Dwayne Mitchell felt a void in his life last year.
After more than 17 years of coaching boys basketball in the Catholic league, he didn’t have a school to call home when Rice closed its doors for financial reasons. Mitchell spent last season with the New York Gauchos travel ball organization, coaching the AAU dynamo’s second- and third-grade team.
“It was a little different,” said Mitchell, who spent the 2010-11 season running the varsity program at Rice after several years as an assistant. “Not just practicing regularly, but the excitement of the rivalries with St. Ray’s and Christ the King.”
Mitchell will get a return to normalcy in some sense next winter. He accepted the varsity head-coaching job at Monsignor Scanlan over the weekend. Mitchell replaces Andrew Ayers. Scanlon went 0-12 last season in the CHSAA Class B league
“It’s the league, it’s not the ‘AA,’ but it’s the league,” Mitchell said. “It has a certain structure to it and a certain standard that I have been part of for years. They have just given me a chance to be back part of something that I have been part of.”
Mitchell, who is in Memphis, Tenn. with his second-grade Gauchos team at the AAU National Championships, came highly recommend to The Bronx school by former Rice coach Mo Hicks, who is now an assistant at St. John’s University, and legendary Archbishop Molloy coach Jack Curran, who was in contact with Scanlan board member Lou Santos, the Stanners junior varsity softball coach.
“I feel he is going to do exactly what we hope to do at Scanlon, revive the basketball program, and we think this is the man to do it,” Athletic Director Tracy Keelin said.
Mitchell was Hicks’ top assistant at Rice for 11 years and got his first head-coaching job at the Harlem powerhouse in 2010-11. He led the Raiders to the CHSAA Class AA intersectional final in the program’s final season, losing to Christ the King. During his time at Rice he began working with the Gauchos and coached five years at Nazareth as an assistant coach with the school’s freshmen and JV squads.
“I’m going to do my best to make Scanlan an attractive school to come to for student athletes,” Mitchell said.
He knows what it takes to coach in the league and sees bringing the program up as a challenge. Mitchell’s hiring is part of the school’s effort to revamp its athletic department, which it hopes will boost enrollment. Scanlan hired former Archbishop Molloy head coach Tom Catalanotto back in late May to head its girls program, also with help from Santos.
“We were confident from the get-go that we could get some heavy hitters in the basketball program that would want to be up for a challenge,” Keelin said.