Tom Catalanotto saw coaching at Monsignor Scanlan as an intriguing challenge he couldn’t pass up.
“There’s an opportunity there,” he said. “Hopefully we can turn it around in a couple of years.”
The former Archbishop Molloy head man accepted the Bronx school’s varsity girls basketball head coaching job Wednesday, he told The Post. Scanlan won two games a year ago as a member of CHSAA Bronx/Westchester, a Class B division. He was told about the job by friend Lou Santos, who is on the board at Scanlan and is the Molloy junior varsity softball coach.
At Scanlan, Catalanotto, who spent three seasons as Stanners head coach, found an athletic department looking to revive itself, help raise the school’s enrollment and return it to prominence. Former Christ the King junior varsity assistant coach and NYC Bulldogs travel team director Mike LoCascio will be a part of his staff.
“They are really great people,” he said of the Scanlan administration. “They are really encouraging sports. I’m not going to have to fight for everything. At Molloy you had to fight for everything.”
Catalanotto, who spent last season as a varsity assistant at Holy Trinity, was unceremoniously fired at Molloy, his alma mater, in June of 2011 after winning a state Federation Class A title. He was The Post’s All-Queens Coach of the Year after the run. He was also an assistant coach on the school’s two previous girls basketball state championship teams.
Many of his former players are still with him as members of the NYC Bulldogs travel team. They won the GymRat tournament and the bronze division title at the USJN/Nike National Championships last summer.
“I’ll always love Molloy, no matter what happened,” Catalanotto said. “Molloy didn’t do this to me.”
The school said it was going in a different direction. Catalanotto didn’t finish higher than third in CHSAA Brooklyn/Queens Division I and only qualified for the CHSAA Class AA state tournament once in three years. He also had two separate public outbursts at games.
Catalanotto speculated that his firing was calculated by the school’s administration, which he believes didn’t care for him. His wife Nancy was the secretary for the former Molloy president. New coach Scott Lagas guided the Stanners to the CHSAA Class AA state semifinals this past season.
“It was a shame I couldn’t continue at Molloy,” he said. “It was devastating to me, to the players, to the parents that supported me.”
It was the help he believes he will get at Scanlan that made him feel comfortable taking the job. Scanlan lost to division champion Preston, 56-16, last year and the school let coach Stephanie Betancourt go, according to athletic director Tracy Keelin. She and Catalanotto, a Flushing native, believe his ties to Queens will allow them to attract kids from an area that Scanlan drew heavily from in the past. The school’s 17-acre campus is undergoing a transition, including trying to build a new soccer field.
“It good we have the same dynamics that we’re working for,” Keelin said. “If he didn’t have the same beliefs it wouldn’t have worked out as well as it’s going to.”
Catalanotto hopes to get the program into the ‘A’ as quickly as possible, but said it’s not all about winning. Impacting the lives of his players is also important to him. Keelin believes there is talent in the program, but the right coach was needed to bring it out. The Crusaders were a top team in the past. Scanlan alum Ann Gregory-O’Connell, who played at Fordham in the early ’80s, holds the NCAA record for most career rebounds with 1,999.
“His resume speaks for itself,” Keelin said of Catalanotto. “We believe he is the best candidate to rebuild Scanlan’s girls varsity program.”