City of Basketball Love

By Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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Fran Dunphy openly cringes at the words. His humility won’t allow him to take it. He’ll even wince like he took a gut punch when such descriptions of him as “legend,” “legacy,” “Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Famer,” “winningest coach in Big 5 history,” “a three-time Hall of Famer” echo.

Dunphy has done it all.

What more needs to be accomplished? Why on April 5, 2022, did Dunphy, at 74, take on the reclamation project that is the La Salle basketball program?

Dunphy jokes that he’s only been asked that question the last seven months, oh, about seven billion times.

Make it seven billion and one.

“It’s my alma mater,” said Dunphy, a 1970 La Salle grad who was a key member of the Explorers’ 1968-69 team that finished 23-1 and ranked No. 2 in the final Associated Press Top 25 Poll and who averaged 18.6 points per game as a senior. “Hey, I’m 74 and I don’t look a day over 73 (laughs). Physically, I’ve always felt pretty good and I’ve been lucky health wise. I still feel really good health wise. Rejuvenated, I don’t know, there are still a lot of challenges that go along with this. You have to be ready to go every single day, and that means you have to be energetic, enthusiastic, and ahead of these guys.

“It’s fun. I like doing it, and we’re getting ready to open the season up and I have agida (heartburn). We’ll see how it goes. It doesn’t bother me when people ask why I came back.”

Dunphy returns to his alma mater with a resume that is as heavy and thick as a brick. He has coached 580 wins in 30 seasons, with 17 NCAA tournament appearances.

He inherited a program that hasn’t had a winning record since the 2014-15 season, when the Explorers went 17-16 overall. They haven’t finished with a winning Atlantic 10 Conference mark since that magical 2012-13 season under John Giannini when La Salle went 24-10 overall and 11-5 in the A-10 while capturing the nation’s attention by reaching the Sweet 16 with Ramon Galloway, Tyreke Duren and Tyrone Garland’s shot-heard-the-world “Southwest Philly Floater.”

Since then, La Salle has not won more than 17 games in a season and has averaged 12 wins a season over the last eight years. Ashley Howard took over Giannini for the previous four years and saw the Explorers go 45–71 (.388) overall and 25–46 (.352) in the A-10 during that time.

The Explorers opened their season Monday against No. 16 Villanova, losing 81-68. The setback extended La Salle’s losing streak against their longtime Big 5 opponent to nine straight games.

“I thought we did enough good things to feel okay about the game as we come out of it, however, we made some mistakes that just didn’t go our way,” Dunphy said afterward. “There were a couple of drives to the rim where we didn’t help quite enough and we gave up a couple of looks to a guy like (Caleb) Daniels, who in the first half we couldn’t give him anything because he was so focused and on target.”

Dunphy admitted he coaches far differently than he did decades ago. He’s shown a great versatility to evolve with today’s athlete, who is far different from athletes as recent as a decade ago.

“You miss the juice, you have agida all day long, but when the ball goes up, it’s awesome, watching the kids play, hoping they do good things,” Dunphy said. “I’m sure I was a little rusty in some of the things I did. My assistants told me some things. But it was great. Great fun. Great to be out there. I mentioned to one of our kids the other day, your head hits the pillow, you go to sleep right away, that never happens to me. That’s what you choose to do this time in your lifetime. I’m enjoying these guys. It was a good day; a really good day.”

Dunphy says he’s a lot more patient these days. He says that the times and his age demand it.

“When you get a little older and a little wiser, you’re not quite as crazed over things that really don’t matter,” he said. “I’ll give a quick example that less is more in today’s coaching profession. There were days when if you weren’t out there at 2:45, 3 p.m. and out there for three hours, you weren’t doing enough.

“Today, you’re doing less; saving your player’s legs. You have to adjust to that. Life is different for everyone, even a basketball coach. I have to be more patient. You strive for perfection, but you don’t have to always expect it. I expect to put these kids in a position to win. I want to put them in a place where they can play their best.”

Dunphy has no timetable for himself or the program. And he hasn’t changed in one respect—he coaches to win. There is no growing curve with an old-school coach like him. He’s not into taking baby steps, where wins and losses don’t matter.

“That’s not my game, my game is every possession is critical and let’s be the best we can,” he said. “There’s no timetable here where we’re going to go slow and create this. We played a team like Villanova on Monday and these kids thought they could win, and I wasn’t about to tell them that they couldn’t. We’re going to play as hard as we can against everyone.”

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Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here .