SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. — Shaheen Holloway is waiting for the painters to arrive at the Seton Hall basketball offices. In about two years, the Pirates’ staff will have new digs. After years of planning, the university has finally found a place to shoehorn a practice facility into its urban campus. They’ll break ground in May, and construction is scheduled to take up to 18 months. Between now and then, Holloway wants to do a little sprucing up for a place that, he jokes, hasn’t been updated much since his playing days.
This really is the story of Seton Hall basketball. It is a program that gets by on new coats of paint. It is not now nor ever has been an easy job. Forty-plus years ago, when the Big East started, only commissioner Dave Gavitt could see a reason for adding the Pirates. They had nothing — no tradition, no facilities, no reason to join the spotlight. Bill Raftery used to chug-a-lug his team in vans to a nearby gym to get them some work with weights, and in 1985, as the league hit the big time with Patrick Ewing and Chris Mullin, the Pirates split their home games between the Meadowlands and a West Orange hockey rink while Walsh Gym got a facelift. Today, as they await the arrival of the practice facility, the Pirates still schlep to the basement of the Richie Regan Recreation and Athletic Center for practice.
Plucky sounds condescending, but in a lot of ways, that’s the best way to describe the team’s history. Successful coaches here have not balked at what and who Seton Hall is, but instead embraced it. They found players who suited the place. Rather than waste their time in battles for five-star recruits they couldn’t win, they’d find three-stars and make them All-Big East.
Holloway was the rare exception, a McDonald’s All-American game MVP (who bested one Kobe Bean Bryant for the hardware) who spurned Duke to come to South Orange. He chose Seton Hall not just because it felt like home; it felt like him. He gave it everything he had, and it replenished him in triple.
Now some 20 years later, Holloway eases into a chair at the head of a conference room table. His head, he admits, is still spinning. “Whirlwind’’ is how he describes the last six months of his life: Holloway got swept into the cyclone of March Madness as his Saint Peter’s team churned through a first-round upset of Kentucky to the doorstep of the Final Four. By the time the twister settled, Holloway was spit out here, as the head coach of his alma mater. In a pure basketball sense, Holloway landed his Big East job on merit — 11 years serving alongside former Pirates head coach Kevin Willard, and then four years crafting tiny Saint Peter’s into a March darling.
But he has landed here, eschewing might-have-been offers from flashier suitors who couldn’t wait long enough for the Peacocks to finish their run, essentially for the same reason he chose the Pirates on a television broadcast in April 1996. “He is Seton Hall through and through,’’ says former associate dean and academic advisor Robin Cunningham. “He’s a grinder, gritty, resilient. He suits the place right away and now, now it’s like Seton Hall is in his blood.’’
“There’s no coolness in basketball,’’ Holloway likes to say. “Cool guys don’t get paid.’’ Except for these days that’s not entirely true. In the era of name, image and likeness, cool guys (and girls) can make bank. It is not a concept that sits well with Holloway — not the notion of players getting paid but that they’re getting paid on their potential rather than their achievement.
It is, frankly, a thorn in the sides of a lot of coaches, who understand and even accept the need for NIL, just not the Wild Wild West execution that has drawn the lines between the haves and the have-nots even deeper. Big-name schools with deep-pocketed alums are able to fund collectives where others simply cannot. Arkansas has Wal-Mart money to help bolster Eric Musselman’s sales pitch, and Tennessee has something called the Volunteer Club, which already has handed out some $4 million to athletes. Seton Hall is in the game; just maybe not up 20 with the ball. At Seton Hall, where there is no football, there is a savvy group of alums who are trying to work out some initiatives for players, all while keeping an eye on the peculiarities of a New Jersey law that remains probationary (it goes into effect in 2025) and currently includes language that a school cannot arrange an inducement for an athlete. It is, however, a pittance comparatively.
Back to school and back in the gym ?#HALLin ?⚪️ pic.twitter.com/nLtuqQpje2
— Seton Hall Men’s Basketball (@SetonHallMBB) August 31, 2022
Holloway had his first encounter with NIL during Saint Peter’s run, when the mustachioed Doug Edert scored a Buffalo Wild Wings deal and launched a “Dougie Buckets’’ line of apparel some point between the Peacocks’ second-round win against Murray State and the Sweet 16. Holloway even told his players to go get what they could, well aware that for guys at that level, the window shuts in a hurry. But he also asked them to shut it down by Tuesday, so they could concentrate on Purdue, and was slightly dismayed when Edert’s deal came out on Wednesday.
The drumbeat at Seton Hall is near constant, if not with players on campus, then certainly in the living rooms. Recruits and their families flat out ask what Holloway can do to build their brand. “I tell them, ‘What can you do to raise mine?’” he says. “Because my brand is Seton Hall.’’ If that reads defiant, it sounds even more so when Holloway says it. Some might say it’s a dangerously retro approach, sure to turn off players who don’t ascribe to Holloway’s work hard, play well, earn yours approach. Holloway figures it’s a way to weed out the guys who can’t play for him, anyway.
He will tell you, without apology, that he is passionate, he is demanding, and not for everybody. His friends and colleagues will second that, and add he’s also fiercely loyal and a person who simply will not compromise his standards. “He is an incredibly strong-minded person,” says Seton Hall athletic director Bryan Felt, who was a senior when Holloway arrived at Seton Hall and the AD at Saint Peter’s who hired him. “He is incredibly true to himself. Always. That is the best compliment I can pay him.’’
What you have to understand about Holloway is that he is a man born with gilded talents, but one who never got fed by a silver spoon. Even after all he’s achieved as both a player and a coach, that quest to work for everything remains insatiable. As a high schooler, he moved across the river to play, and fathered a daughter at 15. In college, the coach who recruited him got canned after a year, and his joy of hitting a game-winning shot in the NCAA Tournament had practically no shelf life, replaced instead by a season-ending and career-altering ankle injury. At his first coaching job, he taught himself earth science in order to work as a long-term substitute teacher. When he could have taken a full-time job at his alma mater, he instead opted to stay at Iona. Before he arrived at Saint Peter’s, the Peacocks had a whopping three NCAA Tournament appearances in their history, and when he lined up across from John Calipari for the first-round game, he checked in, per USA Today, with a starting salary of $266,000 compared to the Kentucky coach’s $8.5 million.
Speaking of that magical March, Holloway left for Indianapolis a whole day after his team, stuck in bed thanks to a need for late-night McDonald’s french fries and a bad case of food poisoning. When the Peacocks tipped off against Kentucky, the sum total of the contents of his stomach was a pack of crackers. When Saint Peter’s won, he celebrated the upset by graduating to bread. Before the Peacocks played North Carolina in the Elite Eight, his beloved grandmother, Dorothy, passed away, buried in her Seton Hall blue, though she preferred to call it her Shaheen blue. When the season ended, he huddled up in a cocoon while his agent feverishly tried to reach him, not surfacing until he solicited the opinion of his returning Peacock players, and not agreeing to leave until they gave him the go-ahead during a three-hour meeting.
He took the Seton Hall job on a Wednesday, went to the Saint Peter’s celebratory parade on a Friday, to Yankee Stadium for a pre-game celebration nine days later, Las Vegas to announce a Jets pick at the NFL Draft on April 28, and to CitiField to throw out the first pitch at a Mets game on May 1. This all occurred while he was mining his old New York/New Jersey contacts for information about available players, desperate to plug the leaks of a roster that dwindled to four scholarship players. He found four (Al-Amir Dawes from Clemson, Dre Davis from Louisville, Femi Odukale from Pitt and KC Ndefo from Saint Peter’s), even though he barely had a staff. Once Bashir Mason took the Saint Peter’s job, Holloway brought his whole Peacocks staff over to South Orange, against the arguments of plenty who thought he was crazy asking a mid-major crew to do a high-major job. And then it was July, and time to hit the recruiting trails, and now it’s mid-September and the season is barreling down at him and the office still isn’t even painted.
Not surprisingly, it takes Holloway a good 15 minutes to unwind all of this, the tale unspooling from a very simple question: What have the last few months been like? When he finally comes up for air, he shakes his weary head, admitting it’s all been harder than even he imagined it would be. Hard because it’s chaotic but especially hard because it’s Seton Hall, and he wants so badly to get it right.
The first time Emma Clemons set the table for Sunday dinner, Holloway didn’t quite know what to do. He knew family. His own back in Queens, anchored by Dorothy, nurtured and protected him. His grandmother’s house, where he grew up, practically burst at the seams with people. She had nine kids of her own, and they, along with their children, often took up residence with Dorothy, not to mention the other kids in the neighborhood who just found their way there, too. “Felt like 50 people in five bedrooms sometimes,’’ Holloway says.
The community was tight, the kind where everyone looked out for one another, but especially for Holloway, whose basketball talents targeted him for something bigger and better than the constraints of where he was born.
But the ritual of family, a big sit-down Sunday supper where everyone laughed and talked over one another, that Holloway did not know. Sitting down at the table that first time with the Clemons family, who would serve as his host family for his four years of high school, Holloway hung back, too shy to jump into the conversation. He wound up there because of basketball, the trite “basketball saved my life” trope actually playing out for him. “No basketball, I don’t go to Jersey,’’ he says. “And if I don’t get to New Jersey, I’m not sitting here talking to you. That’s just the truth.’’ By middle school, Holloway earned the sort of reputation that can only be found on the New York City playground. He burned up the oldheads on the Liberty Park courts next to his house, and embarrassed the upperclassmen on his grassroots team. His academic record, littered with missed days and lousy grades, showed a kid at a crossroads. He had love but needed direction, oozed loyalty but needed to learn to trust, had talent but needed the right place to channel it.
Shaheen Holloway deflected attention throughout Saint Peter’s run, aiming to keep it on the Peacocks. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Chris Chavannes got wind of Holloway and went to see him play, dazzled by his skill and “his pure confidence. He was just dynamic.’’ Chavannes met the family, and learned quickly that he had something the more traditional New York high schools couldn’t offer — a zip code outside of the city. His mother and grandmother, really the whole neighborhood, wanted him out — and not just for the eight-hour school day. They wanted him entirely relocated. St. Patrick High School in Elizabeth, N.J., would eventually grow into a pipeline for basketball studs, but in the mid-1990s, it was just teetering on the edges of the map of prep powerhouses. Holloway could help push the school over, and in turn, the school could get him out of Queens. “I never traveled nowhere, so to me, it might as well have been California,’’ Holloway says. “I’m going where? New Jersey? Why?”
At first, he went home on the weekends, until the fellas back there told him to stop, that there was nothing there for him, anymore. Left with little in the way of distraction, he worked, a concept hardly foreign to him in the basketball sense, but completely foreign otherwise. He buckled down on his schoolwork, even worked on participating in those Sunday dinner conversations, reading his birthday cards aloud as was the family tradition. Soon he became not just a visitor at the Clemons’ house, but a member of the family, finding the structure that he simply couldn’t get at home. (When Emma passed in 2014 her obituary listed her “surviving loving children: William M. Clemons IV (Rene); Kasoundra E. Clemons; Christopher C. Clemons; Marc N. Clemons; and Shaheen Holloway.’’) Slowly the once foreign hinterlands of New Jersey felt like home.
The new zip code did nothing to diminish his basketball reputation. He three times earned N.J. all-state honors, scored more than 2,000 career points and by his senior year rocketed up the rankings as one of the most prized recruits in the country (either he or Mike Bibby rated as the top point guard in the class, depending on whom you asked). Seton Hall head coach George Blaney got in early, first spying Holloway as a high school freshman. The coach pulled no punches, which Holloway seemed to like. When Blaney suggested his shot needed work, Holloway asked what he should do to make it better. “Make 1,000 shots,’’ the coach told him. “And after that make 1,000 more.’’
“The thing was, he didn’t take that as a slight,’’ Blaney says. “He took it as a challenge.’’
The Seton Hall staff, teetering on the brink after two years of mediocrity, wanted the guard desperately. But as Holloway’s star rose, they found themselves swimming in a pond they didn’t usually frequent. Holloway took two visits to Duke, where the Cameron Crazies dazzled (seven shirtless fans greeted him by spelling out his first name on their chests) and Mike Krzyzewski left him gobsmacked. Georgia Tech, looking to replace NBA-bound Stephon Marbury, came in late, and Cal, just a few years removed from the Jason Kidd experiment, wound up a finalist, too.
Seton Hall knew it had one advantage — Holloway’s daughter, Shatanik, lived in Queens. Holloway understood that he was, essentially, playing for two, and that while he could do that anywhere, it would be easier to do it closer to home, and at a place that felt more like home. Holloway decided to make his announcement on the MSG Network, a big deal before such broadcasts became normal. That night Felt and his classmates stuffed a local watering hole, anxious to hear what Holloway would decide. “When he announced for Seton Hall, are you kidding me? The place went bonkers,’’ Felt says. “Of course it did. We had a watch party, for crying out loud.”
To be clear, he did not love it at first. What attracted him — the small campus, close to home, familiar — all felt a little claustrophobic. All of those people screaming at the watch party were now his classmates, and there were times he felt like an animal in a zoo. Always watched, always noticed. But he learned to circumnavigate it, to tighten his circle and go about his business.
He didn’t feel it seeping into his bones. No one ever really does. That usually comes later, when the stresses of college are replaced with the sepia-toned memories and spirited stories. The be-true-to-your-school thing can be even more complicated for a college athlete who oftentimes invests in a very transactional relationship with a college. The university offers a means to an end, and the win-loss column often tinges the fondness of the memories.
By that measure, Holloway could be forgiven for having at least shades of gray when it came to his love for Seton Hall. It did not go as planned. The prized recruits meant to follow him to campus never did — Tim Thomas chose Villanova, and a year later, Ron Artest went to St. John’s. Holloway’s numbers went backwards, the high-water mark coming in his freshman season, when he led the team with 17 points and six assists, but the team won just 10 games. That cost Blaney his job, and though Tommy Amaker righted things to .500 for the next two years, Holloways’ numbers continued to dip, first because of a style change and then because of injury. Finally the payoff came in his senior season. Seton Hall won 22 games and earned an NCAA Tournament bid, and Holloway hit the overtime game-winner in the first round against Oregon. Forty-eight hours later it was all over. Holloway stepped awkwardly on the foot of Temple guard Pepe Sanchez, rolling his ankle badly, not just ending his college career, but robbing him of the pop necessary to succeed as a pro.
To the outside eye, none of that lends itself to a lifelong love for ye olde alma mater. But that’s because people on the outside only saw what Holloway gave to the school. They couldn’t see what Seton Hall gave to him. He met his wife, Kim, there — in the Xavier Hall dormitory, to be exact, which is why their son is named Xavier. He found people who wanted to help him but not do for him, who invested their time and energy in him, but not because he could put a ball through a hoop. Cunningham, the academic advisor, admittedly first thought Holloway was a diva who could do little more than put said ball through the basket. The coaches always brought recruits in to meet her, but for Holloway, she had to go to him — to a restaurant. When he finally did circle around to her office for a visit, she did what she always does with recruits — gave them 20 minutes to write a little something about themselves. It’s an exercise that both introduces her to them, and allows her to gauge where they are academically. Holloway gave her two piddling sentences, infuriating and insulting the academic advisor.
Yet by his junior year, after Cunningham spent hours meeting with him and encouraging him to become the first in his family to graduate, Holloway regularly parked himself behind a wall of books in study hall, laboring for hours to get an essay just right. “It’s 8:30 at night, and I’m ready to go home,’’ she says. “But I remember saying to my assistant, ‘This is what we want.’” Holloway did, in fact, become the first in his family to graduate from college. Shatanik, who also got help from Cunningham, became the second, in 2013.
Just last week, Cunningham, who retired in 2021, answered the phone while cutting across the Seton Hall campus. She’d been invited back to direct a leadership seminar for the men’s basketball team, the invitation extended by Holloway. “He chose Seton Hall, and then Seton Hall showed him all of that love and affection right back,’’ Blaney says. “His love for Seton Hall is unbridled. There is no doubt in my mind that he will succeed there because it’s not just a job to him. It’s so much more.’’
So the story is a little convoluted, even for the man who lived it. It happened in 2007, when Holloway was working as an administrative assistant for then-Seton Hall head coach Bobby Gonzalez. He was recommended for a position with newly hired Iona coach Kevin Willard. Holloway didn’t know Willard but leaped at the chance for an actual assistant’s spot. He took the job in June. Two months later, Seton Hall assistant Geoff Billet decided to leave for a high school job at Christian Brothers Academy, Gonzalez called to ask Holloway if he wanted the position. “No-brainer, right?” Holloway says. “A Big East full-time assistant? At your alma mater?” He felt badly, but figured Willard would understand and hopped in his car, ready to go to his boss and thank him for the opportunity but explain he was leaving for Seton Hall. He even went so far as to tell Gonzalez he was coming.
He was living in New Jersey at the time, so the route is pretty straightforward — Garden State Parkway, across the George Washington and on to New Rochelle. Holloway can’t remember what he was thinking, but all of a sudden he realized he was near Yankee Stadium, which is not on the way. Maybe, he thought, I’m more nervous than I realized about talking to Willard. He regrouped and re-routed himself, got on campus, parked the car, climbed the hill, walked into Willard’s office and shut the door. “What came out of my mouth wasn’t what was supposed to come out of my mouth,’’ Holloway says. “It was supposed to be, ‘Coach, I appreciate the opportunity, but I’m out.’ What I said was, ‘Yeah, Coach, what time is practice?’ He even looked at me like, ‘What did you just say?’ I got up and left and thought maybe it’s like when you go to the principal’s office and you get nervous. I’ll go to practice and tell the guys, and then I’ll tell him. Instead, we had a great practice, and I never left. It was the best decision I ever made in my life.”
Three years and a heap of chaos later, Gonzalez got fired. Willard got the job, and Holloway finally returned to Seton Hall as an assistant, setting in motion a path that would ultimately lead him back here where he belongs. Back home.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Courtesy of Seton Hall Athletics)
