City of Basketball Love

Stephen Pianovich (@SPianovich)
--

Eric Kindler never really believed he would be a basketball coach, especially not after he walked away from the game just a few years ago.

But last week, Kindler became the youngest head coach in one of the top high school leagues in the country when, at 24 years old, he took the head coaching job at Conwell Egan.

“If you would’ve told me my senior year of high school I would be a coach, I would’ve pushed you away and told you not to come back,” Kindler told CoBL over the phone on Monday.

A native of Mechanicsburg, Pa., Kindler was a standout at Trinity High School and earned a Division I scholarship to Canisius. Kindler played 13 games during his freshman season, but said he “lost his love for the game” and left the team and the school.

He eventually ended up at Saint Joseph’s, where he would sometimes sneak into Hagan Arena to shoot around. After being discovered by director of basketball operations Rob Sullivan, he tried out in front of head coach Phil Martelli and was given a roster spot as a walk-on. He’s been back with basketball since then.

“I started to play again by the end of the year and started talking to the coaches,” said Kindler, who majored in theology at St. Joe’s. “The only reason I wanted to play was that I thought I could glorify God through playing. It was a great experiment in a sense, and I got to play a tremendous amount of time with a bunch of great guys.”

Kindler was part of the 2014 St. Joe’s squad which won the A-10 Tournament, and has stayed in contact with Martelli and the Hawks staff.

His coaching career started during the 2014-15 campaign when he was a teacher at Boys Latin and decided to help out as an assistant. But Kindler said he didn’t have any aspirations of being a head coach even then.

That changed when he got his current job. Kindler works as the Institute Programming Coordinator at Neumann University, engaging with multiple teams at the school.

“I spend times with a lot of teams, and I’m working with the hockey team, the tennis team the field hockey team,” he said. “And I was spending all this time and it made me feel like ‘Aw man, I wish I had my own team.’ I wondered what it would be like to have my own team.”

So Kindler started reaching out to his connections in the coaching world, seeing if there would be a fit for him as a first-time head coach. Someone mentioned the Conwell Egan job -- which was vacant after Frank Sciolla resigned in March -- and after a long process, Kindler accepted the job last week.

“I basically sold myself on personal relationships, leadership development and value development,” he said. “I couldn’t really sell myself on my experience, but I do know the game very well and, more importantly, I know what drives young people.”

Kindler is starting to build those personal relationships with his players in the summer and is in the process of setting up meetings with current Conwell Egan players. The Eagles, who won the PIAA Class AA state title in 2015, went 17-10 and finished seventh in the Philadelphia Catholic League with a 7-6 mark.

Conwell Egan will lose both of its top two scorers from its 2015-16 roster as Lapri McCray-Pace and Vinny Dalessandro both graduated. Guards Darien Simmons and Eric Esposito both played meaningful minutes a junior and sophomore, respectively, last year.

So the new-look Eagles will have some different faces on the court, and the youngest in the Catholic League on their sideline next season.

“The only thing those kids will get from me is everything,” Kindler said. “They’re going to get everything I have. It’s a pretty funny circumstance, but I’m learning.”