Shattered Hoop Dreams

A week after he was fired as Cal State Northridge basketball coach, Pete Cassidy has rebounded from some of the anger and frustration.

During a 45-minute interview early this week, he looked more relaxed than he had at any point during his 25th season as the Matadors’ coach.

But one question still nags at him: Why?

“Whatever reasons they have in mind are not clear to me,” Cassidy said. “What they told me is we are going into a conference now, we have money now, it’s time to make a change.

“That logic escapes me.”

Cassidy, who turns 62 in June, insists all he really wanted was one more season, to get him to the age when a better retirement package kicks in. He said he was told by interim Athletic Director Paul Bubb that the decision was made now so the new athletic director could have a hand in hiring the new coach.

“I said, ‘Well, if that’s your logic, why don’t you just let everyone go until the new guy comes in so he can fill every position?’ ” Cassidy said.

Cassidy also said he thought that Bob Hiegert, who was fired as athletic director last summer, would have allowed him to coach one more season, particularly since that season would have been Northridge’s first in a legitimate conference, the Big Sky.

“I think his loyalties are strong enough that he would have said ‘Go ahead and take a shot at a conference, go one more year at this thing’ ” Cassidy said. “Because he was an athlete and a great coach, he understands what loyalty is and would have given me a chance.”

Cassidy will still get one more year at Northridge to reach that retirement age, though he’s not sure in what capacity. He may be teaching or in an administrative role.

After that, he has no idea what he is going to do.

“Frankly I think I’m too young to be put out to pasture,” he said. “I can’t imagine what I would do with myself if I had to wake up in the morning without something worthwhile to do. I don’t putz around the garage. While I think yardwork at some times is therapeutic, it’s not something that enthralls me. And I don’t golf. Maybe I’ll have to take that up. . . .

“My wife works and I don’t think she will tolerate me being a retired guy and just hanging out. Besides, if she knew I didn’t have a job to go to, she’d have a ‘honey-do’ list so long it’d take me into the next century to finish it.”

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When Cassidy was called into Bubb’s office last Wednesday morning, he expected to talk about Hoop-It-Up, a three-on-three basketball tournament that was to be held at Northridge.

But Bubb threw something at him he didn’t expect.

“When I was a youngster I could hit a curveball pretty well, but that one got me pretty good,” Cassidy said of his surprise at the decision.

He may have been caught off-guard by the timing, but he certainly knew his firing was a possibility. He was in the last year of his contract and he had just finished his seventh consecutive losing season, a 7-20 campaign that dropped his overall record to 334-337.

Cassidy sidesteps opportunities to explain that he was not competing on an even financial level at Division I because he might be perceived as making excuses.

“I’m not going to sit back and try to defend Pete Cassidy’s coaching performance to people who, frankly, don’t know what they are talking about,” he said. “If my coaching peers want to judge me, then they are qualified to do that.”

Cassidy also responded to criticisms that, at his age, he was out of touch with modern basketball and the modern player.

Though he admitted he was not as close to players as he used to be because of his age, he said: “That doesn’t mean I can’t communicate, that I have lost my ability to coach. If you talk to a guy who doesn’t play as much as he thinks he should, then he says, ‘I can’t communicate with Coach.’ If you talk to a starter who does everything right, he will say, ‘Coach is a really good guy.’ ”

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Cassidy still goes to the office every morning. He’s planning the team banquet, making sure the players are going to class, writing thank-you letters to friends who have called to console him.

In fact, he still files ideas in his folder of ways to improve the team for next year before he catches himself, realizing that for the first time in more than 25 years he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.

In the short term, he looks forward to the time when he stops making the people around him uncomfortable.

“You walk around school like you have leprosy,” he said. “No one wants to look at you. They don’t know what to say. And I feel bad for those people.”

Cassidy said he’s not concerned with who his replacement might be, and he won’t try to influence the decision.

“Obviously what I say is not going to carry a lot of weight,” he said. “Maybe if I really want someone the best thing I could do is shut up. . . . There are a thousand people who could do the job. No one is irreplaceable. And I’m certainly not.”