ESPN reports that Jim Calhoun, the head basketball coach for the UConn Huskies, will announce his retirement later today. The retirement will end the 40-year career of the legendary college coach.
Calhoun won 873 games over his career, spending the last 26 years with UConn. It has been only two years since he led his Huskies to a National Championship win over the Kentucky Wildcats. Over his illustrious career, Calhoun led his teams to the Final Four on four different occasions and won the National Championship three times (1999, 2004, 2011).
Calhoun is already a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, elected in 2005.
Calhoun, 70, began to lose control of his program recently, facing a short suspension in 2011 after the NCAA found his Huskies guilty of a number of violations. The team suffered a huge letdown in the 2011-12 season, after losing Kemba Walker to the NBA, and then the NCAA banned them from postseason play in the 2012-13 season due to low Academic Progress Rate scores.
When the UConn Huskies won the college basketball National Championship in 2011, reporters buzzed around the head coach and asked if he planned to retire. While he never answered one way or the other, he returned for one more season.
The same questions buzzed this offseason after Calhoun missed a series of games due to undergoing back surgery. After breaking a hip on a bicycle accident, he finally chose retirement.
Assistant coach Kevin Ollie will replace him as head coach, at the request of Jim Calhoun himself.
