La Salle special assistant Joe Mihalich’s inspiring road back to the bench honored by the PSWA

Before every La Salle men’s basketball game, Joe Mihalich sits a few rows off the court and watches the opposing team warm up. It’s a ritual of sorts. By that point, he’s seen the Explorers’ next opponent on film and scouted it plenty. But he wants to see it with his own eyes, how big the players are and how they work out before games.

Mihalich is an observer, which explains a big part of his new life as a basketball coach, now as a special assistant to La Salle coach Fran Dunphy.

The 67-year-old Mihalich is more than three years removed from a 2020 stroke that could have killed him. His speech, while improving, is still slowed. His job title is special assistant to the head coach, and NCAA rules bar him from coaching on the floor during La Salle practices. But Mihalich, in his second season with the Explorers, is not far from the boundary line and does what any other assistant coach would do. He’s heavily involved in scouting and putting together practice plans. He’s in the seat next to Dunphy on game days, and he has a great deal of input (more on that later).

It has been a long road to get here. The immediate aftermath of the stroke involved three weeks in the intensive care unit and three more weeks in a rehab hospital before the hard work began to get the strength and mobility back in his right side. The work has continued. Mihalich still meets weekly on Zoom with a speech therapist in Long Island, where he was the coach at Hofstra when his life changed.

Sure the communication can be challenging at times, but “I am getting better,” Mihalich said, and Dunphy concurred.

» READ MORE: It will take more than a stroke to suppress Joe Mihalich’s basketball expertise | Mike Jensen

Mihalich’s long road back to the bench was honored Wednesday night, when the Philadelphia Sports Writers Association honored the man who grew up on Chew Avenue, near La Salle’s campus, with its Most Courageous Award.

“It was very humbling,” Mihalich said. “It really was.”

How Mihalich ended up back on the La Salle bench is pretty simple. He and Dunphy both played at La Salle and served together as assistants under Lefty Ervin and Speedy Morris in the 1980s. The two remained friends, and Dunphy long admired how Mihalich’s teams played. When Dunphy accepted the job at La Salle in 2022, calling his buddy was an easy choice.

“I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle all of this,” Dunphy said. “To know I have him with me and by my side is tremendously comforting.

“He’s La Salle. His dad taught there. He went there. His wife went there. His wife’s father ran the evening school. He’s La Salle through and through. Those reasons alone were enough for me.”

But there’s more. There’s a comfort level Mihalich brings with him, Dunphy said, and Mihalich “can do everything I do and better. ... He’s my head coach.”

“He’ll say to me during the course of a game, ‘Let’s run this play.’ OK, well, that’s what we’ll run. There’s no question about it. That’s what we do. Or he’ll say, ‘Let’s play some zone,’ and I’ll say, ‘OK, that’s what we’ll do.’ ”

In some ways, it’s like the Explorers have two head coaches. His speech might be slowed, but Mihalich’s basketball brain works as well as it always has. This is a coach who led Niagara to a .566 winning percentage, two NCAA Tournament berths, and three NIT appearances in 15 seasons. He’s in the school’s Hall of Fame. He then won 60.5% of his games in seven seasons at Hofstra, including a Colonial Athletic Association Tournament win and a berth in the 2020 NCAA Tournament that was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dunphy long ago ceded practice planning and futuristic work like scouting opponents to his staff members as a way to give them ownership of things the team is doing — and it also lets Dunphy focus on other things. Not that he doesn’t change things or have a say. But how many coaching contingents in the country have assistants with Mihalich’s resumé?

The communication challenges between Mihalich and the team are fewer and further between, Dunphy said, a product of time, given the coaching staff and the fact that most of the players have been around Mihalich for so long at this point.

“He’s not sitting down having these lengthy conversations with people, but his communication skills are so good, the nonverbal aspect of how he lives his life is just extraordinary,” Dunphy said. “He knows when you can understand and when you can’t.

“We know all the things he’s going to suggest anyway. It’s just this nonverbal communication that just makes you comfortable in being in his presence.”

Mihalich said he’s more patient now than he ever was.

“That’s a function of our age and how many years we’ve been doing this thing,” Dunphy said. “You’re not going to get perfection every day. You’re looking for it, but it’s probably not coming. So how are you going to handle it when it doesn’t come? We talk about that a lot.”

To that end, Dunphy sees how that looks in the way Mihalich works on his speech.

“He doesn’t get frustrated at it, even a little bit,” Dunphy said. “I marvel at how he accepts what happened, he fights through it, and is trying to get better every single day. If you’re paying attention, you get taught every day about how to handle life’s ups and downs.”

Mihalich isn’t sure what he’d be doing if Dunphy had not made the call. Two of the three sons he has with his wife, Mary, are basketball coaches. So maybe Mihalich would be driving up to Connecticut to help Matt with his Avon Old Farms prep school team, or maybe he’d be infiltrating Steve Donahue’s game-planning at Penn, where Joe Jr. is an assistant.

This, however, fits just fine.

Asked what he’s learned about himself over the last few years, Mihalich said: “Where do I begin?

“I know that my wife, Mary, is unbelievable. She helps me daily.”

He’s learned, too, to balance the emotions of this all.

“The nature of it is sad,” Mihalich said of the stroke. “But I’m lucky I’m doing this.”