My Teacher From Afar

I never played for John Chaney. I never sat in his locker room, stumbled into one of his infamous early-morning practices, or had him pull me into his office after I screwed up and explain what I needed to understand about myself.

John Chaney probably never knew I existed.

But he was one of my teachers.

I already had something of a moral compass. My Aunt Andy, who was essentially a second mother to me, and my abuela had taught me versions of the same basic rule: when somebody can't defend themselves, you defend them. If somebody is being bullied, you don't stand safely in the crowd and watch. You step in. Star Trek reinforced much of the same moral universe. Power wasn't permission to dominate people who had less of it. Having power created a responsibility to protect them.

So I had the why.

John Chaney showed me what the why looked like when the person holding it was called Coach.

During the 1990s, while I was becoming a father myself, I watched him closely. What I learned had almost nothing to do with basketball.

The Men Who Cried When Basketball Ended

If you watched enough Temple basketball during the Chaney years, eventually you saw something that didn't quite fit the public caricature of this terrifying little basketball coach.

John Chaney cried. Not a dignified little sniffle, either. Chaney could boohoo with the best of them.

When Temple's NCAA tournament run ended and the seniors beside him had played their final game, Chaney didn't talk about them like basketball inventory leaving the program. Pepe Sánchez wasn't simply a point guard whose eligibility had expired. Marc Jackson wasn't merely a center moving on. Lynn Greer wasn't just another great Temple player reaching the end.

They were his sons.

Senior Day revealed the relationship from the other direction. His players walked toward him crying too because they understood what they were leaving behind. Whatever else John Chaney could be—demanding, stubborn, brilliant, volatile, occasionally wrong—those young men knew something with absolute certainty.

That man loved them.

I was watching, and I was learning.

“The Word Coach Means Dad to Me”

Years later, Marc Jackson gave us perhaps the clearest explanation of what Chaney had actually been doing.

Jackson had been born at Temple University Hospital and raised around Temple's campus. He left Philadelphia to attend Virginia Commonwealth University because, as he later explained, his life had become difficult and he wanted to get away. It didn't last. He returned to Philadelphia and eventually Temple.

His mother was battling her own demons. Jackson described essentially helping raise his younger brother while, in many ways, trying to raise himself.

There was a major piece missing from his life: a father.

At Chaney's memorial service, Jackson put the relationship into five words:

“The word coach means dad.”

That wasn't sentimentality invented for a memorial.

Jackson had lived it.

The Elbow Wasn't the Real Problem

In 1996, Jackson lost control during a game against Duke and elbowed Greg Newton. There was no excuse for it, and Jackson didn't offer one. But years later he explained something far more interesting than the foul itself.

Things had been said to him that made him furious. He didn't know how to handle what was happening inside him. As Jackson remembered it, “You don't learn to cope with certain things. You don't learn how to control certain emotions.”

There is an enormous distinction hiding inside those words.

Jackson knew elbowing somebody was wrong. The missing knowledge existed somewhere else: he didn't know what to do with what he was feeling.

That distinction matters enormously for ADHD students. A kid can understand an expectation perfectly well while lacking reliable access to the regulation necessary to meet it under stress. Knowing the rule does not automatically provide impulse inhibition, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance, or the ability to recover once the nervous system is flooded.

Knowing isn't necessarily accessing.

Chaney understood that distinction long before I had language for it.

The Apology Letter

The following day, Jackson was told to apologize. He wrote a letter, but he was still furious.

Chaney read it and apparently saw straight through the paper. He called Jackson into his office, cleared the room, and dealt with what was actually happening. Jackson later remembered Chaney acknowledging why he was angry and then giving him the kind of guidance “a father teaches a child.”

Chaney wasn't merely concerned with what Jackson had done against Duke. He wanted Jackson to know what to do the next time life put him in that emotional place.

Jackson described what good fathers do: “They don't tell you what you want to hear. They teach you right from wrong, and how to cope with things.”

The consequence wasn't the teaching.

Behavior >> understand what happened >> consequence >> teach the missing skill >> prepare for next time

The consequence created accountability. Chaney supplied the teaching.

Then Chaney Did Something Almost Nobody Does

Jackson was suspended for Temple's next game, and Chaney supported the suspension. He wasn't protesting accountability or pretending Jackson had done nothing wrong. Jackson had screwed up and was going to experience the consequence.

Temple's next game was against St. Joseph's.

Not an exhibition or some meaningless game buried on the schedule.

St. Joe's.

A Philadelphia rival and conference opponent.

Jackson couldn't play. John Chaney could coach.

He chose not to.

Assistant coach Jim Maloney coached Temple instead. Chaney stayed with Marc Jackson.

Think about that decision for a moment. How many Division I basketball coaches voluntarily sit out a rivalry game because a suspended player needs them more than the basketball team does?

Chaney didn't erase Jackson's consequence. Jackson still sat out. But Chaney refused to let accountability become abandonment.

Jackson sits out >> the consequence remains

Chaney sits with him >> the relationship remains

Jackson had already told us what had been missing from his life. He hadn't had a father teaching him how to cope with difficult emotions. Now the man he called Coach—meaning Dad—did exactly what Jackson believed a father was supposed to do.

He taught him, held him accountable, and when the consequence arrived, Dad didn't leave.

For a young man who had spent so much of his life figuring things out without that figure beside him, something fundamental had changed.

Life was no longer an escape room.

Some Things Are More Important Than the Game

Chaney didn't make that decision in an institutional vacuum.

Peter Liacouras had hired him in 1982 for reasons that went well beyond winning basketball games. Temple sat in the middle of North Philadelphia, in a community with which the university had not always had an easy relationship. Liacouras understood that Temple couldn't simply occupy North Philadelphia. It had to belong there.

When Liacouras recruited Chaney from Cheyney, he didn't just show him the basketball facilities. Chaney later remembered Liacouras driving him around North Philadelphia, showing him the neighborhoods and explaining how much of a difference he believed Temple could make there. Chaney said Liacouras's vision for the university and his passion for the community were part of what drew him to Temple.

John Chaney became part of that bridge.

Chaney built a basketball program that reflected the people Temple claimed to serve. That didn't mean recruiting only kids from Philadelphia. It meant finding young men from Philadelphia and elsewhere who came from similar circumstances—kids with ability who might have been overlooked, academically marginalized, underestimated, or simply needed somebody willing to invest in them.

Basketball gave Temple a national stage. Chaney gave that stage a distinctly Temple identity.

Liacouras understood the value of both. He had taken considerable criticism when he hired Chaney, Temple's first Black head basketball coach, away from Division II Cheyney. But the decision became one of the defining moves of his presidency. Chaney's program gave Temple enormous national visibility without severing its connection to North Philadelphia and the kinds of young people the university was supposed to serve.

That's why Chaney and Liacouras were partners.

One was building the university. The other was building a basketball program that embodied something the university wanted to say about itself: Temple could become nationally important without turning its back on North Philadelphia.

And Liacouras knew exactly what he had in Chaney.

So when Chaney decided that Marc Jackson needed him more than Temple needed its head coach for one basketball game, this wasn't an employee unexpectedly abandoning his assigned post while the university reluctantly tolerated it.

It was John Chaney being John Chaney.

The same man Liacouras had hired to build something larger than a basketball team.

Some things are more important than the game.

At Almost Exactly the Same Time, I Was Watching Another Dad

There is another reason 1996 matters to me.

While the Marc Jackson story was unfolding in Philadelphia, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was in its heyday, and I was watching Benjamin Sisko.

Sisko was a single father carrying enormous responsibilities. He commanded a space station, eventually became a Starfleet captain, navigated politics and war, and carried responsibilities involving entire civilizations. Yet Jake was never an afterthought.

Sisko could command. He could discipline. He could be demanding. He could screw up.

And he could still be Dad.

At almost exactly the same time, I was watching John Chaney demonstrate a similar hierarchy in real life. Coach and Dad. Captain and Dad. Authority and affection weren't opposites, and neither were accountability and belonging. Responsibility for the larger mission did not eliminate responsibility for the individual human being.

Right in the middle of all of this, my oldest son Andrew was born.

I didn't feel as though I had inherited a particularly good map for fatherhood, so I assembled one wherever I could find the pieces. My aunt and my abuela had given me the compass. Chaney and Sisko helped me figure out how to read it.

Deep Space Nine completed its seventh and final season in 1999. The following year, my second son was born.

His name is Benjamin Avery.

Benjamin for Sisko. Avery for Avery Brooks.

I didn't discover these influences thirty years later and connect them because they made a good story. I named my son after one of them.

The Father I Wanted to Become

There is a harder part of this story, and cleaning it up would make everything that follows less truthful.

I knew what kind of dad I wanted to be.

I wanted some John Chaney in me: fiercely protective, demanding because he believed in his kids rather than because their performance validated him, and capable of holding somebody accountable without making love conditional.

I wanted some Benjamin Sisko too: present, engaged, affectionate, imperfect, and able to let his son become himself rather than forcing him into Dad's conception of who he should become.

Coach John Chaney and Captain Benjamin Sisko were the dads I was trying to become.

But knowing where north is and consistently walking north are different things. There were unresolved things inside me that I didn't yet understand, along with difficult dynamics in my family life. Sometimes those things interfered with my ability to keep becoming the father I desperately wanted to be.

I failed in places that matter enormously to me. I don't say that to excuse anything, and I don't want the story of John Chaney or Benjamin Sisko turned into evidence that choosing good role models somehow guaranteed a good outcome.

It didn't.

They were the direction on the compass, not proof that I always reached it.

Then something happened I never expected.

Other People's Kids Found That Father

Kids started getting deposited in front of me through soccer, teaching, street hockey, and even while I was working at a school as an IT manager. Often they were precisely the kids other adults couldn't quite reach: ADHD kids, kids carrying significant trauma, bright kids producing almost nothing, and kids whose observable behavior didn't begin to tell you what was actually happening inside them.

For reasons I didn't initially understand, I was really good at connecting with them.

Eventually I figured out why.

It was low-hanging-fruit empathy.

Their experiences weren't identical to mine. Some had experienced trauma considerably worse than anything I had experienced. But I recognized enough of the terrain to see things other adults sometimes missed.

I could see the head drop and the hesitation before an answer from a kid who knew the answer. I could hear the self-doubt underneath the joke and recognize bravado that wasn't confidence at all.

I could see the mask because I understood why somebody builds one.

And perhaps most importantly, I learned to look for the tiny piece that hadn't been destroyed.

Find the Place Where Self-Esteem Survived

Even when a kid's self-esteem had been beaten nearly flat, there was often one little compartment where it survived. Maybe it was drawing, sports, computers, music, humor, or some obsessive interest adults had already dismissed as irrelevant to the serious business of school.

That little compartment mattered.

I understood because I had compartments of my own. There had been places in my life where my self-esteem survived even when it wasn't doing particularly well elsewhere. I knew what it was like to protect those little islands because sometimes they were the only evidence you had that the person everybody else seemed to see wasn't the whole person.

So when I found one in a kid, I didn't dismiss it.

I pivoted off it.

Interest >> competence >> connection >> confidence >> willingness to risk

I also knew where some of the landmines were: shame, humiliation, making a kid feel stupid for something they couldn't reliably control, confusing inability with unwillingness, or taking away the one thing that made them feel competent and using it as leverage to force performance somewhere they felt incompetent.

I knew enough of that landscape to avoid some of those mines.

Because I had wanted somebody to navigate that landscape with me.

Low-Hanging-Fruit Empathy Was Only the Doorway

Recognizing parts of myself in these kids made the initial connection easier, but that isn't where empathy ends. It's where empathy starts.

The relatable part gets you through the doorway. I recognized the head drop. I understood the mask. I knew something about what it felt like when most of your self-esteem had retreated into one protected corner.

Then came the harder part.

This kid wasn't me.

Their ADHD wasn't mine. Their trauma wasn't mine. Their nervous system, history, fears, strengths, and needs weren't mine. Real empathy required becoming curious about everything on the other side of the doorway—the parts I didn't automatically understand because I hadn't experienced them myself.

But John Chaney had taught me something else that mattered once I got through that doorway.

It was okay to care that much.

One Foot Across the Line

There is a professional boundary between this is my student and this is my child, and there should be. But John Chaney showed me that maintaining the boundary did not require emotional distance.

You could remain Coach. You could remain Teacher. You could remain the adult. And still put one foot across that line and love these kids with something approaching the fierceness you would bring to your own.

That didn't mean becoming their best friend, removing expectations, or trying to change them into versions of themselves that made the adult's life easier. It meant making sure the kid understood that you saw them and were willing to make the effort to understand them. I wasn't there to manufacture a more convenient version of the kid. I was there to help them become the best version of themselves.

And when they inevitably screwed up, I was still going to be standing there.

That's what Marc Jackson had experienced, and that's what John Chaney unknowingly gave me permission to do.

My Marc Jackson Moment

Years later, I was teaching at a Montessori high school. One of my students had ADHD, very high intellectual ability, and significant emotional stress coming from home.

Some days he would arrive visibly frazzled. I could see immediately that his head wasn't available for academics.

The conventional response was sitting right there waiting for me: class has started, sit down, get your geometry out, stop talking, focus, do the work.

But I knew this kid. If I pushed geometry immediately, I wasn't getting geometry. I was getting an hour of dysregulation, distraction, resistance, or shutdown.

So sometimes I did something teachers aren't really supposed to do.

I handed him my iPad, opened Procreate, and told him to go play for ten or fifteen minutes. Draw. Doodle. Reset your head.

Then we'd work.

Dysregulated arrival >> Procreate >> drawing >> regulation returns >> access returns >> geometry

I sacrificed fifteen minutes and frequently recovered the rest of the class. Had I insisted on immediate compliance, I could have spent the entire period proving that I was the teacher while teaching almost nothing.

Then I Realized I Had Seen This Before

Years earlier, Marc Jackson had been suspended and John Chaney had a basketball game to coach. The conventional expectation was obvious: go coach the game.

Chaney looked at the human being in front of him and decided that the immediate task wasn't the most important task.

Marc needed him, so Chaney sat with Marc.

Years later, my student walked into my classroom emotionally dysregulated and I had geometry to teach. The conventional expectation was equally obvious: teach geometry.

But I looked at the human being in front of me and made the same kind of judgment. The kid needed something else first, so I handed him the iPad.

The circumstances were different. The scale was different.

The judgment was the same.

Chaney sacrificed a basketball game because the young man needed him more than the team did at that moment. I sacrificed fifteen minutes of geometry because the young man needed to regulate before the lesson could reach him.

Neither of us removed the expectation. Marc still served his suspension, and my student still did geometry.

We changed the sequence.

Not now >> regulate first >> preserve the relationship >> restore access >> return to the expectation

That's the direct line between something I watched John Chaney do in 1996 and something I found myself doing years later in a classroom.

I hadn't learned to imitate John Chaney. I had internalized his judgment.

The iPad Wasn't a Reward

From the outside, somebody could have walked into my classroom and seen an ADHD student playing with Procreate during geometry and concluded that I was rewarding avoidance.

But the iPad wasn't a reward.

It was scaffolding.

I wasn't excusing the student from geometry. I was recognizing that he couldn't presently access the kid who could do the geometry. The objective wasn't drawing; the objective was access. Ten or fifteen minutes of drawing could sometimes accomplish what fifty minutes of escalating demands couldn't.

And then we went back to work.

The expectation never disappeared. It became reachable.

Then the Equation Changed

This student had already been diagnosed with ADHD. Eventually he saw a psychiatrist and accepted treatment with Vyvanse.

Then came a Wednesday afternoon. During geometry, near the end of the school day, he unexpectedly left. I remember wondering why because he didn't normally do that.

The following day, he was dramatically different.

Not a different personality.

The same kid with dramatically better access to himself.

His executive functioning improved. His emotional self-regulation improved. The incessant talking settled, and he could manage himself in the classroom in ways that previously required enormous external scaffolding. His academic performance began improving across the board.

The intelligence hadn't suddenly appeared Thursday morning. The psychiatrist hadn't put intelligence into him.

The stars had always been there.

What changed was his access to them.

“I Am Happy These Kids Get You in Their Lives”

One of my fellow faculty members had been in the loop with this student. When I shared the good news about what we were seeing, she sent me a message:

“I am happy these kids get you in their lives. If you can help one, you did your job.”

Then she added:

“So awesome Jaden opened up to you and responds well.”

That second part matters because she wasn't simply observing that medication had worked. She had noticed the relationship.

The medication improved access. The scaffolding gave that access somewhere to go. The relationship gave him somebody he trusted enough to let into the struggle.

Eventually the kid himself told me what that relationship had meant.

The Kids Started Writing Back

Years later, former students started telling me what some of these relationships had meant to them.

Chris, one of the kids I had worked with through street hockey, sent me a Father's Day message thanking me for “stepping in and being like a second dad i needed in my life.”

There it was again.

Marc Jackson had said, “The word coach means dad.”

Chris said, “a second dad i needed.”

Different generations, different sports, different circumstances.

Same human need.

Another former student told me that what mattered was feeling understood, that I had made her feel “like a person rather than a freak or a bother.” Another contacted me after beginning college and said I had given him “the most important thing a human [can have] HOPE.” Still another later told me he wanted to show other ADHDers something like what I had shown him.

They were describing different parts of the same experience: being seen, belonging, hope, and eventually the desire to pass something forward.

The Caregiving Tree

That last piece brings Marc Jackson back into the story.

Jackson eventually became a mentor himself. After moving to Tampa, he built a program involving scores of young men. When people asked how many children he had, Jackson—who had three biological children—would say 90.

Some of those young men called him Coach. Some called him Dad.

Jackson taught them what Chaney had taught him: how to cope, how to handle difficult emotions, how to distinguish right from wrong, and how to become men. At Chaney's memorial, Jackson told the family that Chaney had touched hundreds directly and thousands indirectly because the people he taught carried what he gave them into other lives.

Then one of my former students told me he wanted to do essentially the same thing for other ADHDers.

That's how the relationship propagates.

Chaney >> Jackson >> another generation

Mentor >> kid >> future mentor

People build people who go build other people.

The Ball Was the Tunnel

Jackson said something else at Chaney's memorial that explains why this worked:

“We know life is bigger than bouncing a ball.”

Then he explained that they used the ball as a tunnel to get into the minds of the young men they mentored.

That's a remarkably useful way to think about ADHD kids.

Schools often treat intense interests as competitors to education. Stop drawing. Put the ball away. Stop talking about dinosaurs. Forget the computer. No games until the homework is done. We remove the thing producing engagement and then wonder why the kid becomes harder to reach.

Chaney understood something more fundamental.

Basketball wasn't merely the thing he wanted young men to become good at.

Basketball was how he reached them.

Basketball >> engagement >> relationship >> access >> teaching

The interest isn't necessarily the distraction from the education. Sometimes it's the tunnel into the mind.

My student's drawing wasn't competing with geometry.

For fifteen minutes, it was the tunnel that brought him back to geometry.

Then Came the Note

There was one message I didn't receive privately.

It happened on the final Community Day of the school year at the Montessori high school. Students were asked to write down one happy thought from their year.

The same student who sometimes needed Procreate before I could get any geometry out of him wrote his about me. His community circle chose him to share it with the school.

Before reading the note, he explained what I had meant to him. I started bawling. Two other adults who had been part of helping this kid knew what he had been through and what that moment represented.

They were wet sacks too.

Then he stood in front of the entire school and read:

“He saw the stars in my eyes,
So he took me to the moon.
I will never be more grateful.”

I don't have much to add to that.

The stars had always been there.

The Father I Found in the Classroom

This is the part of the story that is hardest for me.

John Chaney and Benjamin Sisko had shown me versions of the father I wanted to become. I didn't always manage to become that father as consistently as I wanted to for my own children. There were unresolved things inside me and obstacles in my family life that I didn't yet understand well enough to navigate.

Those failures remain mine. The messages from my students don't erase them, and they aren't absolution.

But they revealed something I hadn't expected.

The father I had been trying to become wasn't imaginary.

Under different circumstances, I could access him.

These kids began as strangers. They arrived without all the accumulated history surrounding my own family relationships. Their ADHD, trauma, masking, shame, insecurity, and protected little compartments of self-esteem were familiar enough that I could recognize the terrain without simultaneously standing in the middle of all of my own landmines.

And something remarkable happened.

The father I had been trying to become showed up—not perfectly and not every time, but enough that the kids noticed.

Eventually, they told me.

What John Chaney Meant to Me

I understand now why John Chaney affected me so deeply.

My Aunt Andy and my abuela taught me to fight for people who couldn't fight for themselves. Benjamin Sisko showed me another model of fatherhood while I was becoming a father myself. But John Chaney showed me what happened when that responsibility walked onto a basketball court wearing the title Coach.

He showed me that accountability didn't require abandonment and that being demanding and loving weren't contradictions. He showed me that a coach could remain a coach while putting one foot across that line and loving young people with something approaching the fierceness of a father.

Most importantly, he showed me what to do when the job description and the human being temporarily came into conflict.

The kid wins.

Sometimes the game waits. Sometimes geometry waits. Then you help the kid get back to the place where the game, the geometry, the consequence, the expectation—whatever it is—becomes reachable again.

That's not abandoning standards.

That's understanding what the standards are for.

My Teacher From Afar

I never sat in John Chaney's locker room. He never coached me, pulled me into his office, or knew that some guy watching Temple basketball was studying what happened when the basketball stopped.

But I was.

I watched him cry over his seniors and watched his players cry over him. I watched him fight for young men. And in 1996, I watched him decide that sitting beside one struggling young man was more important than coaching a basketball game.

Years later, I looked at a dysregulated kid in a geometry classroom and made my own much smaller version of the same decision.

The immediate task can wait. The kid needs me.

Eventually, the kids told me what those relationships had meant to them. I didn't have to decide whether Chaney's lesson had made it through.

They did.

And one of them found words for it that I never could have:

“He saw the stars in my eyes,
So he took me to the moon.”

Years earlier, Marc Jackson had found his own words for what John Chaney had given him:

“The word coach means dad.”

Maybe that's how we ultimately know what a teacher taught—not by what the teacher says, but by what the students carry away.

Coach Chaney was my teacher from afar. And apparently, I learned the lesson well.

Author's Note

The accounts involving my own children, former students, coaching, teaching, the Montessori classroom, the use of Procreate as temporary regulation scaffolding, the student messages quoted in this article, and my personal influences from John Chaney and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are drawn from my own experiences and contemporaneous communications. They are presented as first-person recollection rather than independently documented historical claims.

The interpretation connecting Chaney's mentoring practices with ADHD emotional regulation, executive functioning, interest-based engagement, and educational scaffolding is my synthesis. I am not claiming that Chaney was consciously implementing an ADHD intervention, nor am I retroactively diagnosing his players. What Chaney understood was more fundamental: relationships come before compliance, regulation can come before performance, accountability does not require withdrawing belonging, and basketball could become a tunnel into the mind of a young person who might otherwise be difficult to reach.

Chaney's empathy made his coaching remarkably ADHD-proof.

He didn't need to know which player had ADHD. He didn't need the modern vocabulary of executive dysfunction, emotional dysregulation, interest-based attention, or rejection sensitivity. His instinct was to understand the human being before judging the behavior, find the place where that young person could engage, and build outward from there. Those practices happened to remove many of the failure points that make conventional classrooms and coaching environments so punishing for ADHD kids.

That's the distinction. John Chaney wasn't practicing ADHD neuroscience. He was practicing humanity so effectively that much of what he did already worked for the ADHD brain.

References

Associated Press. “Chaney Decides to Sit Out Game With Suspended Temple Player.” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1996. Contemporary reporting on Marc Jackson's suspension following the Duke game, Chaney's support for the suspension, and Chaney's decision to miss the St. Joseph's game to remain with Jackson. Temple president Peter Liacouras explained that Jackson was distraught and Chaney believed he should stay with him.
Los Angeles Times archive

Temple University. “Celebrating the Life of ‘a Giant of a Man.’” Temple Now, February 9, 2021. Temple's coverage of Chaney's memorial service, including Marc Jackson's description of Chaney's role as a father in his life and Jackson's explanation of how he carried Chaney's mentoring model forward to another generation.
Temple Now memorial coverage

Wolfman-Arent, Avi. “From All Walks of Life, Philadelphians Gather to Mourn John Chaney.” WHYY, February 2021. Coverage of Jackson's memorial testimony describing growing up without a father, struggling to cope with difficult emotions, and Chaney becoming a surrogate father and mentor.
WHYY memorial coverage

Jensen, Mike. “John Chaney's Funeral Service Captured the Memory of the Man.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 9, 2021. Coverage of Jackson's testimony about Chaney teaching him how to cope, staying with him during his suspension, and becoming the father figure he had lacked. Jackson also explained the use of basketball as a “tunnel” into the minds of the young men he later mentored.
Philadelphia Inquirer memorial coverage

CBS Philadelphia. “Memorial Service Held for Legendary Temple Basketball Head Coach John Chaney.” February 2021. Additional coverage of Chaney's off-court influence and Jackson's testimony about Chaney teaching players how to cope with difficult situations rather than simply telling them what they wanted to hear.
CBS Philadelphia memorial coverage

Temple Update. “Memorial Honors University President Peter J. Liacouras.” May 2016. Documents the relationship between Chaney and Liacouras beginning with Liacouras recruiting Chaney from Cheyney. Chaney recalled Liacouras driving him around North Philadelphia, showing him the surrounding community, and explaining his belief that Temple could make a difference there.
Temple Update Liacouras memorial

Temple University. “Temple Celebrates the Life of Peter Liacouras.” Temple Now, May 23, 2016. Temple's account of Liacouras's transformation of the university and his relationship with Chaney, providing context for the larger institutional and community mission surrounding Chaney's hiring.
Temple Now Liacouras memorial

Bohnel, Steve. “Hundreds Honor Liacouras on Main Campus.” The Temple News, May 20, 2016. Coverage of Chaney's tribute to Liacouras and his recollection of a university president who remained personally accessible to students and the Temple community.
The Temple News Liacouras coverage

Snyder, Susan. “Peter Liacouras, President Who Transformed Temple, Dies.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2016. Retrospective on Liacouras's presidency and the transformation of Temple during his tenure, including the importance of athletics and Chaney's basketball program to the university's growing national visibility.
Philadelphia Inquirer Liacouras retrospective

Lunardi, Joe. “Temple's John Chaney Left an Enormous Legacy in Philadelphia and Throughout College Basketball.” ESPN, January 29, 2021. Retrospective on Liacouras's decision to hire Chaney in 1982 and Chaney's subsequent impact on Temple, Philadelphia, college basketball, and generations of players.
ESPN Chaney retrospective

Jensen, Mike. “Temple Legend John Chaney Sees Ray of Hope in Protests.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 9, 2020. Chaney reflects on Liacouras's role in bringing him to Temple and helping connect him with people who could help him develop professionally and personally, illustrating how their relationship extended beyond a conventional president-coach arrangement.
Philadelphia Inquirer Chaney interview

Associated Press. “John Chaney, Temple's Commanding Basketball Coach, Dies at 89.” NBA.com, January 29, 2021. Overview of Chaney's Hall of Fame career, his 17 NCAA tournament appearances at Temple, and his longstanding commitment to creating opportunities for economically and educationally disadvantaged young people.
Associated Press obituary via NBA.com

Temple University Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Sports Medicine. Profile of John Chaney. Temple Orthopaedic Journal, 2007. Describes Liacouras persuading Chaney to come to Temple in 1982, Chaney's advocacy for people from compromised backgrounds and limited opportunities, and the educational purpose underlying his early-morning practice structure.
Temple Orthopaedic Journal profile