Dan Hurley family tree: Explaining UConn coach’s family basketball ties

Dan Hurley finds himself in an all too familiar situation on Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis when Connecticut men’s basketball takes on Illinois in the Final Four.

It is the third Final Four in the last four seasons that the 53-year-old coach has led the Huskies to during their six-year rise back to being one of the top college basketball programs in the country.

He holds a 17-3 record in March Madness with the Huskies, and is looking to become the seventh Division I men’s basketball coach to win at least three national championship titles. Remove the first two seasons that Hurley led the Huskies to the NCAA Tournament, both of which were first-round exits, UConn is 17-1 in its last 18 March Madness games.

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The Huskies’ success under Hurley has not only established him as one of the top coaches in the country and garnered interest from the NBA (hello, Los Angeles Lakers), but it has also bumped their resume up on the blue blood rankings list, which can see them move past Duke with their seventh title in program history.

But Hurley’s success and rise in his profession also put a spotlight on his roots and how he got started in coaching, which, if you know anything about the Hurley family, all started in a gymnasium in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Here’s what to know about Hurley’s family tree:

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Dan Hurley family tree

Who is Dan Hurley’s dad?

Dan Hurley is the son of legendary New Jersey high school basketball coach Bobby Hurley Sr., who is also enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

Bobby Hurley Sr. spent nearly four decades as a high school basketball coach at St. Anthony’s in Jersey City. In his 39 seasons at St. Anthony’s, Bobby Hurley Sr. won over 1,000 games and 28 state championships while turning the program into a national powerhouse. He also led St. Anthony’s to 18 undefeated seasons.

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As noted by CT Insider, Dan Hurley went head-to-head against his dad for nine seasons from 2001 to 2010 at the high school circuit, as the UConn head coach started his career at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark. Bobby Hurley Sr. retired from coaching after the 2016-17 basketball season, when St. Anthony was forced to shut down due to declining enrollment and finances.

The two-time NCAA national championship coach fielded multiple questions about being a byproduct of a high school basketball coach, and whether his intensity on the sidelines comes from that, ahead of UConn’s second-round game vs. UCLA, where Dan Hurley went up against Mick Cronin, whose dad was also a high school coach.

“If you don’t like me, you’d hate my dad. I bet Mick would say the same thing. We’re coach’s kids. For me, growing up in Jersey, North Jersey, Jersey City, I coach the way my dad would be coaching this college. Whether you would like that or not,” Dan Hurley said. “You just have a special relationship to your team, to your players, to the outcome, to the lifestyle of being a coach when you’re a coach’s kid.

“It’s so personal for coaches like me and Mick, which is where you see, at times, emotional reactions to things that happen on the court because it truly feels like, personally, it’s your world, your team. The outcome of the game, it manifests itself sometimes in how we behave.”

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Following UConn’s win over Duke in the Elite Eight, Bobby Hurley Sr. told college basketball reporter Adam Zagoria that the Huskies’ come-from-behind win against the Blue Devils, which featured a buzzer-beater from Braylon Mullins, “the singularly most incredible moment” he’s seen in person following a college basketball game.

“In the times I’ve been around it, this is the singularly most incredible moment (I’ve seen) following college basketball. I don’t think I’ve ever been around the game where we were on the right end of a last-second shot,” Hurley told Zagoria.