CHERRY HILL, N.J. — Basketball wasn’t the first thing on Joe Mihalich’s mind in the immediate aftermath of a stroke on Aug. 15, 2020. But it would end up as a central piece of his recovery.
Mihalich was at his home on the campus of Hofstra University, the latest stop in more than four decades coaching basketball, when he suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in 2020. Thanks to early intervention of family and medical professionals, Mihalic avoided the most dire consequences, and he’s retained much of his mobility and speech through hard work since.
That day marked an end to Mihalich patrolling the sidelines as a Division I head coach, as he had since 1998. But it also eventually brought him home, to his alma mater La Salle — down the street from where he grew up, where he starred in the 1970s and spent 17 years as an assistant coach.
It also brought him the 2024 Most Courageous Award from the Philadelphia Sports Writers Association, bestowed Wednesday at its annual banquet.
“It’s humbling,” Mihalich said at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Cherry Hill. “It really is, to see that.”
As he recovered — which he and his wife Mary stress is a never-ending process — Mihalich returned to see out his contract with Hofstra in 2021-22 as a special adviser to the athletic director.
In the summer of 2022, an old friend came calling: Fran Dunphy, who had been an assistant at La Salle alongside Mihalic from 1985-88 and against whom Mihalic had waged plenty of battles in and out of the Big 5, had taken the top job at La Salle.
Dunphy thought he could use someone with 400 wins and three NCAA tournament appearances at Niagara and Hofstra on his staff.
The former Penn and Temple coach offered to create a position for Mihalich as his special assistant, to be in the huddles and around the team on a daily basis.
“We were in the car and Fran was talking to Joe, and they talked about it,” Mary said. “And Joe started crying, and I started crying and Fran started crying.”
It’s one of many ways in which basketball has touched Mihalich’s recovery.
His speech therapist at New York University, whom he’s seen at least once a week for the last three years, is the daughter of a former Hofstra player.
He’s worked with speech therapists on the La Salle campus that he and Mary (nee King, an Archbishop Carroll grad who also went to La Salle) are able to call home again. And it lets him be closer to his son, Joe Mihalich Jr., an assistant at Penn since 2015.
“I don’t know where I’d be without it,” Mihalich said, fighting back tears. “Dunphy really is something. He’s the reason I’m here today.”
Source: Berkshire mont
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