A coach’s coach through and through, Fran O’Hanlon says goodbye to Lafayette | Mike Sielski

EASTON, Pa. — The lights went down at the Kirby Sports Center on Saturday afternoon, just a few minutes before the final regular-season home game that Fran O’Hanlon coached at Lafayette, and little more than an hour later, he was wishing that the arena had stayed dark. They played a tribute video on the scoreboard, and they unveiled a maroon banner in the rafters with the broad strokes of O’Hanlon’s 27 years here: the three NCAA Tournament appearances, the four Patriot League titles, the most victories of any Lafayette coach, the most of any Patriot League coach.

Then, at halftime, he shuffled across the court to the locker room, taking a quick glance at the scoreboard, his face a flat frown, the Leopards down by 20 to Lehigh, their 78-58 loss a formality.

“When they say, ‘You’re the winningest coach,’ I’m also the losingest coach,” O’Hanlon said, and Saturday was the latest and next-to-last example of the humbling nature of that truth. He has won 362 games at Lafayette, and unless the Leopards embark on the most miraculous national-champion run in college basketball history, he will end his career with 432 losses.

As going-away parties go, this one was a bummer, though not necessarily a shock. O’Hanlon, who is 73, had announced last month that he would retire after this season, and Lafayette is 10-19, the pandemic disrupting its early schedule and forcing it into a 14-games-in-29-days grind through January and February. The Leopards’ first victory, back in November over Rutgers — the kind of win, over a superior opponent, that O’Hanlon was always dangerous to deliver — seems a distant memory for a team without the depth and talent of those that O’Hanlon shepherded to the NCAA Tournament in 1999, 2000, and 2015.

In a program and a league where basketball is kept in at least something close to its proper measure in higher education, a season like this one and a performance like Saturday’s are perils of the profession. The graduation of one standout senior is enough to cause a multiyear drop-off. A guard flashes open on a backdoor cut to the basket, but the bounce pass is too firm and off target and skids out of bounds. The spirit is willing, but the flesh majors in chemical engineering.

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But O’Hanlon’s record will never be the truest measure of his tenure at Lafayette. He was a coach’s coach, taking the tactical and life lessons he learned from his time as Jack Kraft’s two-guard at Villanova, from his years playing and coaching overseas, and applying them in ways that surprised even his peers. “Offensive genius,” Villanova coach Jay Wright said. “He’s got an incredible offensive mind.”

During a practice in his first season as an assistant coach at Penn, working under his childhood friend from West Philadelphia, Fran Dunphy, O’Hanlon watched a player, while under his own basket, try to save the ball from going out of bounds — a no-no, generally speaking, because an opposing player might turn the blind pass into a layup. Always save it to the closest corner, O’Hanlon advised the Quakers. Then your teammates will know where you’re throwing the ball, and they’ll get to that spot before the other guys do. Dunphy had never thought to tell a team that. “He was just a cut above,” Dunphy said.

He had to be. Lafayette was the last Patriot League school capable of awarding athletic scholarships to start awarding athletic scholarships; Army and Navy still don’t, of course, because they don’t charge tuition. “Those were really difficult times,” Bruce McCutcheon, who was Lafayette’s athletic director from 2001 through 2017, said Saturday. “There was a beer or two popped after that.” It took Lafayette’s trustees until 2006 — 16 years after the league’s formation, eight years after the league changed its non-scholarship policy to keep Holy Cross from bolting — to vote to give O’Hanlon and the college’s other coaches a level playing field, as if there were some higher virtue in handicapping them as long as possible, in standing athwart college sports modernity, yelling, Stop.

It was the ultimate coaching Catch-22: The better that O’Hanlon’s teams fared, the more the administration argued that he didn’t need scholarships to succeed.

“To play in your own conference when everyone else is giving scholarships and you’re not, that’s literally unheard of,” Wright said. “I don’t know anywhere else where that’s ever happened. And they were competing for championships without the scholarships, and you never heard him complain.”

Instead, he made do. Ahead of a matchup against Army, John Gallagher, O’Hanlon’s assistant for three years in the early 2000s, was incredulous to learn that the Leopards would take the three-hour bus ride to West Point on the morning of the game. He lobbied to have the team leave a day early and stay overnight. Gal, O’Hanlon told him, in Europe, I took a train with my team 24 hours to Italy. I got off the train and dropped 48. We’re going to take the bus to Army on the day of the game.

“It was magical,” Gallagher, a Delaware County native who has been the University of Hartford’s head coach since 2010, said in a phone interview. “I always said his consistency outlasted his intensity, but his intensity was always there — the intensity of the game, how sacred the game was for him. It would be a miserable place if you liked basketball, because you needed to love it.

“It was f—g beautiful, man. It was f—g beautiful. I was like a wild horse with him. He really tamed me and taught me to think and how to coach. I literally owe him my career. I never would have lasted 12 years somewhere without Fran O’Hanlon. Every day there was a quote of the day. ‘Leave it better than you found it … The smaller the detail, the greater the value.’ The Holy Spirit sent me there.”

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Lafayette has hired a firm to search for O’Hanlon’s successor. Good luck to that group in finding someone with his staying power, someone who commanded the same respect from his peers. After Saturday’s loss, he waved to an appreciative crowd as he walked off the court, and he said the things that coaches say: that he didn’t think about retiring unless someone mentioned it to him, that he was focused only on what was ahead for his team. “I’m sure there will be a big hole after our last game,” Fran O’Hanlon said. Yes. Yes, there will.