March Madness: Yale coach James Jones still inspired by his Long Island teachers
Yale head coach James Jones, right, greets fans after Yale upset Auburn in an NCAA Tournament first-round game in Spokane, Wash., on Friday Credit: AP/Ted S. Warren
James Jones’ name is back on the lips of college basketball fans in these parts again. Coaching your team into the NCAA Tournament has a way of doing that. Guiding Ivy League champion Yale through a heart-stopping first-round win over fourth-seeded Auburn makes it a certainty.
Oakland’s takedown of Kentucky headlined the first day of The Big Dance and the Bulldogs’ 78-76 stunner against a Tigers squad that was ranked No. 7 nationally in the final AP poll was the talk of Day 2. It propelled 13th-seeded Yale into the second round for only the second time, and the first since its epic 79-75 upset of Baylor in 2016.
Jones, who grew up in North Babylon before his family relocated to Dix Hills for his final two years of high school, will lead the Bulldogs against San Diego State, last season’s national runner-up and the No. 5 seed in the East Regional, on Sunday in Spokane, Washington.
There were phone calls from Long Island not too long after Yale scintillatingly turned away two shots in the final seconds — a frenetic defensive stand — to preserve its victory. But the calls didn’t come from where one might expect. One was from Pamela Katz, his fifth-grade teacher, and another was from Richard Hogan, who taught 11th-grade English at Half Hollow Hills West. He counts both as inspirations to him as a youngster.
“[Katz] was my favorite teacher,” Jones said via Zoom from Spokane Arena. Of Hogan, he added, “[He] kind of inspired me as much as anybody.”
“This is basically what we do in basketball, teach,” said Jones, who is in his 24th season at Yale and has taken the Bulldogs to four NCAA Tournaments, all since 2016.
He told a story about Katz coming to his defense from across the hall when his sixth-grade teacher was hollering at him, asking her to step out of the room and dressing her down.
“That moment, having someone protect me at the age of 12, just gave me a lot of confidence in myself to go and to do and to be [myself],” Jones said.
He added that when Yale played at Stony Brook, Katz attended the game. And that Hogan has road-tripped to New Haven for a game.
There was a moment in 2019 when Jones might have come home and become the head coach at St. John’s. Chris Mullin had made his exit from the Red Storm and Jones was a finalist for the position right up until Mike Anderson was hired.
(While Anderson’s years at St. John’s didn’t produce an NCAA Tournament team, Red Storm fans need not look back with any lament now that Rick Pitino is the coach.)
Jones’ biggest basketball influences came years after his time on Long Island when, as he put it, “I was not the player that I wanted to be. I was a lot better in my mind than I was on the court.”
He said his high school coach coaxed him to work harder, “but I didn’t work nearly as hard as my guys do and how they play.”
When he left Long Island for college at Albany, becoming a coach wasn’t a thought. When he was serving as an assistant at his alma mater, something changed.
“I didn’t really realize that I wanted to be a basketball coach until I graduated college,” Jones said. “I went back to get an MBA and was coaching at the same time and I got snakebit by it.”
On his laptop computer, Jones keeps a recording of the 2016 win over Baylor. He likes to watch it a few times a year because it makes him smile. But there is one part of his recording that he zeroed in on and is using with these Bulldogs as they head into Sunday.
“There’s a clip where I run into the locker room and I jump on the players who were huddled up and water being splashed and stuff,” Jones said shortly before donning a Yankees cap and exiting the news conference. “I thought we got a little too high. [We] came out in the [next] game and Duke really jumped on us. They were up by 24, 25 points in the first half [of the 71-64 loss] . . . I think that if we had a better understanding of what we needed to do and were calmer, we would have had a better chance at winning that game.”
After his team sent a shiver through college basketball on Friday, he went a different route.
“I tried to be as calm as possible, celebrate obviously the win somewhat, but to be calm and just let the guys know that we have more work to do,” Jones said.
And there’s no reason Yale can’t do it. Princeton was in the Sweet 16 a year ago.
“I think the talent in the Ivy League is better than anyone knows,” Yale’s Danny Wolf said. “It’s unfortunate that we’re a one-bid league, but I think there’s multiple teams in the league that could go out and prove themselves on this level.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.