What’s more exciting than fireworks — and the ensuing fire that will burn down your garage? Mailbag! Let’s kick off the holiday weekend with a long one this week.
Remember: If your question wasn’t answered or you’ve been living under a rock and are just hearing about this, you can submit your questions here or on Twitter (@ADimeBack).
Storrs South asks: you’re Charles and Augustus Storrs: you can establish UConn wherever you want in the state. Where do you put it?
We had quite the discussion in the A Dime Back Dot Com slack channel, centering on the only two reasonable choices, New Haven and Hartford. (My suggestion of “anywhere in Fairfield County so that we’re closer to New York City than Rutgers and then we could win the Geography Lottery” went unheeded.)
The case for New Haven is a strong one – putting the State U in a city with an already established college like Yale in 1881 could have pushed the development of that city into overdrive, creating an actual Connecticut metropolis/college town á la Providence. In this scenario, New Haven becomes a cultural capital of New England trailing only Boston, a destination city for the various failed professional sports teams Connecticut has hosted. Athletics-wise, UConn would be a city school on par with a Louisville or Cincinnati in terms of success in both of the major sports. The one drawback is that “The City of New Haven, But Actually Good” would probably be important enough to need a bridge to connect it to Long Island as a shortcut around New York City, and then you’re dealing with all that mess.
Despite all of that, the benefits of founding UConn in the Hartford area in 1881 were too great.
Had Charles & Augustus Storrs been future-minded visionaries and not farmers, they would have planted the UConn flag on the east bank of the Connecticut River, opposite downtown Hartford. We would have a land-grant school within biking distance of the State Capitol, with a campus waterfront(!) and lots of room to build out. Imagine a UConn campus bounded by the Connecticut River on the west, the site of Rentschler Field on the East (the stadium would have been built to the exact same size and location, only in 1960 or so), Route 44 at the north and a southern boundary TBD.
The benefits are obvious: UConn’s centralized location in the state’s biggest city (Bridgeport doesn’t exist in this, or any, scenario) would change the whole history of the university, making it the obvious flagship state school of New England far earlier than it actually happened. Direct transit links to New York and Boston might have been built before the ugly interstate highways, making Hartford more vital than it is today. The campus abutting the Old State House on one side and Pratt & Whitney on the other would give the school great leverage politically and economically. It would overwhelm every other non-Ivy League school in the state, which it does now, but like, less weird because it’s not a farm town three hours from the state’s western border.
Sports-wise, UConn would be playing all its home games in Hartford, but in a less infuriating fashion. UConn students would take a trolley across the river to watch UConn basketball downtown, and “taking the trolley” would be a UConn student sex euphemism that would be referenced on A Dime Back Dot Com frequently.
It would’ve been a no-brainer for UConn to be tied to Hartford the way Wisconsin is tied to Madison, or Texas is tied to Austin. One can only presume that’s why that one professor is trying to travel back through time, and we wish him the best of luck.
Kevin asks: Who would be the best assistant coach candidate? Would they be able to help with recruiting as well?
A few others asked a similar question, prompted by a job posting on the UConn website last week seeking a new assistant coach (you should absolutely apply). The prevailing thought since Karl Hobbs left for Rutgers was that Director of Basketball Operations Kevin Freeman would be promoted. Freeman has been out on the recruiting trail this summer, and has an established rapport with coach Kevin Ollie — and fast-rising assistant Ricky Moore, a former teammate of Freeman’s. I think the smart money is still on Freeman landing the job and his deputy, Danny Griffin, ascending to fill Freeman’s position. The job posting online could just be a formality.
If you enjoy reckless speculation, however, it’s possible that Freeman has decided that recruiting is awful and he’d rather hang out in his office in Storrs as DOBO, perhaps on an administrative career path, than being an assistant. In this scenario, we’ve already provided a list of possible assistant coach candidates. The problem for UConn would be that so much time has passed and many of the ideal candidates have already found work elsewhere. Since that article was posted, Donyell Marshall became the head coach of CCSU, and Saddi Washington (a personal favorite of mine) accepted an assistant coaching job at Michigan.
Ollie and Moore seem to have a solid handle on recruiting. Obviously every little bit helps — and Glen Miller is on the road as well — but I have long maintained that the two areas a new assistant coach should focus on are in-game offensive strategy and big man development. As a coach, it’s unknown if Freeman can fill those roles, but work ethic has never been a problem for him. I feel pretty confident that, given the chance, Freeman would be a welcome addition to the coaching staff.
Timmy asks: Why won’t UConn schedule the good New England teams?
Because they last time they did, they lost on a corner three.
But I know you’re not talking about the better RPI games, like Yale and Harvard (instead of f-ing Sacred Heart and Maine). You want to know why UConn doesn’t play the big boys — UMass, Rhode Island, Boston College, Providence, etc. The answer: there is none. Getting at least one of those teams on the schedule every year seems like a no-brainer. It’s an easy road trip or a familiar opponent that will put butts in the seats at home. Do it.
