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Alexander: Expect sideline intensity with UCLA’s Cronin, UConn’s Hurley

March 22, 2026

PHILADELPHIA – Mick Cronin and Dan Hurley have a lot in common.

They both landed at college programs with histories of success, created by legendary former coaches who have cast long shadows. And while John Wooden had passed away by the time Cronin arrived at UCLA in 2019, four-time national championship coach Jim Calhoun was still on the UConn campus – still had an office, in fact – when Hurley became the Huskies’ coach in 2018.

They, and their staffs, also have a good amount of interconnectivity. For example, UCLA lead assistant Darren Savino and Hurley go back so far that at Saturday’s media availability before their teams play each other Sunday night, Hurley was talking about their days as Little League opponents in Jersey City, N.J., where Savino also played high school basketball for Hurley’s dad, Bob Hurley Sr., and alongside his brother, future Duke guard and Arizona State coach Bobby Hurley.

Ah, yes, Little League. As the legend went, one questioner suggested, Savino “ruined” Dan Hurley’s baseball career by hitting multiple home runs off him.

“I don’t know if it was home runs,” Hurley said. “It might have been a three-run – it was a big home run that I gave up to Darren. I don’t think it was multiple home runs. Anthony Caldrillo hit multiple home runs off of me, but not Darren Savino. Anthony Caldrillo is out there. He’s worked his way into the presser. Yeah, appreciate Darren sharing that.”

The most obvious similarities, of course, are uncompromising coaching styles that tend to be high volume.

Cronin has received his share – more than his share, actually – of negative fan reaction for his frequent outbursts at players. And yet what seemed to be the most egregious example – when he pulled Steven Jamerson II off the floor and sent him to the locker room at Michigan State earlier this season, after Jamerson had committed what Cronin thought was a flagrant foul (it really wasn’t) – was a mistake that Cronin admitted to the following day with an apology.

“Get a life, bro. You want to win big?” Cronin said Saturday when the issue came up. “You think Coach Hurley is not supposed to be intense, but you want to win? We’re not coaching Little League, buddy. Everybody doesn’t get an at-bat. Come on, man. (They’re) paying us a lot of money to win games.”

Asked a similar question later during his own media session, Hurley said:

“When you look at the best programs, the best organizations, the best coaches, there’s high degrees of accountability in those organizations. There’s high degrees of responsibility, discipline, efficiency, productivity, work ethic and standards. So holding 18, 19, 20-year-old young men to those standards on a daily basis is what forges championship teams. It’s also what helps develop strong men that will enter the adult world and be successful people, be able to not only function at a high level, but be productive, be successful, lead productive lives.

“When I look at Mick and coaches like Mick, they’re all the coaches I have either modeled myself after or admired, is the ones who can balance holding their players to the highest standard, where the players have that respectful fear of their coach, and they love playing for their coach, you know? I think it takes a special coach to pull that off. If you look at most championship coaches, the Nick Sabans, (Indiana football coach Curt) Cignetti, Jay Wright, they ran really, really, really tight ships.”

And, as we’ve noted before in This Space, Cronin’s players may not like the criticism, but they accept it, because they realize he’s looking out for them not only as basketball players but as future productive adults.

The similarities go even beyond coaching styles or the histories of their current employers. Both grew up as sons of respected high school coaches, Hep Cronin in the Cincinnati area and the aforementioned Bob Hurley Sr. in Jersey City.

“I think it’s a huge advantage growing up the way we grew up in the gym, which you don’t realize until you go into coaching,” Cronin said. “Everybody else has got to learn things that you learn through osmosis, like how to attack an odd-numbered front zone with an even-numbered front? It just does. If Dan and I would have went into something else, we would have had no idea what the hell we were doing.

“Osmosis is the whole 10,000-hour theory. We had it by eighth grade, probably. It’s not just your dad. It’s his friends are coaches. Everything revolves around that. You really don’t know how advanced you are at it. I didn’t until my first year. I was 19. I was a freshman coach at Woodward High School. I didn’t know until I started coaching that I knew all that. You’re a kid, you think everybody knows everything about basketball. But everybody’s dad is not Cronin or Bob Hurley, Sr. You’re a kid, you think everybody knows what to do in late-game situations or how to run a practice, or how to teach these things. You realize everybody doesn’t. Everybody doesn’t have those dads.”

Said Hurley:

“If you don’t like me, you’d hate my dad. I bet Mick would say the same thing. We’re coach’s kids. For me, growing up in Jersey, North Jersey, Jersey City, I coach the way my dad would be coaching this college – again, whether you would like that or not. You just have a special relationship to your team, to your players, to the outcome, to the lifestyle of being a coach when you’re a coach’s kid.

“It’s so personal for coaches like me and Mick, which is where you see, at times, emotional reactions to things that happen on the court because it truly feels like, personally, it’s your world, your team. The outcome of the game, it manifests itself sometimes in how we behave.”

And that graduate school level of basketball knowledge Cronin talked about receiving from his dad? Same with the Hurley household.

“Yeah, when I got to practice at Seton Hall my first year, and we were installing things, we were doing defensive breakdown drills, we were doing offensive installation, we were doing these things, and I was completing the sentences of my college coaches. New concepts (others) were learning for the first time, jump to the ball, midpoint, close out technique. And I’m kind of finishing – when you’re so well-coached as a high school player and the son of a Hall of Famer, I was finishing the sentence of my college coaches in my first college practice.”

Don’t you wonder what would happen if one of either coach’s players did that today?

Hurley was asked if he could relate to what Cronin faces at UCLA, given the incredible (and impossible) standard set by Wooden, 10 titles in 12 seasons.

“Definitely,” he said. “I think coaches that do what we do, as long as we’ve done it and had the success that we’ve been able to have for as long as we’ve had, you’re internally motivated. There’s a lot externally that you deal with. The criticisms, the critiques, the comparisons.

“I would say in today’s college sports, just having a great brand doesn’t get you a whole lot in today’s day and age. Obviously, the NIL and the portal have diminished the advantage of coaching at a big-branded school. (And) I certainly understand the microscope that you’re under all the time.”

Cronin noted that he’d read all of the books written by Wooden, but one passage stood out – his idea that the only one of his successors who should feel the pressure was the first one.

In one sense, that was accurate. Gene Bartow lasted only two seasons, went 27-5 and made the Final Four his first season before losing to undefeated Indiana in the national semifinal, but did not handle the comparisons with his predecessor very well. But the others who followed him all faced those comparisons as well, and to date, Jim Harrick has been the only one who hung a banner in Pauley Pavilion.

“For everybody else, they didn’t follow (him),” Cronin said. “If they’re worried about that, they’re worrying about the wrong things. When I read that quote from him, it kind of helped. He became so philosophical after he retired. One of the best of all time, right?

“But the standard is real. The standard is real. I think it’s not for the faint of heart. But I wanted it. I left a place that I loved, my alma mater (Cincinnati), for the chance to sit in a seat at UCLA. So it’s been everything I’ve dreamt it would be.”

Maybe this is the common thread between these coaches and these jobs: In both cases, you have to have a thick skin to succeed.

And I can’t imagine anybody would ever accuse either of being overly sentimental.

jalexander@scng.com

Orange County Register

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Alexander: Expect sideline intensity with UCLA’s Cronin, UConn’s Hurley

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