Return of the Mac

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Rare is the top-level college athlete who actually sets a goal to, someday, be a top-level college coach.

Prove it wrong. Find the kid who grew up dribbling a basketball for hours around his driveway, who wouldn't leave the gym until he drained 100 3-pointers, whose ultimate goal was to be his generation's Phil Jackson, not its Michael Jordan. You sure wouldn't have found him in the early 2000s in Scranton.

Back when legendary Syracuse men's basketball coach Jim Boeheim made the two-hour trek south on Interstate 81 to recruit him, Gerry McNamara never envisioned a day when Boeheim's program would be his, because the Scranton hoops icon never considered coaching as an ambition. The greats rarely do.

"I never envisioned being a coach. I always envisioned playing in the NBA," McNamara said. "(Coaching) is something I didn't envision, but immediately, I knew it was something I could love from the first workout I did with the guards back in 2009. I knew that this was going to be something I could dive fully into."

On Monday night, McNamara will be patrolling the sidelines for the first time in a game that matters as Syracuse's head coach when the Orange host the University of New Haven in the regular season opener at the JHA Wireless Dome. It will mark a long-awaited homecoming to a program he helped to its lone national championship in 2003, willed to an epic Big East title in 2006, aided as an assistant coach to nine NCAA tournament appearances and two Final Fours — and is also pining for a return to that glory.

Nobody knows better than McNamara that the one NCAA tournament game tiny Siena University played in during his two seasons as head coach there is one more than the once-mighty Orange have played in over the last five years.

Back in the arena with which he became synonymous, in a role most everyone there but him figured he'd be ideal to assume.

Back to prove an ever-changing landscape in collegiate athletics is no match for ideals that have always mattered most to him.

Back to pursue a return to glory, in a place longing for it.

There is no better place to gauge the excitement of McNamara's Syracuse return than on the team's website.

There, atop a list of links that will take you to the season schedule, statistics, or anything about the program's extensive list of All-Americans that range from Dave Bing to Carmelo Anthony, you'll find a link that will take you to a page dedicated solely to McNamara.

"Welcome Home," the headline blares, in oversized capital letters. Cleverly, Syracuse is calling this season the beginning of the program's "McNamERA."

He was only gone two seasons, off to guide Siena after Syracuse's athletic administrators elected to replace the iconic Boeheim as head coach with Adrian Autry in 2023. But the road to becoming the Orange's head coach seemed somewhat long for McNamara.

At the beginning, he put it off for a while, floating around professional leagues in Eastern Europe and even the NBA's G-League, scrapping for an NBA opportunity that never did come his way. Even as he longed for a return home, it took him two weeks in the spring of 2009 to consider Boeheim's offer to join his staff as a graduate assistant coach working with the team's guards.

"(Boeheim) said, "I think it's something you're probably not looking for, but I think it's also something you'll be good at," McNamara recalled.

McNamara made the painful decision to end his playing days and pursue a different basketball destiny.

So, with each bit of instruction, each bit of through-the-battles wisdom, he provided stars like young point guard Scoop Jardine and former teammate Andy Rautins, the Orange's starting shooting guard in 2009, McNamara learned something about his new role.

"I had the attention of the guys I was working with," McNamara said. "These guys knew exactly who I was and saw the success. Andy Rautins, he became my guy, one of my best friends to this day. But working with him every day, just firing hundreds of passes at him and him just shooting, knowing I was a part of the success of anything I could do for this kid, because I knew he was going to be ready on game night, which he always was. It was just kind of the same rewarding feeling as if I went out there and made the play myself. I helped the guy prepare to go do it himself. It's the same reward (as playing), in a completely different way."

He always believed coaching basketball couldn't exactly match the feeling of playing it.

But coaching sure felt an awful lot like competing. And, really, competition has always been the driving force in his athletic life.

McNamara was hooked, and he attacked his new passion with the same ferocity he mustered during the PIAA playoffs at Bishop Hannan, or the Big Dance with the Orange.

He went from graduate assistant to full-time assistant in two seasons under Boeheim's tutelage. Autry made him Syracuse's associate head coach in 2023, when he took over as head coach. During the time in between, McNamara became one of the most consistent recruiters along the east coast, dedicated to building personal relationships in an age of college basketball where so many programs rely on transactional ones.

In his debut season at Syracuse, McNamara finds himself in a rare situation. Technically, he's a newcomer, barely more than 200 days on the job, but his fingerprints already are all over the Orange roster.

White, a highly regarded forward who boasted offers from some of the top college programs in the nation coming out of high school, committed to Syracuse after the then-assistant McNamara spoke to him on a recruiting visit. With lucrative offers to make a switch to another program through the NCAA's transfer portal after Autry's firing, White elected to stay with the Orange, primarily because they hired the guy he wanted to play for all along.

"He," White raved of McNamara, "is the ultimate human being."

It's a rare thing to hear from college athletes these days.

Prospects like White typically don't look for those kinds of relationships when they're searching for a school to play at, because they rules say they don't have to; Long gone are the days when a prospective student-athlete, at 18 years old, essentially made a four-year decision coming out of prep school. The transfer portal allows them to pursue any opportunity available, and new Name, Image and Likeness rules that can lead to the better transfers earning upwards of $1 million to skip town essentially makes them no different than NBA free agents.

But for as much as his reputation as a player intrigues his charges, it is McNamara's charm away from the court that has always stood out to players.

Scrappy freshman point guard Ryan Moesch, who committed to McNamara at Siena, followed McNamara to Syracuse not because their games were similar, but because he found his chosen coach to be "a real dude." Sophomore forward Frances Folefac played for McNamara as a freshman at Siena, then tagged along to Syracuse because McNamara "treats me as family."

There may not be a better example of McNamara's emphasis on building relationship-driven programs than Gavin Doty.

The 6-foot-5 junior who starred for Siena in its near upset of top-seeded Duke in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in March was a McNamara favorite long before his recruiting process began.

Doty grew up in Fulton, N.Y., in the shadow of Lake Ontario and a 30-minute drive away from the Syracuse camps he used to frequent as a youngster. That is where he caught McNamara's eye, and where the baby-faced sharpshooter first dreamt of playing college ball.

The first college visit he made was to McNamara at Siena. He had five others lined up after that.

He liked Siena a lot. But he loved McNamara, his family-first viewpoints, his emphasis on belief, his passion for winning. So when McNamara asked what it would take to convince him to sign on with his Saints. That's when Doty smiled, and surprised McNamara — and his own parents, for that matter — with the news that he'd be canceling his other five visits.

"I've never heard anybody say anything bad about G-Mac, in terms of his character and how he treats people, how passionate he is and how he was as a player," Doty said. "Being around him is amazing. He makes you want to run through a brick wall for him. He'll say something before a game, or even a practice, and you can feel his spirit. You can feel his passion, especially about this place."

He has gone through successes and frustrations. He has had plans foiled, and balked at different ones. He began his career in a world of collegiate athletics that seems almost backward compared to the one that exists now and has embraced the personal changes in approach that had to come with it.

But, in a situation where coaches have to deal as much with agents now as they do with parents, high school coaches and, sometimes, the players themselves, there is one ideal from which Gerry McNamara has no plans to deviate.

Each day, he and members of his staff spend an hour outside of practices or games working with players on personal development. That might be basketball-related. It might be education-based. Whatever it is, though, the intention is clear: Build successful people, not just winning rosters.

"Ultimately, we come in here as competitors, and we need to win the day," White said. "But as a man, there are days you don't win. There are times you don't come out on top. Those are the days when coach pulls you aside and says, 'You did this wrong and this wrong, but I can see you want to get better here, and I know you can get better there.' It's just little things like that with him.

"What that tells me is, I know he's watching me. I know he believes in my game. We commit to these coaches with a dream, and this coach, he believes in my dream too."

In essence, Gerry McNamara has always been about dreams. He accomplished his fair share as a player, for sure.

This week, he officially sets sail on a different era of them.

If he can eventually achieve the goal of getting Syracuse back to national prominence, and that midcourt celebration after the national championship game he knows so well, it will further emblaze his legend both in upstate New York and back in Scranton. But he knows, just as well, that pretty much everybody who is hired to do the job he has ends up getting thanked for his efforts and urged on his way.

Those relationships, then, better lead to a winning culture, he said.

"It's what we're judged on," McNamara conceded. "But I won't sacrifice the development piece. I said it when I first got the Siena job: We're going to recruit high-character kids, and we're going to develop them. I'm not going to change that model. We hope all the work we put in with them ultimately leads to that gameday moment where it's no longer about development. Now you've got to perform."

Nobody did that better at Syracuse as a player than McNamara, when he was pursuing his own dream. He returns to the sidelines Monday pushing to live another one.