Jim Calhoun: An Appreciation

The UConn men's basketball team takes the court for the first time tonight without Jim Calhoun as head coach. Last month, when Calhoun announced his retirement, I submitted this to the Hartford Courant, but a lack of space and another UConn article prevented me from getting it published.

So I submit it here, today.


We were lucky.

We were lucky that, for the last 26 years, Jim Calhoun, who retired Thursday as UConn men’s basketball coach, chose to make his coaching home in Storrs, where he built the program from relative obscurity in 1986 to a national powerhouse. Love his style or not, and many didn’t, he is the main reason why UConn won three NCAA titles, played in four Final Fours since 1999, and he helped make winter a season to look forward to in Connecticut.

We owe this to his fiery spirit, his passion for winning, his command and knowledge of the game. It should now be clear that, even when he was questioned by the media and fans for his coaching decisions – and in a place this small, every move you make as a high-profile coach is questioned – he knew what he was doing all along.

Just look at the way he retired – so late in the process that the university had no choice but to name his recommendation, Kevin Ollie, as the new head coach.

Having attended more than a hundred UConn basketball games since my freshman year there in 1990, I derived as much entertainment from watching Calhoun act on the sidelines as I did seeing his team play, perhaps even more so. On TV, I would have paid an extra fee to have a separate camera locked on him for the whole game, his body swaying, arms gesturing, having “conversations” with officials that were largely one-sided.

It is true that his courtside dialogue was often not PG-rated. From the second tier of the XL Center, as a season ticket holder I could hear him chew out one of his players after calling a timeout ten seconds into a game. The arena would turn library quiet, just to catch a few words of what he was saying. Though embarrassing for the player involved, the public criticism, which usually stemmed from playing lazily, usually worked.

His relationship with referees could best be described as tenuous. While most coaches stayed near their assigned spot in front of the bench during a game, he often wandered five feet onto the court. Calhoun stomped the floor if a player didn’t box out on a rebound or if he made an errant pass, and I saw the coach more than once put his dress shoe into the UConn Club sign on the bottom of the scorer’s table in a fit of fury over something that didn’t meet his expectations.

And of course, this is exactly what I liked about him, what many of us liked about him. His attitude.

After all, this was the guy who refused to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium one year, staying true to his Boston roots.

It’s this attitude and his passion that I’ll most miss, as I’m sure his players will. It’s this passion that propelled UConn from a promising basketball program in the late 80s to one that became a favorite, year after year, to win Big East championships. It’s this passion that made elite high school athletes perform so well at the collegiate level. As any coach knows, it takes more than mere talent to win games.

While Calhoun’s retirement was a national story – ESPN called on its team of basketball analysts on Thursday for commentary during their off-season – its statewide implications will be felt the most. For the last 20 years, the UConn men have been expected to win, and because of this, between 10,000 and 16,000 fans filled seats in Hartford and at Gampel Pavilion to witness this greatness. And hundreds of thousands more watched on television, often at the edge of our seats.

Jim Calhoun’s retirement was not unexpected – he did not commit to return as coach until the end of summer last year – but Thursday will go down as a sad day for Connecticut sports, on par with the announcement that the Whalers were leaving Hartford in 1997. When Geno Auriemma decides to retire, we will feel a similar void.

UConn basketball is arguably the closest thing we have to a men’s professional sport in our state. Whether you agreed with his antics or not, if you cared about Connecticut basketball for the last few decades, you are going to miss Jim Calhoun. I know I will.

David Polochanin of Marlborough is a teacher and freelance writer.

Slave labor?

All right, so when I looked out the window and saw the kids not only raking the leaves in the yard but they were doing so ON THEIR OWN, WITHOUT BEING TOLD, ON A TARP, I admit, I felt a little guilty, I felt a little useless.

Long Live Paper!

A professor at Tufts argues why we shouldn't, as our Secretary of Education believes, abandon paper. He's talking mostly about the future of textbooks, but also about one's ability to concentrate well while reading on a computer or some other electric device. Answer: You get distracted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/opinion/long-live-paper.html?ref=opinion?hp&_r=0

Old people smell funny

It's amazing, but true. Old people smell, well, old. You might think that The Onion might publish this. But in the New York Times? http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/the-telltale-scent-of-old-people/

Essay About Christmas Undecorating

Good news on the writing front - the Hartford Courant yesterday ran this essay I wrote about when to take down Christmas trees and holiday decorations. Got the idea from passing by a house on my way to work that, as of Friday, still had its tree up. A little late, I thought...


When Should The Christmas Tree Come Down?
Holiday Dilemma: So, when is the right time to undecorate from the holidays?

By DAVID POLOCHANIN

January 15, 2012


Their tree is still up, its large, old-school glass bulbs aglow in the front doorway, as I pass by each morning. It's now Jan. 13, well past Christmas. I wonder when the homeowners will take it down, and then privately wish they wouldn't.

At least, not yet.

The small white bungalow in Glastonbury shines a light on an interesting seasonal question: Just when is the socially acceptable date to take down the Christmas tree and its related decorations?

Opinions vary, but it was my understanding that New Year's Day generally meant curtains for the Christmas season. Those who like to hold onto the holiday feeling leave the tree up until Jan. 6, when the Epiphany is celebrated. For many Christians, this is an important day. For others, it justifies prolonging packing up ornaments.

Our tree is currently on our back deck, still in its base, near the grill. My wife removed all of its decorations and lights and then hurt her back dragging it through the living room during the early morning hours on Dec. 26, before I woke up. She feels the need to cleanse our house of the clutter that inevitably gathers around the tree, such as dirty socks, magazines and used paper plates. While I would have enjoyed a few more days with the tree, what's done is done.

I don't sweat it anymore, and at least I didn't have to personally remove the tree, which I should add gave me two weeks of poison sumac after cutting it down. I learned that calamine lotion doesn't work.

At some point when I have a few minutes, I will carry the tree out into the woods behind some live evergreens and toss it beside trees from previous years, which resemble brittle skeletons of their former selves.

While Christmas trees are one matter, the outside lights and decorations still clinging to life can become, dare I say, a tad tacky, a tiny bit embarrassing, even an eyesore. In some neighborhoods I have seen those fake icicles dangling from the front gutter all year long. Is this some kind of personal statement, or simply the manifestation of a common syndrome: man being lazy?

Getting up on a ladder and removing the icicles would only take an hour, but there are so many excuses for leaving them up, and I can hear them now: It gets dark before 5 o'clock; it's too cold to do it; there's a game on soon; they look good next to real icicles; they could increase the value of our home if we decide to put it on the market in January; and, of course, the obvious: Why would anyone remove them if you have to put them up again in another 330 days? Not that I would use any of these excuses myself, but being a home project procrastinator, I understand every one of them.

This year, we took the family out one Saturday night in December and drove around admiring Christmas lights, an occasional tradition. With our two young children in the back seat, LITE 100.5 on the radio (have they stopped playing Christmas carols yet?) and hot chocolates in our hands, we enjoyed the lengths that some people go to when celebrating the holiday. The flashing light displays, the wreaths, the figurines of Santa and Frosty and Rudolph, and in one yard, Homer Simpson, were all a delight for us to see. That is, until we had to pull over and my son had to go to the bathroom in a parking lot. His bladder, it seemed, was bursting with hot chocolate.

It was a joyous season, but I'm happy to have moved on with the Christmas holiday. Still, when I pass by the front of the white bungalow, I hope to see the tree in that door, for just a little while longer.

David Polochanin, a teacher in Glastonbury, lives in Marlborough.

On Writing

It's the second day of the year - and I've just tied last year for total number of blog entries.

I kind of took last year off in the blogging world. (If you're reading this on facebook and want to see my actual blog, it's http://the30somethingsuburbanguy.blogspot.com)

But 2011 was a pretty good year for me writing-wise. I had my first poem published in October, in an anthology by Native West Press. In June, the Hartford Courant published an essay I wrote about my observations taking a walk around Glastonbury. And in August I had an essay published for the website of an educational journal, Middle Ground. Three pieces is not a remarkable number if all I was doing was freelance writing, but for having a fulltime job, it is respectable. I've definitely done worse.

The biggest news I received last year related to writing was that my request for a sabbatical leave from teaching for next year was approved. This is unquestionably huge. For many years, I've dreamed of taking a sabbatical to pursue opportunities to write (and hopefully get published) and next school year, this will be a reality. I have proposed five writing projects, including books of poetry and short stories for readers in grades 6 through 10, as well as three professional education journal-type articles. This will officially merge my experiences as a writer and journalist and teacher. For three years, I worked fulltime at big New England newspapers (Boston Globe, Providence Journal), and then went back to school to become a teacher, which I've been doing now for 14 years. Since I started teaching, I have written articles, essays for the Courant, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Education Week, and some websites. Since 1998, I'd guess, I've had more than 30 pieces published in all. My sabbatical will afford me the time to develop and market substantial writing projects for children, which I plan to use in the classroom when I return to teach.

Having this year off will be a gift, and I am grateful. It's been a goal of mine for the last 7 or 8 years to take a sabbatical for the purposes of writing, and I now have 7 months to plan what I'm going to do. (A lot of this planning has been done already.) Someone has asked that I blog each day while on sabbatical, and while I think the idea is interesting - tempting, even - I plan to pour most of my writing energy into poems, short stories, and professional articles. However, I do plan to post more to this blog, to "keep the tools sharp", as my former journalism professor Wayne Worcester used to say, and share random opinions as well as the relatively ordinary things that happen to me.

Hunting for Better Television

It is a typical Friday or Saturday night. The kids are in bed, probably not sleeping, but at least they have retreated upstairs for the evening. After checking emails and maybe facebook, the adults have the TV and the night to themselves. We surf, and surf, and surf. Since getting rid of the DVR, we are committed to watching live TV, which is usually not very good. And so, what we end up watching, for the millionth time, is House Hunters. It’s the only thing we seem to agree on.

House Hunters is not actually terrible. It is entertaining, or I wouldn’t watch it. But it is not that great, either. There are varying degrees of House Hunters quality. Seeing a young couple get a first apartment is not interesting. Actually, watching the house hunter(s) look at anything worse than my own home is usually grounds for not watching the show. Why would you do that? Of course, I have, but the point is to get a peek inside a home that you cannot afford. To gain an inside look at a really exclusive place, with a pool, outdoor kitchen, five bathrooms, a palatial lot, three or four car garages, 3 or 4 fireplaces, etc. We do not want to look at a house like our own, a colonial built in 1973 that has cracks up and down the driveway, a rear gutter that’s literally hanging from the roof, a damp garage, electric sockets that don't work, a bad washing machine hookup, and a water filtration system that is about to give out at any second.

But we’ll even watch those episodes, the crummy ones. It’s amazing how the producers make the cities look attractive to live in. Many times, the personalities of the people buying the home leave a lot to be desired, but in this reality TV world, that’s the catch.

So, when/if people ask(ed) what we watched, or what we did on Friday or Saturday night, if we were being honest, we would probably say, “Watched House Hunters again.” This is so lame.

It seems the only truly good network show out there is “Parenthood.” There was just a great write-up about the series in the New Yorker. Awesome cast, good plot lines, just good dramatic television. In a time when everything is either reality-based or a spinoff of Law and Order or CSI, “Parenthood” is refreshingly, well, old. It isn’t sensationalistic, it’s not violent, it’s just a bunch of intertwined stories about a family, from grandparents to their grandchildren, most of whom have very real flaws, that is really engrossing to watch. Maybe this is because I’m a parent myself and can relate to some of the stories, but I can’t think of a better show on TV right now.

I’m sure there’s some better programs, or maybe as good. Some like “The Good Wife”, but I can’t get into the idea. “Mad Men” has won tons of awards, “Weeds”, which I’ve seen, is good but too far-fetched for me to buy into it. I’ve also seen “Nurse Jackie” on some most popular lists.

What you won’t see on there is House Hunters, but it’s probably what we’ll still be watching, every Friday and Saturday night, right until the very end, when the couple picks from the three homes they toured - as long as the house is better than mine.