The UConn men's basketball team's recent second consecutive NCAA championship in 2024 marked the university's sixth national men's title, and no one is more proud than Sande Greer, 75, son of legendary UConn men's basketball coach Hugh Greer.
(The UConn women's basketball teams have won 11 NCAA championships, all under the leadership of head coach Geno Auriemma)
"Ah, there must be a smile on everybody's face in Storrs," said Sande Greer, who makes furniture in Botswana, South Africa, where he moved more than 40 years ago. "I'm absolutely blown away by the team's success."
Sande Greer is the youngest son of Hugh and Billie Greer. His brother, Scott, who died July 11, 2022, at the age of 86, was 13 years older than Sande. Billie Greer died July 19, 1994, at age 88.
Former UConn men's basketball coach Hugh Greer died of a heart attack 10 games into the 1962-1963 season, at age 58. Sande Greer was 13 at the time.
Sande Greer said his father would have been thrilled by UConn's recent hoop success, especially by the decision-making of team coach, Dan Hurley, who Sande Greer called a genius.
Hugh Greer had led the Huskies to eight post-season tournament berths in his 17-year UConn career, but only had one victory, a 1956 first-round win over Manhattan.
"Back then, winning the Yankee Conference was UConn's main goal," said Sande Greer, who, as a child in the 1950s, routinely participated in the team's basketball practices at UConn's field house. (The gym later was renamed the Hugh S. Greer Field House in 1991.) "Winning a tournament game wasn't nearly as important as it is today."
Hugh Greer was considered "The Father of Connecticut Basketball" and coached from 1947 to 1963. As head coach, he compiled a 285-112 record, for a 72 % win percentage. His teams won 12 Yankee Conference titles and never finished lower than second.
Greer was the winningest men's coach in UConn history until former head basketball coach Jim Calhoun surpassed him in 1998.
The Greer family lived in a house on the Storrs, CT, campus, Greer said. The family also owned a home at Groton Point in Groton, CT where Billie Greer lived until her death in 1994.
Sande Greer loved growing up in Storrs and hanging out with the players at practices and games, he said. He attended Deerfield Academy, an all-boys high school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Although his father encouraged him to play basketball, stardom and varsity play eluded the then-5-foot-11, 155-pound Greer, he said.
After graduating from University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s Greer moved to Santa Cruz, California, where he learned carpentry and how to make furniture.
Sande Greer said, as the UConn coach, his father was under considerable pressure to win and lived with constant pain from a bad back.The stress from coaching occasionally left his father irritable and moody, especially at home, Sande Greer said.
His father didn't smoke or drink alcohol and enjoyed playing squash and golfing, he said. He and his father loved to fly fish together, an activity that relaxed his father and gave him a chance to have his father's full attention, Sande Greer said.
Unlike his older brother, who was a tennis coach at Western Illinois and Indiana universities, Sande Greer never considered a coaching career. His father always advised him not to coach, he said.
"I guess he saw what the job and the pressure did to him," Greer said.
During a series of phone interviews over the past two years Sande Greer talked about several topics related to his father and UConn events.
In this four-part series, Sande Greer tells the story behind an array of subjects that include his relationship with his parents, his father's worsening health, growing up on the Storrs campus and rooming with team players, life in Botswana, his acrimonious relationship with his late brother, Scott, how UConn's involvement in a 1960s point-shaving scandal affected his father and the UConn glorious basketball era of the 1950s.
This is the story: