Whistle between his lips, Bobby Hurley waves his arms as he harps on details like blasting through screens as all Bobby Hurleys have done on Hudson County hardwood for more than a half century.
But this is not Bob Hurley, the retired St. Anthony High coach with 1,100 career wins and enshrinement in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Nor is it Bobby Hurley, the oldest son of Bob who led Duke to a pair of national championships at Duke and before becoming the head coach at Arizona State.
No, this unrelated Bobby Hurley grew up in a family of Super Duper grocers in a Pennsylvania county with one stoplight. He played at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and went into coaching only after the dot com bubble burst and led him away from Wall Street. He landed directly across the Hudson River, at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, less than three miles from Bob Hurley’s Jersey City apartment.
Bobby, who attended Duke basketball camp as a child and hosted St. Anthony teams for practices at Stevens before the school closed in 2017, has now spent the last 20 years at Stevens, the last 15 as head coach. Phone calls have come for the more famous Bobby Hurley, and he shrugs. On Friday, he will lead his resilient Ducks into the Division III NCAA Tournament after trailing by more than 10 points in the semifinal and final of their conference tournament before rallying for wins. Considerably calmer than the Jersey City Hurleys, the Stevens coach balances high academic demands with limited athleticism.
“We have to box out,” he told his team Tuesday as it prepared to play Farmingdale State in Hampden-Sydney, Va. “We’re not going to win the jumping game.”
He learned to be resourceful in Dushore, Pa., a pinprick of a town with a population of 435 residents. He grew up the son of a Bob Hurley on 43 acres, and remembers being devastated when he learned Duke had been blown out in the 1990 NCAA Tournament national final by UNLV. He made his way to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he wore a headband and his hair gelled just so. When Justin Leonard, who had starred at Don Bosco, told friends that he was competing for playing time against the 5-foot-9 Bobby Hurley, it elicited laughs.
“It was always the joke of the gym,” said Justin Leonard, a tri-captain with Hurley at RPI. “‘Oh that’s not the real Bobby Hurley!’ That changed pretty quickly, both within our walls and wherever we played once you saw him on the court. He was always the real deal, super crafty. Hard to deny his skill set. You have to have pretty thick skin to grow up as a ball player at that time with that name. He certainly held his own.”
Leonard connected Hurley with the New Jersey basketball scene when he worked for The Hoop Group following graduation. It did not take long for the Hurleys to intersect. The Hoop Group ran Bob Hurley’s camp in the Poconos, and Bobby Hurley worked those sessions. When it came time to look for a winter rental near the company’s headquarters down the shore, it was Bob Hurley’s wife, Chris, who vouched for the 22-year-old to the landlord. The number of Bobbys in close proximity boggled Bob’s mind at times.
“There was an element of confusion,” Bob Hurley says. “Because the other Bobby Hurley had a house down the shore at the time, too. It was pretty confusing. ”
After one year, Bobby Hurley bounced to Stevens, where he embraced the Division III life as the program’s first full-time assistant coach. Administrators then viewed athletics as a way to grow enrollment, and the team, which played in a gym with no scoreboards and wooden bleachers, developed incrementally. By 2007, the Ducks appeared in the NCAA Tournament as an at-large bid and reached the Sweet 16. The next year, Hurley took the reins. A congratulatory note came from one of Bobby Hurley’s roommates at Duke.
“Bobby was like, ‘how does he not check?’” said Brendan Twomey, who was Hurley’s first hire at Stevens.
No matter the season, Hurley negotiated back roads to March. Trips in the Empire 8 conference required bus travel, including six-hour hikes to Rochester and long hauls to Houghton University, where the closest tow truck could be 45 minutes away. One time a bus got stuck going up a hill; players emptied out to ease the load. When the bus finally reached the top, players sprinted to the tail lights in the dark of night.
“These guys are going to forget half the games we play and remember that because they were all together,” Hurley says.
He travels with talent in tow. Junior Jack Spellman leads all NCAA levels with 108 blocked shots this season and was named the MAC Freedom Conference’s defensive player of the year for the second straight season. Xander Singh, an X factor as a freshman, was named the Rookie of the Year.
The 23-man roster is an eclectic collection of talent and intellects. Guard Richard Machado is also in the chess club and battles classmate Harmehar Chhabra, a quantitative finance major, on bus rides. Seven players study engineering; another three major in data science or accounting and analytics. Past players have posted perfect scores on the SAT and taken two classes at the same time because they were smart enough to do so. Liz Hornberger, an assistant coach, holds a juris doctorate.
“Every place has its issues and problems,” Hurley says. “Ours are making sure that everybody is doing alright with thermodynamics and fluids and stuff like that. It’s funny, you’ll look at some grades, and it will be a C. I’ll say, ‘what’s up with the C?’ and they will say, ‘Coach, that’s a good grade in that class!’ Some of those engineers, over my head.”
To educate them on local hoop lore, he has shown “The Street Stops Here,” a documentary on one of the last St. Anthony teams before the school was shuttered. Graduate transfer Stephen Braunstein, who grew up in Colts Neck, needed no introduction. “According to like my great aunt who lives in Colorado I am like third cousins with St. Anthony Bob Hurley through marriage,” he said. “We’ve never had the conversation.”
Practice started on Sept. 11, and they dropped the season opener to Catholic. The Ducks needed two double-digit rallies in the MAC tournament to secure its automatic bid to the NCAA. Trailing by 13 points with just under 12 minutes remaining in regulation, freshman Tommy Scholl, who averaged 11 minutes and 3 points per game, came off the bench to post a game-high 16 points, including a 3-pointer with 25 seconds left to go up three. He also forced a turnover to seal the road win for the championship.
“Seeing everyone in the stands crushed was a great feeling,” Spellman said.
They loaded up for a six-hour ride to the NCAA Tournament site in Virginia Wednesday afternoon.
“Packed?” said Trevor Clifton, an athletic department official said. “Ready to go?”
“They’re trying to do the laundry quick,” Hurley said.
“I think the laundry machine’s out,” Clifton said.
“Out out?” Hurley said.
“I think,” Clifton said.
“See all these gray hairs?” Hurley said.
He laughed. Logistics, he lamented, were his least favorite part of the job.
“I just want the players to teach me chess,” he said.
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Kevin Armstrong may be reached at karmstrong@njadvancemedia.com.
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