Kevin Ollie, the former NBA point guard who played at UConn, will take over as head basketball coach at Connecticut, replacing Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun, who will announced his retirement at a press conference today.
Calhoun, 70, won 873 games in 40 years as a head coach, first at Northeastern and the last 26 years at UConn, where he led four teams to the Final Four, winning national titles in 1999, 2004 and 2011.
Calhoun has two years remaining on his contract and previously had stated that he wanted Ollie to be his successor. UConn recently was ruled ineligible for the 2013 NCAA tournament due to poor Academic Progress Rate scores of its basketball athletes.
A source close to Calhoun told ESPN.com that a fractured hip in early August after falling off his bicycle gave the prolific coach time to ponder his future.
Calhoun told ESPN.com this past summer that whenever he retired, he would mimic Dean Smith’s plan of waiting right until the start of the season. Smith ended his tenure at North Carolina prior to the 1996-97 season, when UNC named longtime assistant Bill Guthridge as his successor.
Calhoun, elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005, is a three-time cancer survivor and missed eight games last season while suffering from a painful spinal condition. He returned just four days after having back surgery to coach the Huskies in their regular-season finale and the postseason.
UConn finished the year 20-14, losing to Iowa State in the first-round of the NCAA tournament. Turned out, it was Calhoun’s last game as coach.
In addition to his medical leave, he served a three-game suspension at the start of the Big East season last winter for failing to maintain an atmosphere of compliance in his program, an issue that dated back to recruiting violations in 2008.
