INDIANAPOLIS — Five years ago, Wagner college AD Walt Hameline made a big and bold move by hiring Danny Hurley to coach the school’s basketball team.
Hurley had spent nine years as a high school at St. Benedict’s Prep and made the rare jump to the Division level.
How’d that work out?
Well, Wagner won 25 games two years later and Hurley then moved on to coach Rhode Island in the Atlantic 10. In three years there, he improved from 8 wins to 14 to 23 and was in line to land the St. John’s job until he agreed Sunday to a six-year extension with the Rams and the Red Storm hired Chris Mullin.
I bring all this up now because I think some lower-level Division 1 school should think outside the box and take a long, hard look at hiring another former New Jersey high school coach: Kevin Boyle.
In case you missed it, Boyle on Saturday led Montverde (FL) Academy to its third straight Dick’s High School Nationals championship with a 70-61 win over previously unbeaten Oak Hill Academy at Madison Square Garden. It didn’t hurt that Boyle had 6-foot-10 LSU-bound Ben Simmons, who went for 20 points and would probably be a lottery pick this year if he were allowed to enter the draft.
Boyle famously left St. Patrick High School in Elizabeth a few years ago for Montverde, where he makes in the low six-figures at the posh private school outside Orlando.
“I’m extremely happy and there’s no question I have the best high school job,” Boyle said last week on SNY’s Four Quarters Podcast. “If you ever came on our campus, it’s an incredible Southern-style campus. It’s an incredible school…
“Obviously, if somebody walks in with an opportunity for you, you would definitely look at them….Obviously in life you have to look at situations, is it a better situation for you and your family or are you better where you’re currently at? I’m happy where I’m at and we’ll go from there.”
Across his career, Boyle has won 24 titles and was named the 2013 USA Today National Coach of the year, the 2011 Naismith National Coach of the Year, the 2009 ESPN National Coach of the Year, and the 2007 USA Today National Coach of the Year.
Between his time at St. Patrick and Montverde, Boyle has coached players picked No. 1 (Kyrie Irving), No. 2 (Michael Kidd-Gilchrist) and No. 3 (Joel Embiid) in the NBA Draft, to say nothing of guys like Kasey Hill of Florida and Dakari Johnson of Kentucky.
In the last two years he’s coached both current Ohio State freshman guard D’Angelo Russell –– a projected Top-5 pick in 2015 — and Simmons, a projected Top-2 pick in 2016.
That’s five top five picks that Boyle will have coached.
How many college coaches can match that résumé?
Not many.
If Boyle’s 2013-14 Montverde team featuring Russell and Simmons were in the Sun Conference that season, they might have won the league.
“Kevin Boyle is one of the best at utilizing the game of basketball as a tool for personal growth and self-development for young athletes,” former Knicks assistant Phil Weber said. “Through his extensive knowledge of the game, teaching style, and competitive drive for excellence, he has transformed the lives of many players into well rounded students, superior athletes, and strong citizens.”
Boyle would be a strong hire anywhere, especially in the Northeast or probably Florida, too.
He has relationships with all the AAU and high school guys in the New York/New Jersey area from his time at St. Patrick. Do they all love him and would they all send him their kids? Probably not, but they all have to respect the work he’s done.
Boyle is a passionate, high-energy guy who knows something about toughness from his days in New Jersey battling it out with St. Anthony coach Bob Hurley and then-St. Ben’s coach Danny Hurley.
Boyle has also coached against other current college coaches who began their careers as high school coaches and have gone on to highly successful college careers, including Iona’s Tim Cluess and South Carolina’s Frank Martin.
“Our level of high school basketball is very similar to the low- or mid-Division 1 level, when you’re looking at the teams,” Boyle said. “We could have had six pros on our team two years ago and we’re playing the Findlays and the Oak Hills and the La Lumieres and the Huntington Preps…we’re playing he best teams in the country, we’re playing on TV. It’s very similar to what you would do in college, so I think sometimes people don’t understand that and they think it’s very outside the box. But I think Danny and Frank Martin and Coach Cluess at Iona all were all guys that were recently in high school that had great intensity and proved that you can do the same thing at the next level.”
Some college somewhere should think outside the box and call Kevin Boyle.
He’s in New York this week and isn’t hard to find.
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Photo: Star-Ledger
