STORRS – When Kimani Young arrived at UConn to join Dan Hurley’s staff in 2018, a plateau on his long journey, through adversity and up from the grass roots levels, he thought, “wow, I’ve made it.”
But Hurley had a question.
“Now I was at UConn, one of the blue bloods in the country,” said Young, now the Huskies’ associate head coach. “And his response to me was, ‘don’t you want more? From that first conversation, I realized I still had so far to go to reach my potential.”
Luke Murray, who joined the UConn men’s basketball staff in 2021, was handed the steering wheel for a game at Seton Hall last season, when Hurley and Young were out with COVID and the team was in a mid-season funk. The Huskies lost a 17-point lead and the game at the buzzer.
“I felt as though I let the group down,” Murray said. “We were going through a tough stretch, but it was a really good experience to be out there and feel that, the ebbs and flows of the game. I still beat myself about the way it ended. Feel like I failed him. You feel a different level of responsibility. I said to (Hurley by phone) on the bus after the game, ‘I don’t know how you do it every night.’”
A couple of months later, the Huskies returned to the top of the college basketball world after a nine-year absence. Perhaps only because the season ran into April, by which time most hiring around the country was done, were the Huskies able to keep the coaching staff intact. Young, 49, and Murray, 38, have rising stock as assistants.
‘If they weren’t so highly thought of, weren’t so excellent, they would have probably taken a lesser, low-major job or mid-major job,” Hurley said. “But they’re in a special place coaching. They have their eyes set on continuing to win big here and maybe take over a bigger job.”
Cutting down the nets in Houston, where UConn clinched the school’s fifth national champion last April, was the culmination for a coaching staff of different personalities, but like-minded in their passion, stoked to ever-higher levels by their boss.
“There’s an expectation level that you’re bringing it at a really high level every day,” Murray said. “That’s in every facet. There really is a standard you have to meet.”
Hurley is demanding of those who work for him, and there has been some staff turnover since he came to UConn. Tom Moore came with him from Rhode Island, then Hurley sought out Young, who had been with Richard Pitino at Minnesota, for his recruiting touch, and his New York City connections. Murray, a Fairfield grad, had coached with Hurley at Wagner and Rhode Island and Moore at Quinnipiac and had the rep as a basketball junkie when he left Louisville after the season in 2021.
“It’s going to be neat to see where they go in coaching next,” said Moore, 58, UConn’s most experienced assistant, a former head coach at Quinnipiac. “… Because both of them have so much to offer. It’s just a matter of time for them.”
Moore was a key member of Jim Calhoun’s staff in the 1990s before landing the job at Quinnipiac, where he was 162-150 in 10 seasons. The championship rings they all have earned are a symbol of well the staff’s synergy works.
“They all knew each other, so they came in with a prior relationship,” Hurley said. “They’re all coaches without ego, all coaches pushing to get better, try to share. On a lot of college staff, there’s a lot of territorial egos in recruiting, coaching. We’ve just got good people.”
Young got his chance to sit in the big chair when Hurley was ejected from a key game against Villanova at the XL Center on Feb. 22, 2022. This one, the Huskies won at the buzzer, 71-69.
“It just gave me some confidence,” Young said. “When you’re an assistant, I’ve never really looked ahead. I’m focused on the job I have now. Just to have that opportunity and come away with a victory, it gave me some confidence that maybe one day I will be ready to do this, and do this at a high level.”
In his early years at UConn, Hurley worked to solidify the Eastern Seaboard as a recruiting base. Hurley and Young focused on New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia to land several important recruits, including Adama Sanogo. Young’s name has been connected with a few head coaching positions the last couple of years.
“Not only is he a great recruiter, he is a great X and O guy,” Moore said. “He’s very good with the players. He’s an old-school coach in a sense in that he is very demanding with these guys, as hard and as tough on some days as (Hurley) is, and he’s relentless with those guards and what he expects out of them. He just comes in here with great energy every day and a great attitude. He’s got every attribute to be a successful head coach.”
Just spoke with the newest Husky, James Bouknight. … said a key was UConn continuing to recruit him while he was injured. “A lot of schools stopped calling … (Kimani Young) even visited me when I was on crutches.”
— Dom Amore (@AmoreCourant) September 18, 2018
For Young, there is no hurry.
“You take things that you’ve learned through all your experiences in basketball, but you stay true to yourself,” he said. “I just look at basketball as a tool to build the habits, the character you need to be a successful person. That’s always been why I’ve gotten into coaching. That’s at the core of who I am as a coach, helping young people overcome adversity. I’ve learned how to push yourself, how to get out of your comfort zone, how to strive to be perfect, strive to be great, push people to do things they don’t necessarily think they’re capable of doing.”
Murray came aboard, in part, because Hurley wanted to expand his recruiting base geographically, especially with the transfer portal. He has also brought new ideas.
“He has really helped us a great deal in every facet of the program,” Moore said. “He’s got a great mind for offensive basketball. He’s really opened up my thinking and everyone’s thinking on analytics, shot quality, spacing. He’s an incredibly focused, driven coach, well organized. His recruiting efforts are just so thorough, comprehensive and detailed. It’s awesome to watch him work on a daily basis and watch him carry on a game plan for a recruit. Like Kimani, any athletic director that gets him is going to get the whole package, because he knows how to run a program.”
Murray is known to do exhaustive research on a recruit, and be able to reference a relative who played somewhere decades ago, or any other pertinent information, and for branding UConn for recruits.
“I don’t feel comfortable taking credit for things,” Murray said. “Coach (Hurley) allows us a lot of input as a group, a great opportunity to really grow as coaches. We’re constantly studying the game, NBA tactics and trends, we watch a ton of European basketball and it is a big influence in how we play. Coach has really taken an interest in some of the analytical models, and the efficiency of how we play offense, defense, and it has made for some adjustments in the type of shots we value and how we scheme. … Recruiting is in line with what we’re talking about with basketball. It’s our responsibility to be as thorough as possible. Just like when you’re game-planning for an opponent, you have to try to be really researched in the way that you attack recruiting situations.”
As for Moore, still very youthful and energetic, the point man in keeping Donovan Clingan in state, he savors the experiences he has had at UConn under Calhoun and Hurley and is not looking ahead.
“It’s unique when you get to this point in your career,” Moore said. “If this is my last position, I’d be thrilled with it. It’s an honor and a privilege to be part of this thing coming back, not just cutting down the nets in Houston, but from Day One, where it was. That’s the coolest thing for me. I was blessed enough when I got here in ’94, it was established, Coach Calhoun (and his assistants) did all the heavy lifting, so I had a charmed life. It’s rewarding to be able to come here and feel like I had a little piece in helping to get the thing back to where it was.”
Each of their stops has exposed Moore, Young and Murray to different approaches to the head coaching role. At UConn, Murray is learning the importance of relationships, something he will take with him if, or more likely when the head coaching opportunity knocks.
“The way that he communicates with the guys,” Murray said, “there is a tendency for college coaches to have a little bit of a sterile relationship with your team. Sometimes you can lose that relational part of the job. Coach Hurley values that a great deal, spending a lot of time taking to players outside of practice, about their personal life. He has a has a way of throwing guys into the fire in practice, which allows them to learn through trial and error.”
For Murray, cutting down the nets with his young children was a highlight of the run to the Final Four. Young talks about some of the private moments, when the staff was grouped together on the busses to the hotels, airports, arenas.
“All those bus rides, going to games,” Young said. “Wait a minute; these games are getting bigger, getting bigger. We’d all look at each other and say ‘what is going on?’ Luke and I used to laugh at each other, we’d compete with each other in Las Vegas in the (Addidas) Super 64 like 15 years ago, and now look at us. We’re about to walk on the biggest stage.”
And yes, with the Huskies about to embark on a new season, attempt to be the first team to repeat as champions since Florida in 2007, Young, and the rest, still want more.
“That was a great feeling,” Young said. “Who doesn’t want to feel that again? It’s so hard to do, the data says it, but why not try, do everything possibly to do it, because if you do, you’ve done something incredibly special.”
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