Tim O’Toole isn’t my friend. If he was, I wouldn’t be doing my job, and neither would he.
But count this sportswriter as one whose heart sunk to the floor when the words “we’re not going to be back next year,” came out of O’Toole’s mouth last Friday in the Pepsi Center press conference room.
First of all, I’m not sure O’Toole was given fair treatment.
I know all the facts. In eight years, he failed to get to the NCAA tournament, an area in which the two men who had his job before him were more successful.
From the allegations of widespread violations (which proved to be nothing more than mudslinging from an angry former player) to the off-the-court issues that kept the two best players in this year’s senior class suspended for a year combined, his program probably got a lot more negative attention than positive attention.
But he took over a program that had been the least successful in MAAC history, and gave it a pulse. In 2002-03, his team was within a game of the Big Dance, and it gave Boston College all it could handle in the first round of the NIT.
The next year, under the cloud of allegations and investigations, the Stags won 19 games and became the first Fairfield team to have back-to-back winning seasons since the Carter administration.
Certainly, that all must mean something.
I hope, like everyone else on this campus does, that the next Fairfield coach is more successful than O’Toole. If he isn’t, a whole lot of people are going to be awfully frustrated and very disappointed.
But even if he is, I’m gonna miss the heck out of the coach whose team was my first real beat assignment as a newspaper writer.
Whether or not I liked him, I am always going to remember O’Toole because he was the first coach I ever got to know as a reporter. And when I came to Fairfield for the 2003-04 school year, I had my worries.
It’s quite clear that there are more than a few coaches in college basketball who treat sportswriters like garbage.
One of those coaches about 100 miles northeast of here.
And I had to go from writing columns in the teen section of the Springfield Republican to covering a Division I college basketball program.
But O’Toole couldn’t have possibly made things easier for me. He wrote back to my e-mails and returned my phone calls quicker than any other coach at Fairfield, even though he and Head Women’s Basketball Coach Dianne Nolan are the only coaches who have other media requests to fulfill. He acted happy to see me every time, even though there were probably times when he wished I’d scram.
Last year, I had to go to a practice to do an assignment for a sports broadcasting class. I don’t remember what was bothering me, but I was visibly bogged down, and O’Toole noticed. So what did he do? He dragged me outside the gym and gave me a pep talk. Told me I was the first guy from this newspaper in his seven years who asked intelligent questions at press conferences.
I stopped by in early June to talk to him about a story I was writing for the freshman orientation issue. I told him about my summer job as a play-by-play announcer for the Bridgeport Bluefish. And then, despite the fact that Tim O’Toole doesn’t know a thing about baseball, we talked baseball for 10 minutes.
This October, I went to a pre-season practice about three weeks before the start of the season. It was the first time I had showed up to watch the new team, and I hadn’t met any of the freshmen. So at the first break in action after I showed up, he made every new player introduce himself to me.
Then came last Friday. The Stags had just lost 84-77 to Niagara, wrapping up a disappointing season in which they failed to meet their already low expectations.
The usual suspects – seniors Michael Bell, DeWitt Maxwell and Terrance Todd – sat at the table next to O’Toole and told reporters how it felt that their Fairfield careers were over.
Little did we know, but the whole time O’Toole sat still, knowing his career was over too.
O’Toole talked a lot about turning young men into men that would be able to do good things in the real world, something his players said he did exceptionally well.
Then Emery Filmer from the Stamford Advocate asked him a question that had been a long time coming.
How does he feel about not having gotten to the NCAAs in eight years?
He asked us if we were done talking to the players. We said yes, so he told them to leave. Then, his last words as Fairfield’s head coach started to flow.
The first thing he said was that he wanted to thank Filmer and me for being at every game. The least I can do is thank him in return for being a class act.
Like I said, Tim O’Toole isn’t my friend. When a reporter and a coach become friends, both are instantly corrupted.
But if I could pick a basketball coach to be my friend, the guy who’s packing up his office right now at the Walsh Athletic Center would be at the top of my list.
Leave a Reply