Dan Hurley Opens Up About His Mental Health: "There Is No F - - - - - g Shame in It"

After winning the NCAA tournament last season, the UConn men's basketball coach faced an age-old question for high-achievers: Is this all there is?

Note: This article was originally published on Nov. 9, 2023. Because of the importance of the subject matter — and because the platform that published it no longer exists — I am re-publishing it here without a paywall.

Andrea Hurley had seen that look on her husband’s face before. It worried her.

This was April 12, nine days after her husband, Dan, had coached UConn to the NCAA men’s basketball championship. The Hurleys had gone with his assistant coaches, the university president, and a few other school representatives to New York City, where Dan had been invited to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. It was supposed to be a joyful occasion, but from the moment Hurley arrived, he felt uncomfortable. The previous nine days had been a sleepless whirlwind of interviews, appearances, pictures and praise. Hurley is good at many things, but being feted is not one of them.

The morning started off well enough. The group attended an early breakfast reception. Hurley worked the room and then participated in a brief Q&A session in front of roughly 75 people. When it was over, he locked eyes with Andrea. She hurried over, sensing what he was going to say before the words came out of his mouth.

“I’m having a panic attack.”

It wasn’t Hurley’s first panic attack, and certainly not his worst. But given the setting and timing, it was a big problem. Andrea discreetly pulled Dan to a side of the room. She coaxed him through deep breathing and fed him positive thoughts. He tried to follow her guidance, but as he did he unspooled a river of angst.

Why am I here? My team should be here . . .

Who are these people? I don’t even know them . . .

Where’s my team? I shouldn’t be here without them . . .

I gotta get outta here.

After a couple of minutes, Hurley pulled himself together. He made his way onto the floor of the exchange, where he posed for more pictures and shook more hands (which he never likes to do because he’s something of a germaphobe). He did a live interview with CNBC. Then he climbed the platform with the UConn entourage, rang the bell, smiled, and clapped like he was having the time of his life. At each stage, he checked to make sure Andrea was nearby, looking at her with what she calls “those Hurley eyes.” Finally, mercifully, the formalities were over and the Hurleys were in a car headed back to Connecticut.

For Hurley, the minor panic attack was a jarring reminder that his mental health challenges did not end the moment he cut down the nets. He had chased that goal for so long, grinding and striving and doubting himself the whole way, it was natural to assume that once he got there, his anxieties would disappear. Instead, he reached the summit, took a look around, and was left to ask the age-old question: Is this all there is?

“Don’t get me wrong, [winning the title] was an incredible feeling in the moment,” Hurley, 50, said in a lengthy phone interview. “But it hasn’t fulfilled me in a way that maybe I thought it would. I was probably chasing that championship thinking there’d be some level of healing. It’s like realizing there’s no Santa Claus.”

In the weeks after his Wall Street visit, Hurley went into what he describes as “an emotional valley.” But it wasn’t a tailspin. Over the last three decades, and especially the last few years, Hurley has worked to acquire tools that prop him up when he starts to get off-kilter. The championship proved that Hurley is an elite coach. His focus is intense, his work ethic legendary. But those same forces that propelled him to the mountaintop can lead to his downfall if he’s not careful.

That, in the end, will be his biggest test as he climbs anew. His UConn Huskies launched their title defense on Monday night with a 95-52 victory over Northern Arizona. UConn entered last season unranked, but the Huskies now start off at No. 6 in the AP poll. The elevated expectations are a direct result of having won the national championship. Can Hurley proceed without losing his balance? Most of all, no matter where he is on that journey, will he allow himself, at long last, to enjoy the view?

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Billy Donovan warned him that this might happen. After coaching Florida to consecutive national championships in 2006 and ’07, Donovan sank into his own emotional valley. Donovan has since moved on to the NBA, but he remains one of Hurley’s closest mentors. When Hurley called him after the Huskies claimed the title, Donovan told him, “Don’t be surprised if you feel a little depressed.”

The phenomenon goes by many names — achievement trap, arrival fallacy, hyper perfectionism — and it stems from human physiology. When Hurley won the championship, his body experienced a culminating rush of dopamine. This hormone is associated with pleasure, but it primarily produces motivation. High achievers like Hurley can get tricked into believing they are driven by results, but in truth they are motivated by process and deep engagement, the pursuit of the goal rather than the goal itself.

When the season ended, Hurley’s dopamine supply receded. Where he once felt relentless motivation, he now felt a void. He was being celebrated for winning a championship, but the people who helped him get there were absent. That combination triggered some unhappy memories, which led him into that emotional valley.

“He loves his team every year, but he really adored that team,” Andrea says. “The fact that it was over was hard. Then the fact that he was celebrating their accomplishment but they weren’t there, that just set him off.”

The game of basketball has been good to Hurley, but it has also been ruthless. He was raised to believe that winning required extreme devotion and that losing was unacceptable. Hurley’s father, Bob Sr., won 26 state titles and four national championships at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, and he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. But on the rare occasions when his teams lost, he could sometimes barely get out of bed the next morning.

Hurley played for his father at St. Anthony, but he didn’t just have to deal with his old man’s pressure. He had to deal with his older brother’s shadow. Bobby Hurley was a high school All-American point guard who won two NCAA championships at Duke. Dan was an excellent player in his own right, a highly coveted recruit who became a starting point guard at Seton Hall. At every arena where Dan played, he was serenaded with chants of “Bobby’s better!” and “You’re not Bobby!” The taunts were cruel, but nowhere near as cruel as the things Dan was saying to himself.

“I’ve always been just really hard on myself,” he says. “My dad set a super high standard that sometimes makes it uncomfortable to be in your own skin because you don’t give yourself a break a lot of the time. You put a lot of pressure on yourself and you’re constantly evaluating: How am I measuring up?”

As Hurley’s college career got underway, his father wondered what happened to the free-spirited kid who used to dominate pickup games at White Eagle Hall, where St. Anthony practiced because the school didn’t have its own gym. “He’d go up against all these NBA guys and be in a relaxed state of play,” Hurley Sr. says. “But then he got to Seton Hall and would constantly put an expectation on himself. He built it up to a point where he could never relax and just let things happen.”

It all came apart at the start of Hurley’s junior season. He slept too little, drank too much, and couldn’t make a shot. After playing miserably in the Pirates’ second game, Hurley decided to step away from the program. One week later, Bobby, who was in his rookie season with the Sacramento Kings, was seriously injured in a car accident. Dan spent that winter as a volunteer assistant at St. Anthony while his dad stepped away to focus on Bobby’s recovery. That gave him his first taste of coaching, and he liked it. Dan finished out his final two seasons at Seton Hall, but the emotional scars endured.

After spending a year teaching and coaching at St. Anthony, Dan accepted a position as a low-level assistant at Rutgers. Four years later the school fired head coach Kevin Bannon, and Hurley was out of a job. He took over at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark. Andrea, a fellow Seton Hall student whom he’d started dating after his senior season ended, knew that she had married a grinder, but she was often aghast at how hard her husband worked. “He never took a day off, ever,” she says. “He would always say, ‘I’m going to get fired.’ I’m like, you’re a high school history teacher. You’re not going to get fired.’ ”

Hurley spent nine years at St. Benedict’s before landing his first college head-coaching job at Wagner. With Bobby serving as his assistant, Dan revitalized a program that had won three games the previous year to a nine-win season, and then 25 in Year 2. That catapulted him to Rhode Island, where in eight years he steered the Rams to a pair of first-round NCAA tournament wins. He also earned a reputation for being overly combative with officials. It got so bad at times that Andrea told him he was embarrassing her and their two boys, Danny and Andrew.

As the years went on, Hurley refined his habits and added practices to support his mental health. When his weight ballooned, he exercised more and streamlined his diet. He switched to mushroom coffee to take off the caffeine edge. He developed a morning routine of reading, meditation, prayer and journaling. He became an avid podcast consumer, which of course he listens to at double speed. Most important, he maintained regular appointments with a therapist, which he first started doing during those low moments in college.

When Hurley took the UConn job in 2018, one of the first things he did was show the returning players a video of a possession from the previous season against Villanova, which ended with Villanova scoring after getting four consecutive offensive rebounds. “This cannot happen again,” he said. It was a page straight out of his father’s playbook, and though over time he was able to instill a Jersey City culture, the effort took a toll on his body as well as his mind.

During the summer of 2019, Hurley started to feel discomfort throughout his body and a numbness in his arm. Worried he might have a cardiovascular issue, he purchased a heart monitor and kept the sensor clamped to his finger throughout the day. He visited several doctors, but none could discern the root of his pain. The start of the summer recruiting period meant lots of traveling on planes and sitting in gymnasiums. Hurley has never liked flying — he tends to get claustrophobic and changes clothes before each flight so he can feel fresh — and the physical pain made that even worse.

When he was back in Connecticut, Hurley experienced a severe anxiety attack. He was rushed to the emergency room of a local hospital, but still there appeared to be no cause for his symptoms. Finally, Hurley went to see a neurologist, who did an MRI on his neck and discovered a spinal cord compression. It was a dangerous situation, because if Hurley fell the wrong way he could have been paralyzed. Three weeks later, Hurley had surgery. He was back at work a week later. “He couldn’t drive, so I had to take him to the office and back,” Andrea says. “Sometimes he would only stay for an hour, but he has to maintain a schedule. He’s not someone who can sit around and be still for a long time.”

Eventually, Hurley was back on the job full-time. As usual, his teams steadily improved, but he had trouble converting that to postseason success. In 2020-21, the Huskies finished third in the Big East but lost to Maryland in the first round of the NCAA tournament. They finished third in the league the next season — and again they went home early, this time via a first-round loss to New Mexico State. “That was probably the worst I had been emotionally and mental health-wise since Seton Hall when it was going bad for me,” he says.

The Huskies began the 2022-23 season unranked, but a hot start vaulted them to No. 2 in the AP poll by mid-December. Beginning on New Year's Eve, however, they went into a terrible skid, losing six of eight games. It was the kind of downturn that in the past had knocked Hurley off-balance, but his daily maintenance got him through. “The hardest thing when you’re dealing with mental health struggles is when you feel like you can’t move,” he says. “You don’t want to eat, you don’t want to drink, you don’t want to leave the room. But my morning routine is so embedded that it gets me out of bed, it gets me moving, it gets me functioning. So when I go to those places, it goes on for much shorter periods of time for me now, just because I’ve worked on myself.”

The Huskies regained their footing, won nine of their last 11 games, and earned a No. 4 seed in the NCAA tournament. Coincidentally, Hurley’s former college coach, P.J. Carlesimo, was assigned to call UConn’s NCAA tournament games for Westwood One radio. It was Carlesimo’s job to interview the coaches before and after each game. When one of the interviews was over, Hurley grew emotional as he apologized to Carlesimo — again — for not being the player he thought Carlesimo needed way back when.

“If you listen to him, you’d think he didn’t have a good career,” Carlesimo says. “He was a 1,000-point scorer and played on three NCAA tournament teams, including our Sweet Sixteen team. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake for him to go to Seton Hall. The expectations may have been more there than at someplace outside of New Jersey.”

The Huskies steamrolled their way to the national championship, winning their six games by an average of 20.0 points. As Andrea watched her husband hoist the trophy, she convinced herself that his troubles would be forever in the past. “I was so happy for the team, but selfishly, I was thinking, he’s finally validated,” she says. “Now we’re done with all that worrying. Now there’s no more pressure.”

Nine days later at the New York Stock Exchange, she learned just how wrong she was.

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Once he climbed out of the emotional valley, Hurley had a productive summer. He signed a quality guard out of the transfer portal, watched two of his players get drafted by the NBA, hit the recruiting circuit in July, vacationed with Andrea and their sons on the Jersey Shore, and welcomed a top-five recruiting class to campus. The real fun began once school was back in session this fall. “Aside from being with Andrea and Danny and Andrew, he’s happiest when he is on the practice court with his guys,” says UConn assistant coach Tom Moore. “He’s an outstanding coach entering the prime of his career. It’s really fun to watch on a daily basis.”

Hurley has been intentional about making sure his routines remain intact. He still shows up early at the office, his shirt soaked from his morning workout. He refuses to hire an administrative assistant for the basketball office, even though he has exponentially more demands on his time. He promises he will coach like he has never won a game, just like always. “He has so much fear inside him, even now. Sometimes it’s crippling,” Andrea says. “He’s just so afraid of people thinking that he's screwing around because he won. So he’s going double-hard.”

That is one of the many potential pitfalls that Hurley must navigate in the months ahead. “We talk about this all the time because I know he’ll paint himself into a corner by planning out too far,” Bob Sr. says. “That’s where he gets himself in trouble, because he misses enjoying the moment.” Bobby shares that concern, but he understands that his younger brother is wired to anticipate trouble far more than he savors success. “I think it’s something he’ll appreciate more down the line,” Bobby says of the championship. “I hope he can take a deep breath and really understand that the struggle is part of accomplishing something special.”

There was a time in Dan Hurley’s life when he did everything he could to hide all these feelings. By discussing them publicly, he’s found that he can address them more honestly. He also aspires to help remove the stigma that all too often is attached to discussions about mental health, especially in the world of athletics. “What’s the shame in it, man? There is no f------ shame in it,” he says. “I’m not, like, waking up sad every day. There are things that trigger different ways you feel about yourself. It’s totally normal. Most people have to deal with depression, anxiety, frustration, rejection, addiction. It’s like getting your knee replaced.”

The experience at the New York Stock Exchange may have been uncomfortable for Hurley, but it served as a healthy reminder of what truly motivates him. “The part that fills you up is the relational side, the human side,” he says. “Being part of a close-knit tribe. The hard work that you do with a group of like-minded people.”

That work has begun again, putting Hurley back in his element — in the gym, grinding with his guys, pursuing a fresh set of goals. If he calibrates success by the things that really matter, he might finally realize that he measures up just fine.