By Luke Mauro, QBSN Staff Writer
You typically won’t find a soul inside the TD Bank
Sports Center at Lender Court on an April day. The 3,500 seat arena looks extra
blue with no Quinnipiac fans and their gameday gold there to fill the colored
seats. The lights and scoreboard are off,
with the arena being lit only by the sun gleaming in, making you feel guilty
for being inside on such a beautiful day.
But that’s exactly where you’ll find Quinnipiac’s Eric Eaton at this
time of the year- inside, at the empty and lonely Lender Court.
Eaton, taking a break from his recruiting and
off-season regiment, is there to run individual drills with players who are
willing to take advantage of the opportunity.
Waiting for players to show up, Eaton sits in the seat on the bench that
he hopes to call his own someday; the one at the very end, closest to the
scorer’s table.
The one for the head coach.
“I set a goal for myself when I started [coaching]
to become a head coach by 40,”Eaton said, leaving him with a couple of years to
reach his goal.
Eaton sits there telling stories about recruiting headcase-type
players, about people attempting to bribe him during recruitment, and about
being a father, having to take care of three kids (and a dog) each morning as
they prepare to go to school. The
Quinnipiac assistant coach tells each story with a smile on his face and
passion in his eyes. It’s the same
passion that he exhibits on a daily basis during the basketball season, whether
it’s at practice or sitting next to Tom Moore on gamedays.
The passion that he shows for the game is just one
of many traits and qualities on a long list of reasons for why everyone around
him says he’d make a great head coach.
“He’s a student of the game; he has a passion for
the game, and he’s a good role model for kids.
I think he has the whole package,” Quinnipiac’s Assistant Athletic
Director Billy Mecca said.
Mecca, a former head coach at the collegiate level,
says it’s only a matter of time before Eaton is able to make that step up,
something the Worcester native has been eying for 15 years now.
“There’s no doubt that at some point, when the lords
thinks it’s the right time to be offered a job and take a job, he’s certainly
going to be prepared for it,” Mecca said.
However, if it was up to Ted Paulauskas, the
athletic director at Assumption College, Eaton’s journey would be
complete. Eaton was an assistant at the
Division III school for a year in 1999 and Paulauskas was attempting to bring
him back to his hometown, this time as the head coach of the Greyhounds.
It was at the end of the 2010-2011 season when the
position became available and Eaton interviewed for the job last April.
“When the job came open I went for it because I do
want to be a head coach very badly, and I thought it’d be a place where I could
start building my head coaching resume,” Eaton Said.
It was April 24, Easter morning, and Eaton was
packing his wife and kids into his car outside his Connecticut home to drive up
to Massachusetts to spend the holiday with his family. That’s when he received a voicemail.
“I think I’m about to make your Easter a little bit
more special,” the man leaving the message said.
It was Paulauskas, who couldn’t even wait until
after the holiday to deliver the good news.
However, he wouldn’t get as good of news delivered back to him.
“The more my wife and I talked about it, the more
the excitement surrounding this place and my enjoyment of being around our guys
was way too much to overcome at the time.
Staying here was the right thing for us,” Eaton said. “I don’t regret it
for a second, in all honesty.”
The first job offer isn’t always the best job offer
that you’ll get. Quinnipiac’s head coach,
Tom Moore, turned down job offers from both a school in the Atlantic-10
Conference and the Colonial Athletic Association before finding the right fit
in the Northeast Conference in Quinnipiac.
“So often ego comes in to play with all these
decisions. My ego was telling me to
pursue the Atlantic-10 job because of the Atlantic-10, but my head told me that
Quinnipiac, in the Northeast Conference, was a better job,” Moore said. “You should feel like you’re going to a place
that you can win and it’s a good job.”
Assumption was Eaton’s third attempt at becoming a
head coach, but the first time he was offered the position. Eaton also interviewed for the job at Becker
College, a Division III school in Worcester in 2003, and for Holy Cross
following the 2009-2010 season. Eaton
was an assistant at Holy Cross from 2000-2004, helping the Crusaders reach the
NCAA tournament in three-consecutive seasons.
Following the move from Holy Cross, Eaton became the
associate head coach at Albany University in 2006, his second and final season
with the team. It was the closest he has
gotten to becoming a head coach in terms of his title as he then joined Moore’s
staff at Quinnipiac, which doesn’t possess the associate head coach term.
It’s always a difficult journey for an assistant
coach to move over that one seat on the bench in terms of job status, but even
more difficult when you’re an assistant at a smaller school.
“These athletic directors, for the most part, look
for guys with big name schools attached to them. Unfortunately, the perception of our business
is those are the best coaches because they’re at that level,” Eaton said. “It makes it hard for guys at smaller schools,
like myself and some guys that I’m close with, that we’re sure we’re every bit
as good as those guys but we don’t coach in the ACC; we don’t coach in the Big
Ten or the Big 12 or the Big East.”
Therefore, Eaton’s next job may have to be as an
assistant again before he can make that step up.
“I think it would be hard for them [the assistant
coaches] to become a Division I head coach from the spots they’re in right
now. The path may be for them to go to a
higher level as an assistant coach, whether it be the Atlantic-10 or the Big
East, or something like that, and then possibly come back down to this level as
a head coach,” Moore said.
Mecca, meanwhile, is in agreement with Eaton that
there really isn’t a big difference in the different-sized conferences, in
terms of coaching.
“You’ll probably surround yourself with better
players as the level reaches higher, but coaching is coaching. I think you got some pretty good Division III
coaches out there that, given the opportunity, could be great Division I
coaches,” Mecca said.
Along with the big name comes exposure for these
schools, something that’s lacking when coaching at a smaller school like
Quinnipiac. Of course, the big-time
conferences are on TV much more than the NEC and also feature the big-time
players. When a coach recruits a certain
player, like a Kevin Durant or a Carmelo Anthony, their name gets attached to
that player, making themselves highly regarded.
“We don’t get that opportunity. No one cares that I
recruited James Johnson,” Eaton said.
All James Johnson did was score 1,729 points, the
most by any Bobcat since Quinnipiac moved to Divison I in 1998, and the seventh
most in Quinnipiac’s 83-year history.
Eaton is also just one of three
current assistant coaches under 40 years old to lead five mid-major teams to
the NCAA Tournament.
However, Eaton is starting to get the recognition
deserved. He was selected to attend the
2012 Villa 7 Consortium in May. This
event, in its ninth year, is put on by Nike and Virginia Commonwealth
University to bring together athletic directors and elite assistant coaches in
attempt to prepare the next generation of college basketball leaders. Eaton will be just one of five assistants at
the event from a mid-major conference.
“I'm sure Eric will find the event
to be very beneficial to his personal and professional growth. Eric's
invitation to such an exclusive event speaks to his rising profile in coaching
circles and the growing reputation of Quinnipiac basketball,” Moore said.
Eaton said that at this level, it’s all about
networking if he wants to move up to become a head coach, and he’ll be able to
network with 29 other assistant coaches and 20 athletic directors at this
event.
Eaton is just one of many examples of assistant
coaches who don’t get the opportunity they may deserve because they lack the big-name
school on their resume. However, Eaton
will continue to try and reach the goal he set for himself 15 years ago.
For many people, turning 40 is a milestone. For the 36-year-old Eaton, he hopes that
milestone is met simultaneously with another, that of becoming a head coach.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s going to be
successful. He’s going to be effective
because he’s going to be able to develop players and run a program that’s run
with integrity.” Mecca said.
“I think it’ll definitely happen for him; it’s just
a matter of when and the right situation.
He’s positioning himself and working hard to hopefully be in that
situation soon,” Moore said.
