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The winningest men’s basketball coach in Canadian college history is himself a history buff who, naturally, seeks to discover connections between the past and present.
Steve Konchalski, Coach K to most everyone who knows him, finds it fitting, then, that his last game behind the bench for the St. Francis Xavier X-Men took place a week ago, on March 6, against the Acadia Axemen.
Acadia, after all, was the opponent during his very first game as ST. F.X.’s coach in the fall of 1975.
Yet, his debt to the Wolfville school goes back even further.
“Acadia university changed my life,” he told me last week, his voice, after all these years, still carrying a hint of a nasal Queens, N.Y., twang.
Which may seem like a strange thing to say for a man who spent 46 years coaching Acadia’s perennial conference rival, except this is one of those everyone-knows-everyone Nova Scotia stories.
When Konchalski was growing up in Elmhurst, N.Y. —watching immortals like Oscar Robertson and Jerry West as collegians at Madison Square Garden with his late, equally hoops-smitten brother Tom, playing 365 days a year on the same outdoor courts as the city’s streetball legends — he attended Archbishop Molloy High school.
His coach there was the legendary Jack Curran, who would go on to win more baseball and basketball games than any coach in the United States during his 55-year career.
Curran was also a baseball pitcher of note who played in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ and Philadelphia Phillies’ minor league organizations, and who also, in the post-Second World War years, found himself playing for the Kentville Wildcats in the Nova Scotia senior baseball league.
Curran, along with his Annapolis Valley connection, knew Stu Aberdeen, the pint-sized basketball genius then coaching at Acadia, who used to get in his car and take recruiting trips through New England.
So, in the way these things happen, Aberdeen was in the New York gym one day, watching his friend Curran’s team scrimmage. A lanky sharpshooter caught his attention. When Aberdeen made his pitch to come to Acadia, Konchalski declined at first, in part, because he had to consult an atlas to find out where Nova Scotia was.
“But he wouldn’t take no for an answer and came back down to New York later in the summer and convinced myself and my parents that Acadia was the place for me,” Konchalski, 75, recalled the other day.
Aberdeen was right. Konchalski led a seven-man Acadia squad to its first national championship in 1965, during which he was tournament MVP. After graduation he headed for Dalhousie and a law degree, but his heart was always in the gym.
Konchalski spent a few years as assistant basketball coach and athletic director at Loyola College in Montreal, then, while on a trip to Nova Scotia in 1975, learned that the head coaching job was open at St. F.X.
Heading down to Antigonish for his interview that August, he had a good feeling about the opportunity and “said to myself that if they offered me the job, I would take it.”
X did, and I think we all know how the arrangement has worked out.
Due to the pandemic, the March 6 contest against Acadia was an exhibition. But Konchalski’s squad won 99-76, which meant that he finished his career with 1,495 games and 919 victories, making him the winningest men’s basketball coach in Canadian history.
Even then those numbers only tell part of the story of his basketball life: Konchalski has spent 31 years, in various capacities, around the Canadian national basketball team during which he toured the world. At the same time, thousands of Nova Scotian girls and boys have learned to shoot layups and how to box-out at his 20-plus years of St. F.X. summer basketball camps.
It is no surprise, then, that when I asked about his proudest coaching moments Konchalski had to think for a minute because, when he looks at the 45 years, “it is one great memory.”
“The first one was magical,” he finally said of St. F.X.’s 1993 national championship.
Because it was the first national men’s basketball banner in the school’s history, but also because it was the culmination of something that began when he recruited three young men from the Central African Republic, who arrived in Antigonish unable to speak a word of English and left four years later with St. F.X. degrees and a share of a national championship team.
Also special to him, naturally were his team’s back-to-back national championships in 2000 and 2001, particularly the last one, an overtime thriller.
Then there is something that happens every season, no matter what the team’s win-loss record, when he sees his players walk on stage at the university’s convocation.
“I go every year and make sure I watch every single player get up and get their degree,” he said, “because that’s really what it's all about.”
So much has changed in 46 years: the introduction of the shot clock and three-point line, along with more aggressive defence, have transformed the game. Then there are the training methods, which have made the players of today bigger, faster, stronger, and more dynamic than they’ve ever been. Basketball, and Nova Scotia college sports in general, no longer draw the throngs of spectators they used to.
“When I first started coaching at St. F.X. in 1975, I was five years older than our oldest player, now I’m 50 years older than our oldest player.”
He’s changed as well. The young Coach K. once bit the finger of Acadia coach Ian MacMillan, his old Acadia teammate — the man who lent him his car so that he could drive down to interview for the St. F.X. job -- when he wagged it in Konchalski’s face following a particularly heated game.
Though the fire still burns, he maintains that he has mellowed with age.
How he handles players is different, too.
“When I first started coaching at St. F.X. in 1975, I was five years older than our oldest player, now I’m 50 years older than our oldest player,” Konchalski, a married father of three adult children, said. “They’re not going to adjust to me, I’m going to have to adjust to them.”
He has never compromised on his core values — “loyalty and trust and things of that nature” — but coaching is no longer a “yes sir, no sir profession anymore.” Instead, it's “more of a collaborative approach,” which is the way Konchalski has always tried to coach anyway.
Those relationships, he said, are what he will miss more than anything. The games, the wins and losses, matter to coaches and players.
But coaching taught Konchalski that there is a bigger picture, “where you have an opportunity to work with young people at a very pivotal part of their lives when they are transitioning from their teen years and becoming a young adult and they are trying to find their way and they are trying to create a pathway towards the future.”
To be a successful coach over a long period of time, like he has been, “you must want to help players on and off the court,” he said.
Thus, the relationships he builds are deep. Konchalski keeps in regular touch with Gill Green, a guard from New York City, his first recruit to the X program. Doc Ryan, a former player has been an associate coach with him for 14 years. When Konchalski retires at the end of this month, Tyrell Vernon, an X-Man from 2011-2013 will be his replacement.
Coach K isn’t done with basketball yet. He’s about to become a “free agent” and his intention “is to move forward and see what is out there.” Konchalski is not talking about a full-time job, but it's important for him to stay involved with the game, so he hopes to continue his relationship with the Canadian national team program.
Walking out of his office on the second floor of the Saputo Centre, not far from the gym that bears his name, that last day is going to be hard,” he said. For one thing he must find a home for the 250 pictures that hang on his office walls. “They give me energy,” the history buff said.
All those teams, players and coaches, those friends of the program, those mentors that go all the way back to where his long journey began.
