Big East basketball coaches found a fitting way to celebrate what would have been Lou Carnesecca’s 100th birthday.
UConn’s Dan Hurley wore a white, blue and maroon sweater during Sunday’s game against Providence, making him the latest coach in the conference to don a patterned sweater like the ones Carnesseca wore during his 24 seasons as the head coach of St. John’s.
Xavier’s Sean Miller and Georgetown’s Ed Cooley also wore particularly colorful sweaters as a tribute during their teams’ meeting on Friday. Coaches wore “Lou” pins over the weekend as well.
“We scheduled this as a celebration of his tremendous career and life well-lived,” Dan Leibovitz, the Big East’s senior associate commissioner for men’s basketball, wrote on X.
Carnesecca, who died on Nov. 30, would have turned 100 on Sunday.
Carnesecca led St. John’s to Big East titles in 1983 and 1986 and won the conference’s coach of the year honor three times. He went 112-65 against the Big East in his 13 years in the conference.
Overall, Carnesecca went 526-200 (.725) over two stints as head coach at St. John’s from 1965-70 and 1973-92 and led the Johnnies to the Final Four in 1985.
Focus on Sport/Getty Images
Lou Carnesecca coaches the St. John’s Red Storm in 1987. (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images)
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992, and St. John’s renamed the arena on its Queens campus after Carnesecca in 2004.
On Dec. 7, in the first St. John’s game after Carnesecca’s death, current head coach Rick Pitino wore a custom replica of one of Carnesecca’s sweaters on the sideline.
Following that 88-71 win over Kansas State, Pitino symbolically placed the sweater on the St. John’s logo on the Carnesecca Arena court.
“I don’t think I would have ever forgiven myself if we lost this game,” Pitino said at the time.
