REBOUND

A basketball coach reflects on the lessons he’s learned from a lifetime in the sport.

In his debut memoir/leadership book, Doherty tells the colorful story of his career in basketball, playing for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels early on. He eventually landed coaching jobs at Notre Dame and UNC, later working for a handful of other teams. The author grounds his narrative in his own life story, from growing up in working-class East Meadow on Long Island to playing varsity ball in high school to being courted by the Tar Heels just as he was entering college. Immediately after college, he was drafted by a professional basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. The coach ended up telling Doherty that he “wasn’t going to make the team”: “I went into a free fall emotionally....My basketball career was over!” He took a job on Wall Street at Kidder Peabody but recounts that his heart was never really in it. “Although I loved living in NYC, I hated my job,” he writes. “I would hit the snooze button each morning, dreading to go to work.” Doherty soon moved back to the world of basketball, becoming head coach at Notre Dame in 1999 and, a year later, head coach at his old alma mater, UNC. The author narrates all this and his subsequent season-by-season career with ease, often expanding on discrete scenarios in order to show the larger lessons he learned. As with most what-I-learned-from-sports memoirs, some of these lessons can be hackneyed and overgeneralized, things like “It is very important for a leader to show strength and hope” during a crisis. or “You are only as good as your last game.” His job as a coach, he writes, was to push his players out of their comfort zones, but his book clearly has the opposite aim. This is the memoir of a sports success looking back in comfort at the straightforward lessons he learned along the way.

An easygoing, affectionate reminiscence about a career in basketball that offers some familiar advice.