Brian Connelly’s mop-top blond hair and surfer appearance suggest that his game is California flash.
Looks can be deceiving. The 6-foot-8-inch Albany senior forward’s game is decidedly New Jersey blue collar, with an emphasis on substance over style. Connelly’s two NCAA appearances speak louder than his statistics (8.1 points per game, 4.7 rebounds). The latter suggest he is a role player, but the former underscore the importance of such players on championship squads.
“It’s every athlete’s dream to go to the NCAA tournament. I was able to go twice,” Connelly said. “Every time you turn on the TV everyone’s crazy with the bracketology, filling out the pool. It’s cool to see your school on the bracket. All my friends picked Albany to win. Unfortunately all of them lost.”
His experience on two tournament teams makes Connelly, along with his teammate Jimmie Covington, arguably the most important player on Albany this weekend. Great Danes’ head coach Will Brown will be counting on him to relate his championship experiences to his younger teammates when No. 7 Albany faces No. 2 Vermont tomorrow. Connelly’s Albany teams have defeated Vermont an impressive six times, including twice in the conference tournament.
“[Coach Brown] knows that I’ve been to where we want to get this year,” Connelly said. “Sometimes he takes us aside and tells us this is not the caliber of practice we want and we’re not playing at the level we need to in order to win a championship. We know what he means when he says that.”
One of the things that Brown expects from his senior leader is playing the game within his own abilities. While Connelly has had some athletic playmakers around him, such as Jamar Wilson and Tim Ambrose, he is never tempted to take over on offense.
“If I tried some of the stuff those guys can do I might be out for the rest of the season,” he joked. “Those guys are incredible athletes with incredible gifts. I don’t think I was given those gifts.”
One of the staples of his game is taking charges on defense. Connelly claims he picked it up because he can’t block shots. But anyone who follows the game knows that drawing offensive fouls takes smarts and toughness, two qualities that he consciously developed to offset any natural physical limitations.
“Last year we had Brent Wilson. He took a lot of charges and I saw numerous occasions when those plays changed the momentum of the game,” he said.
His discipline on the court might come from his discipline off the court, where he has a regimented diet, exercise and sleep plan, developed to control his Type 1 diabetes. He was diagnosed his senior year of high school, but it took several years to fine tune his diet. During his sophomore year against Harvard, he began feeling weak during an Albany run late in the game. He had to be subbed out and the UA medical staff brought him a candy bar to boost his blood-sugar level.
“At that time it was still fairly new to me and I wasn’t educated,” he said. “I was winging it and just doing enough to get by.”
After the scare against Harvard, Connelly took more responsibility for his condition and adhered to a tight routine. His next season he averaged a career best 10.1 points and helped his team overachieve in securing a No. 3 seed in the conference tournament. Though diabetes may have limited his individual abilities on the basketball court, Connelly makes no excuses and sees the positive side of his condition.
His discipline in treatment and prevention has helped him focus in the classroom, where he is completing a business major with concentrations in management and marketing and was named to the 2008 America East Academic team. But in the midst of a slumping economy, the job hunt can be daunting, especially for students whose athletic commitments prevent them from landing internships.
“Your job experience is almost non-existent because of how rigorous the basketball schedule is,” Connelly said. “But when you look at it another way, the skills you learn from basketball are just priceless, like being a leader and having time management skills.”
If all else fails, Connelly might make connections that most job applicants cannot match. He hopes Albany alumni on Wall Street might remember him from the NCAA tournament: the mop-topped forward whose game belied his appearance.