I’ve had two career paths — one as a Catholic school educator and the other as a newspaper man. Last week, both worlds collided at Kearny High School.
From 1998 to 2002, I was a teacher and the campus minister at St. Anthony High School in Downtown Jersey City. Regular readers of The Observer have probably heard me say this over and over, but it’s relevant to this story.
Back in 2017, St. Anthony closed its doors because of a serious decline in enrollment and because of ever-rising costs associated with a Catholic school education. For those who had any kind of association with the school, the closure was painful.
Friar High was a place where many kids came to get off the streets because as the school’s marketing slogan — which became a documentary and a rallying cry — The Street Stops Here. Countless kids who otherwise would not have had a chance — at anything — got that chance. But it all went away when the school closed.
One of the major reasons — some might say the only reason — why St. Anthony survived for as long as it did was because of one man, Robert Hurley Sr. Hurley was the coach of the team for nearly 40 years, amassing more than 1,000 career wins, an incredible number of state championships and several players who went on to play in the NBA and Major League Baseball.
More than 100 players he coached played Division I college basketball, many on athletic scholarships.
He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010.
He had entirely too many accolades to mention here — it would seriously require a book to do so properly and fittingly.
After the 2017 season, Hurley’s last, he never coached another high school game again. I had always secretly hoped St. Peter’s Prep would swoop in and hire him to close out his career, his and my alma mater. After all, the 1965 alumnus never coached a game at Prep, though St. Anthony was just a short mile or so away from his alma mater.
It wasn’t in the cards.
What was in the cards, however, was his foundation, the Hurley Family Foundation, which conducts clinics throughout Jersey City and elsewhere. One such clinic took place at the gym at Kearny High School at the invitation of the Kearn Police Department’s Community Oriented Policing unit —thank you Sgt. Jack Grimm and team — along with the support of varsity boys’ basketball coach Marc McCaffery and varsity girls’ basketball coach Jody Hill.
The first session was for younger kids. The second was for older kids, of high school age.
Hurley’s booming voice could be heard throughout the entire morning instructing the players on all kinds of basketball fundamentals. If ever someone was born to do this, it was Hurley. His knowledge of the game is surpassed by few in this world.
If there was a defining message he tried to convey — one of his all-time greatest players ever, Hudson County Commissioner Jerry Walker, of the Class of 1989, was also present at the clinic — it was that every kid had a chance to get better. But in order to do so, they had to be somewhere playing the game.
“I would once asked a kid, ‘Are you watching everything they’re doing?’ and he said, ‘I am definitely watching what they were doing,’” Hurley said. “They would always take something from that. And no matter where you were playing, where it was the Booker T (housing projects of Jersey City), wherever, you better be ready because you are being challenged to play. And if you were watching, they would play well.
“But they would say to me, ‘You’re not just letting them be basketball players, man. You’re watching everything they’re doing. But the difference is, how much do you want to do stuff? Every day that others don’t that’s OK. They’re your friends. But if you are driven, you’ll be better.
“I gave you a million drills to do today, but you don’t need to hire anybody to show you how to get better. If you do, shame on you. It’s all in you. I used to go to gyms in Jersey City and watch guys play. There were great college-type players. You know what I’d do? I studied everything they did. That was the coaching. You have parks here in Kearny, don’t you? They have nets on them right? That’s all you need. The weather is getting nicer. Go out for a couple hours and shoot. Nobody’s there in the morning, that’s your shooting time.
“You hope guys show up. If there are games someplace, you go play. Girls can play too. Play with the girls. I’ve seen girls who have pushed aside boys. So get out there and play … You all can’t be home all the time on those devices. You have to be doing stuff. You have to put the time in and get out there.”
Walker agreed, noting back to one of his former Friars who went on to a great career that included time in the NBA, Terry Dehere.
“Terry put in the work,” Walker said. “You don’t always have to be the front-runner, but if you put in the work, you’ll get things out of it. At Team Walker, I say there are three Ds — dedication, determination and discipline. If you believe in that, there isn’t anything you can’t do to have success in life. Keep pushing — we have to get a championship out here in Kearny.”
Very sound advice from Hurley and Walker. For Hurley, it’s all he ever did — he wanted to see kids succeed. And for 39 years, they did and he did. And that all lead to McCaffery joining in with sound words of advice at the end of the day of drills.
“Coach Hill and I say the same thing,” McCaffery said. “Get better by yourself. Go to the park by yourself. He (Hurley) is in the basketball Hall of Fame. Jerry played Division I basketball — and they’re saying the same things we’re saying.
“This isn’t new — this isn’t rocket science. If you want to get better, you can get better. At the end of the season, I told my guys, ‘If you come back the same player when you left, and you don’t make the team, or you don’t play, don’t blame me. …This is easy if you want to do it. It’s hard to do, to get yourself to go do it, but you will get better by accident if you play every day.”
Learn more about the writer ...
Kevin A. Canessa Jr. is the editor of and broadcaster at The Observer, an organization he has served since 2006. He is responsible for the editorial content of the newspaper and website, the production of the e-Newspaper, writing several stories per week (including the weekly editorial), conducting live broadcasts on social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and X, including a weekly recap of the news — and much more behind the scenes. Between 2006 and 2008, he introduced the newspaper to its first-ever blog — which included podcasts, audio and video. Originally from Jersey City, Kevin lived in Kearny until 2004, lived in Port St. Lucie. Florida, for four years until February 2016 and in March of that year, he moved back to Kearny to return to The Observer full time. Click Here to send Kevin an email.