The annual reshuffling of college basketball coaches began early this year. Sadly, the process claimed its first victim when Siena College parted company with its coach, Mitch Buonaguro.
Coach B came to the Siena job with the highest expectations — ironic now — given that he in large measure helped create them. Under his predecessor, Fran McCaffrey, Mitch and the Saints enjoyed the greatest single run in the storied 75 years of the Siena program. Siena had inched up the bar for success and become, in some minds, a poor man's Butler or Gonzaga.
Then it changed.
Coach McCaffrey was lured to greener pastures in the Midwest, and Siena hired his second-in-command with the hope that the dream would continue. It didn't. The truth is Coach B got the Siena job because of his success with Coach McCaffrey; it is also why, three years later, he lost it.
The only thing Coach B was guilty of was exquisitely poor timing. The fact is there has never been a finer person to lead the Siena team.
Mitch Buonaguro was a relentless worker, a teacher and role model without peer, and a true gentleman that embodied the finest Franciscan traditions of Siena College.
He will be missed.
Kevin G. O'Haire
Watervliet