringing us back to UConn, I’d love to hear about some of the similarities and differences between Jim Calhoun and Dan Hurley. I mean, it’s gotta be. Two completely different experiences, but also similar in some ways.
Tom: I’ve never met two people that were so different and so alike at the same time. I mean, it’s amazing. Their styles are different. But their core principles, how they’re wired, are almost exactly the same. Like, if you cut them open, their wiring, their DNA, in terms of how they, how they’re wired, how they build their programs and how they coach their programs is exactly the same.
There’s a singularity and purpose that both of them have. And it’s, it’s really interesting is he like I got here in ’94 and it was right around the same time that Dan and coach were similar ages. I think they were both Dan’s 51 now. So he was like 45 when we came here in 2018. Coach was around that same age in ‘94 when I got here.
So I look at it like they were both in the prime of their careers, their coaching careers. They had enough time behind them where they had learned a ton and they still had a ton of energy and fight and fire and determination that was going to serve them well for the next 10 to 20 years. Right? So joining them at the exact same time in their lives has been interesting because Their personal lives are very similar too.
I’ve never met two men who are more locked in on really like their immediate family and their program. Like, and there’s no other things distracting them. They don’t wake up. With other things on their mind, they, they have interests and they have hobbies, but like, it’s not anything that’s at the forefront of their lives or their energies.
It’s they wake up every day fighting for every inch and, and, and every yard that they can get for their programs. And they’re constantly pushing their staffs and their players and their administrations to, to just like to raise the bar, to always get better, to find better ways and invest more money and invest more resources and, and improve what we’re doing and he calls it a championship level standard, like Dan does,
But they’re, they’re different in a sense where I think Dan is in practice on a day in, day out, drill in, drill out situation. Dan is really confrontational and really trying to create chaos in practice like nonstop chaos. The amount of energy he expends to challenge and really push and in practice every day is incredible. And in games, he’s very he’s very supportive of our guys. He’s not a cheerleader because that’s not right the right term. He’s a more of a hype man, he likes to say sometimes, or a corner man for a great boxer. He feels like during games he wants to empower our guys, make them believe that they can do anything. Coach Calhoun was really strict and tough in practice, but a little more measured in practice.
And, but in games, Coach Calhoun would really challenge our guys. Was very very demanding and tough in games. And I saw, I’ve seen both styles work incredibly well. You know, I think at the time, from ‘94 to ‘07, at various times during that time, I was with Coach Calhoun. He was the best college basketball coach in the country and I think Dan is that right now, too, as well.
So, I’ve seen both of those methods, while slightly different, I think. Coming from the same value system and the same core beliefs, I’ve seen both of them work at the highest level. And it’s also ironic, too, that, you know, that when you talk about their personal lives, they have a wife and two boys, and that the boys are almost at the same age as when I got here the first time and with Dan’s guys, Danny and Andrew are, too, as well.
So you’ll get a text from them, or a call from them, you know, at, 10 or 11 p.m. or the first thing and we’ll greet you as a text or something in the morning or a call early in the morning about some aspect of the program that we can improve on, you know, that I can improve on or that I can somehow try to get someone to improve on.
You know, it’s just that fight and, and that, and. That push for excellence is a, is, it sounds trite, but it’s a 365 day a year thing for them. It doesn’t Leave their core being it never strays from their core being
Mike: Tom college athletics has changed a lot since you first got into it and candidly has changed a lot in the last two or three years with the transfer portal and NLI, name image and likeness for listeners who aren’t diehard sports fans. Talk about how that has changed your job and and the way you operate the program and it seems that there’s a certain Wild West right now to the college athletics. Is that going to change? Can that change? And should it change?
Tom: Well, Dan made a point recently at a breakfast where he said no major sports league is operating with as few guardrails as college sports are right now like college football and college basketball. And for the fans out there who aren’t really up to speed with name, image, and likeness, what happened was college athletes could never really benefit financially from their being shown in their college jerseys or using their celebrity. As a college athlete to advertise for people and there was a class action suit that I think was started in 1996 or so with Ed O’Bannon at UCLA over some rights to a video game, his image on a video game.
And it took 20 years to get through the courts where, they finally are allowing people to student athletes to benefit from their, basically get paid for their name and their image and their likeness. What it’s turned into though is sort of a pay for play type of situation because these collectives have, have sort of been formed and you know, it’s a way for, I think sometimes big boosters and donors to contribute to a collective and money gets funneled to athletes and it’s, it’s, it’s sort of giving college football and college basketball a little bit of a pro sports feel that doesn’t seem to be a lot of guardrails right now out there as to how all of this should be governed and controlled.
So I think every coach is all for kids benefiting. Dan’s very much for it. I’m for it. We’d love to see these kids and their families get opportunities to benefit from their hard work and what they’re doing above and beyond just the scholarship. But it is, it has made things a little bit tricky to navigate and it’s brought in different conversations with kids, their families, now kids can have NIL agents too as well.
So, it’s, it’s forced us to try to become as sophisticated as we can be in this new world. Because if you don’t adapt you won’t flourish. So, Coach Calhoun and I talked about this same thing about NIL. You know, and I said, Coach, a lot of people are asking me, like, how do you think you would handle it?
He said, he shared with me, he said, you know, how I’d handle it. He said, I would probably go in my office for a couple hours when it was put in and rant and rave and get it all out of my system for a couple hours. And then I would leave the office and rally everybody up and say, how are we going to be the best at it?
And he’s like, because if you drop me in the middle of an ocean and I’m out there with sharks, I’m going to try to fight the sharks, you know, and like, you got to try to survive. So it’s, we’re evolving and we’re doing I think we’re doing a great job like we do everything at the University of Connecticut in partnership with our athletic department, in partnership with our alumni office, in partnership with some great, great, great people who’ve stepped forward to form our collectives.
We’re trying to do as, as good a job as anyone in the country and I think we’re, we’re succeeding at that. My role has changed in particular on this staff quite a bit because I’m doing a lot more of the day to day general manager type duties, which, which is, is heavily tethered to the NIL and, and fundraising.
So it’s exciting for me. It’s a new thing for me. I think it fits my experience right now. As you mentioned, Mike, I have 20 years here, so I know so many of the influential boosters and donors and people who’ve been close to the program for all these years. so much. We also have two other excellent, outstanding assistant coaches and Kimani Young and Luke Murray.
And what Dan has decided to do is have me take on a lot of these administrative type of details and duties. And it allows Kimani and Luke to focus a lot more on sort of the traditional assistant coaching duties. So they’re doing a ton of the recruiting and the scouting and the, and the practice planning.
And they’re doing excellent obviously as the proof is in the pudding. But I’m excited. It’s a new opportunity for me and for our basketball program. And it’s just another thing is to quote Coach Calhoun that you’re trying to, you’re trying to dominate, you’re trying to be really good at.
Izzy: So, not to toot our own horn here, but UConn has had some tremendous success in athletics since you’ve came here. Basketball, men’s, women’s, sports like field hockey, baseball, soccer. Why do you think UConn is able to succeed at the level that we do for so many years and for so many sports?
TOM: I think it’s the coaches and the administrators over the years. You know, they work hand in hand. And It’s important to the university. We’ve had great presidents too as well during those times. And I do know like in the, the athletic directors that I’ve known, I didn’t know John Toner, but when I got here, Lou Perkins was here, and then Jeff Hathaway was here, and Paul Pendergast was here, Warde Manuel was here, and, and now Dave Benedict, like they’ve all been outstanding athletic directors.
They’ve all led with a clear vision, and understood the role that, that, that athletics plays at a university of this size and they’ve got great backing from the presidents. They’ve got great backing from the state. There’s always seems to be funding when it’s needed. But the coaches that we’ve had here over the years, you know, like obviously coach Calhoun and coach Hurley here now with the men’s program.
But obviously with Geno Auriemma, you’ve got the greatest women’s basketball coach in the history of the sport and for him to make the commitment to UConn to stay is I think this is his 40th season.
Mike: Yeah, he and CD together. Yes.
TOM: I mean, just incredible. The dedication and the loyalty to the school and the amount of opportunities he’s had to leave have been I’ve been you know, numerous, obviously.
Nancy Stevens of field hockey was was was a fantastic coach I know for so many years, Coach Morrone and Coach Reid on the men’s soccer side were outstanding coaches to as well. And brought great consistency to that to that seat. So I think it’s like that sort of synergy between great administrations and great coaches that have That have that, that’s led the way here.
And again, I think you have to also understand, too, as well, the dynamic of UConn athletics in this state is. We don’t have the pro sports team anymore since the Hartford Whalers, of the four major sports. And so, I think a lot of people identify UConn athletics as the pro sports teams in the state.
Mike: So you referred to him very quickly, and we know free time is at a premium when you’re a coach, but tell us a little bit about your family and and what you like to do in your free time that you get.
Tom: My wife Eileen, we’re coming up on our 30th year married in a couple weeks. And my daughters, Elizabeth, Catherine and Caroline, 27, 25, 22.
This is our first season, Mike, as, as empty nesters. So that’s a new and exciting adventure that Eileen and I are taking on right now. I think like when I get free time, I’m pretty boring because we get so little. It’s amazing how much the demands of our job have changed and actually gotten worse in the last 30 years.
You mentioned the transfer portal, That’s something that, like, the day the season ends, you have to be, like, in full portal mode as a staff.
Mike: Or even before the season ends, right?
Tom: Yes, yes. Like, we were looking at, you know, I was looking at video Dan and Luke and Kimani weren’t. I was looking at video because then they needed to stay focused on, on winning games in the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight and the Final Four.
But we were keeping tabs on everyone who went in the portal while the season was going. But it’s funny, like the casual fan would say to us. After we won it. Oh, this is great. Like it’s such a long grinding season. You win a championship. It’ll be great. You guys can get away now for a little while to take some time and I’ll, I’ll walk you through what happened.
Like we won on Monday, April 8th and the next day we flew from Phoenix back. We had a great pep rally and Gampel at like six o’clock on Tuesday. And we were all in on Wednesday in the office. We had a visitor and a kid on an official visit that weekend. We had another kid on an official visit the weekend after that and, but we were in the next day making major decisions on how the roster is going to look because you have to.
Kids are available. Kids are making decisions. Kids want answers. Not only kids in the portal, but your own kids, like your own players have decisions to make about going pro and not going pro. So we had three or four of those guys in that situation and then. The kids who aren’t playing are thinking about transferring.
Should they transfer? Should they stay? It’s amazing how little time you get. We have a place that we bought in 2010 on Cape Cod. And my wife and I, we love, and my daughters love to get down there whenever we can just to get away. It’s a couple hours away, and I love it. I wish I had more time to get down there, but they’ve been able to use it a great deal, and they spent most of their, majority of their summers there growing up because we, like I said, we’ve had it for about 10, 12 years now.
But we don’t, you know, I, it’s funny, like we, when you, when you have a job like this, that’s all encompassing, like the day days off are usually pretty boring, usually at home. And they’re just sort of like, you don’t really want to go travel. You don’t have much time, but you don’t really want tom you do so much of it for your job.
Izzy: So my day sounds half as busy as yours, and I still love to relax on my days off. So I hear you. Practice is underway and you’ve already played an exhibition game. And here’s the question that all of us are dying to know. What can we expect from the Huskies this year?
Tom: I mean, I think we’ll be good again Izzy, and our standards is so high. One thing I think coach Hurley’s done a great job of is not really trying to get, let anyone get caught up in like comparing. This year’s team to last year’s team, because the version that college basketball saw and all the UConn Husky fans saw of, of our team last really all last year.
But in particular, the last month or two of the season was like this indomitable force of nature on both ends. I mean, we were close to, I’m not, again, I’m not trying to brag, but we were as close to a perfect team.
Izzy: It’s okay to brag.
Tom: And the way we were playing, as evidenced by the amount of, the margin of victory in the six NCAA tournament games, we were playing at such a high level that it would be a disservice to this group to say, oh, we’re a little bit short here, a little bit short there, compared to the last time we played.
You know, we lost two lottery picks. In Stefon Castle and Donovan Clingan and we lost two other young men who will play in the NBA this year, Cam Spencer and Tristan Newton. So it’s impossible to really sort of fill their spots, you know, man for man. You know, you just don’t really find that level of ability, like either as a high school player or a transfer player.
But we do feel like we did a really good job with the freshmen we brought in. And the transfers that we brought in of strategically trying to plug personnel spots and we really like how they’ve been coming together so far. The neat thing, one other rule that I didn’t mention with Mike is that’s really also made the job a lot more of a 365 day a year job is we were granted about 10, 12 years ago, summer access to the players were during summer school. Now we can coach them. It’s only one hour a day for four days a week, but it’s eight weeks where we can get on the court with them. It’s great for their individual development.
It’s great for us as a staff and the way coach Hurley does it is we get eight weeks that we can do it. And these guys are all here all summer one and all summer two. So we have 32 hours already of coaching with them throughout the summer, and they really picked up a lot of things, and they’re doing a great job of sort of learning and growing and understanding their roles.
A lot of the NBA guys are saying this that come through. the scouts that come through to watch our workouts. A lot of them are saying like there really isn’t as quite as much top end talent, but there’s a lot that the depth is really, really impressive. We really like the two centers that we have in Samson Johnson, who’s come back and played a key role in our run last year off the bench.
And Tarris Reed, who’s a young man who transferred from Michigan. We have really good wings and Alex Karaban, who’s, who’s won two national championships here as a starter and put his name in the draft and probably could have stayed in and, and done fine, but wanted to improve his draft status and decided to come back.
Liam McNeeley is a freshman from Montverde Academy, who’s a terrific wing, very good offensive player. And then Jaylin Stewart and Jayden Ross and Isaiah Abraham, also sort of bigger wings that are super athletic and improving every day and we’ll get an opportunity, I think, to sort of showcase what they’re about.
And the backcourt’s strong, too, as well. Hassan Diarra is a returning player. Aidan Mahaney is a transfer from St. Mary’s who had a lot of success on the West Coast. Solomon Ball is a sophomore who’s already made huge strides as well. And we have another freshman guard from Philly named Ahmad Nowell.
So, we think we have every position covered. It’s going to be how quickly they how quickly they gel, how quickly they pick up all the concepts, how tough they are as a group, how selfless they are as a group. They seem to be drinking the Kool Aid, as we say ,right now of like the messaging and they seem to really like want to carry the torch and they want to sort of honor this run to try to three peat.
So it’ll be exciting. We, we can’t wait to It’s good to see it get going in November.
Mike: Well, Tom, thanks for taking some of your valuable time and joining us here on the podcast today. And thanks for all your contributions to UConn as a coach and a real valuable member of the UConn community over the years.
TOM: Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Izzy.
Mike: And thank you, everybody, for listening today to the UConn 360 podcast. We hope you join us again.