Less than an hour before taking charge of his first national championship with the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team in April 2023, Dan Hurley received a text he couldn’t ignore.
With the weight of a nine-year title drought on his shoulders, Hurley responded instantly. The man at the other end: Thorr Bjorn, director of athletics at the University of Rhode Island, and Hurley’s former employer.
“I sent a text just saying, ‘hey man, I hope you enjoy this, you deserve it, this is what you left [Rhode Island] to do, but do me a favor and enjoy it,’” Bjorn said. “He texted me back within a minute, just saying some really nice things.”
Hurley, who became one of just eight coaches in the history of college basketball to win back-to-back national championships in 2024, holds a relationship with Bjorn that far predates his time in the national spotlight.
The two first met face-to-face at a New Jersey diner in 2012, when Bjorn was eyeing the two-year Wagner College head coach as a potential candidate for the vacancy at URI. That meeting marked the beginning of a long relationship that would go on to shape Hurley’s coaching career, starting in his first season with the Rams.
In a preseason exhibition game on Oct. 14, Hurley had a chance to reflect on his time with the Rams when he faced Rhode Island for the first time since his record-setting six-year run in Kingston.
“Thorr choosing me to lead his program, it changed my life, just the way the people supported me here,” Hurley said. “People have no idea how great a place Rhode Island is to live and how awesome URI is, and what it’s like when you build a great team and what the Ryan Center turns into.”
Hurley had only been coaching for two years when he was hired at URI in 2012, but Bjorn said it was instantly clear during their meeting in New Jersey that he was the right man to take the Rams back to their championship-winning days of the late 1990s.
“I got there and we spent three hours, three hours in this diner talking,” Bjorn said. “It was just a great conversation… he wasn’t selling himself as much as he was [selling] his love for basketball and his interest.”
Although progress was slow and wins were hard to come by in his first year with URI during the 2012-2013 season, an 8-21 record did little to sway Bjorn from his initial impression of a coach who was “never going to take his foot off the gas.” Coming from a high school program where he only lost three games during his entire career, Hurley’s slow start in Rhode Island proved to be a difficult adjustment.
“That was kind of hard for Dan, for sure,” Bjorn said. “He was frustrated… [and] he was wearing it on his sleeve. So I know it was hard for the players and so forth. But you still had to believe. I knew he was the right guy, and it’s gonna take time.”
Bjorn was right. In six years with the Rams, Hurley became the only coach in program history to win both an Atlantic 10 tournament title and regular season title, and the only coach to win in two separate NCAA tournaments – taking the team dancing during back-to-back years in 2017 and 2018, and winning its first A-10 championship in 20 years.
“He never wavered from the endgame,” Bjorn said. “He never wavered. I think he probably put more pressure on himself in terms of wanting to experience that level of success sooner.”
While runs in the NCAA tournament and dominance in the A-10 defined Hurley’s tenure at URI, he said he draws the most from the losses. A three-point loss to No. 3 University of Oregon in the 2017 NCAA tournament, despite marking the Rams’ furthest run in the tournament in nearly two decades, is the loss Hurley said “haunts” him the most.
For Hurley, losses like those helped to drive his success long after his time in the Ocean State.
“I gather a lot of strength from that experience when I’m going through it at UConn,” Hurley said. “Minus winning the national championships, my biggest moments of my career came at Rhody.”
The secret to Hurley’s success? An unmatched dedication to his players, according to Bjorn.
“I don’t think we had a lot of kids transfer, because they knew how much he loved them,” Bjorn said. “Now, he was hard. He demanded everything. But it’s almost cliché. He would do anything in the world for them. They knew it, which meant they would run through a brick wall for him.”
Bjorn and Hurley still text regularly, according to Bjorn. The impact Rhode Island had on Hurley’s career isn’t one that left him when he took charge of the Huskies. When he watched the Rams run out onto the court for the first time as an opponent, a full-circle moment brought him back to his roots.
“I love Rhode Island,” Hurley said. “I f––ing love Rhode Island.”