Never Stop. Dan Hurley and Ian O'Connor.

 

Never Stop.    Dan Hurley.  

Life, Leadership, And What It Takes to Be Great.   Dan Hurley and Ian O’Connor. 

 

A fear of failure can be a powerful motivator as can a relentless attitude to be achieve greatness.    It can help a competitor, such as a coach, from falling behind the competition.    It can enable the coach to stay on top of his players, his job and the game they aspire to conquer.     The rewards are immense including fame, fortune, championships and eternal honor among peers and admirers.    The risks, however, of adopting this potentially dangerous attitude can be just as steep but in the other direction, including self-doubt, exhaustion and even mental breakdowns.     Current Connecticut head basketball coach has written about the incredible heights and crippling lows during his experience as a most successful basketball coach in his recently published book, Never Stop.  

What we like about this is the rawness, honesty and vulnerability that coach Hurley asserts, demonstrates and expresses throughout the entire book.    He makes no true apologies for who he is and how he goes about his business and his day.   His style is clearly not for everybody.    Hurley readily admits to this.   This is not an easy coach to please as a player or a hired assistant.   Hurley also takes a deep dive later in the book to express his views on work ethics and how to go about taking on responsibility and revealing personal character.    One Hurley-ism that caught my attention had to do with nearly killing oneself to appease the employer.    His views and approach to his work, in particular, could be a rude awakening for the many young people he comes across on his team.         

Of course, Dan Hurley comes from the first family of basketball.   His father is legendary New Jersey high school (St. Anthony’s) basketball coach Bob Hurley Sr..  His brother Bobby Hurley, jr., two years Dan’s senior, was a prep phenom, a national champion collegiate player at Duke and a professional player for a few years before suffering a life-changing non-basketball injury.   The author acknowledges that there was some pressure living up to the expectations of his coaching father and older star brother.   Dan Hurley’s time spent at Seton Hall was rocky.   He writes about suffering some breakdowns and having to leave the team for part of one season.  These sufferings have resulted in a resilient, hardened coach (and person).    That comes in handy when coaching at pure basketball school like UCONN where the men's expectations are high but the women's team has endured a dynasty under legend Geno Auriemma as well.    

Most readers will likely appreciate how the UCONN coach has figured out how to manage his daily stress and navigate through the perils and pitfalls of being a high-level collegiate coach.   He asserts that he has cultivated a system along the way while being an assistant coach in both high school and smaller colleges but also through his struggles and travails as a head coach at lower profile schools such as Wagner and Rhode Island.   Hurley asserts in his book that he coaches his way about as hard as he can each day with an unrelenting approach yet also creating a culture of caring about his players.   He admits that he can turn quite cold to assistants when he senses they are not meeting his expectations.    That is seemingly not an issue with his current Husky assistants, though, as he labeled them the best staff in America.     

Hurley made a wise decision to work with co-author Ian O’Connor, one of the most gifted biographers of this generation.    (Readers can find reviews for two of his books in this blog---search for Duke or Aaron Rodgers)   This proud New Jersey coach, who has been known to be quite animated while working the court and not immune to levying off the cuff remarks, likely needed a writing shepherd to bring his many thoughts to life in a cleaner, clearer presentation. In addition, Coach Hurley credits his wife as a calming, supportive figure in many of his career and life decisions.    Halfway through the book Hurley asserted that he was close to turning down Connecticut, after initially accepting the job, due to the late arrival of merchandise from another pursuing school.   After an agonizing day of weighing all options, the book credits his wife and agent in staying with his initial decision.    Two championships later the rest is history, although he opens the book with some intriguing details of how the NBA Lakers tried to woo him from the Big East.        

One does not have to be a UCONN fan or a knowledgeable college basketball aficionado to appreciate this manuscript, but it likely helps those that fall into this category.    Certainly, though, what Hurley includes in the two hundred ninety pages are lessons or examples of living a life and not always an easy one, principles of leadership - Hurley style - and his personal version of what it takes to be great.   Some readers may, for good reasons, find this approach very costly.      For most fans, though, there is something in this story that is bound to resonate in the form of personal motivation or simply an enjoyable anecdote.    In either case, this polarizing figure continues to chase his professional goals as a championship caliber coach (he likely will never stop) and college fans can rejoice that his thoughts and views were neatly captured and presented in what is mostly an entertaining memoir.     

·       You might like to read this book if you are a Dan Hurley fan.

·       You might like to read this book if you crave reading about the Connecticut Huskies men's basketball program.

·       You might like to read this book if you are interested in learning more about college basketball coaches.

·       You might like reading this book if you seek autobiographies that detail and outline professional and coaching success.   

Read more about the author on X:    https://x.com/dhurley15