{"id":497772,"date":"2013-10-28T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8080\/david-blatt-meets-with-legend-jim-calhoun\/"},"modified":"2013-10-28T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T10:00:00","slug":"david-blatt-meets-with-legend-jim-calhoun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/david-blatt-meets-with-legend-jim-calhoun\/","title":{"rendered":"David Blatt Meets with Legend Jim Calhoun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> \t<span style=\"font-size:14px;\">By Amy Samin<\/span><\/p>\n<p> \t<span style=\"font-size:14px;\">Legendary basketball coach Jim Calhoun, 71, who is visiting Israel, took time yesterday (Sunday) for a special meeting with the head coach of Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv, David Blatt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p> \t<span style=\"font-size:14px;\">Blatt recounts: \u201cIt was an exciting and emotional reunion. Jim is a close acquaintance of mine. I played for him at a basketball camp when I was 14, and he has kept up with me and even tried to recruit me to coach at Northeastern. I have always respected and admired Coach Calhoun for all of his achievements, and especially for the amazing way he reached the top in basketball. I have followed his Hall of Fame career at Connecticut with great interest. And of course, I really liked the rare and wonderful combination of the many Israeli players who were so successful under his coaching. Jim is a very dear and intelligent man, both when it comes to the game and as a person. It was wonderful to sit and talk with him about basketball and life in general.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p> \t<span style=\"font-size:14px;\">Calhoun has come to Israel as part of a delegation of academics from the University of Connecticut that is looking into the possibility of a student exchange program in coordination with the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and with the cooperation of the Israeli Consul General in New York, Ido Aharoni.<\/span><\/p>\n<p> \t<span style=\"font-size:14px;\">Calhoun retired last year after an amazing 40-year career that included 14 seasons at Northeastern University (1972 \u2013\u00a0 1986) and 26 years at Connecticut (1986 \u2013 2012) with whom he won the NCAA Championship three times (1994, 1999 and 2011). Calhoun has always had a warm relationship with Israel, and he coached and nurtured many Israeli players including Nadav Henefeld and Doron Sheffer, both of whom went on to have excellent careers with Maccabi Tel Aviv after leaving college. Calhoun also sent dozens of players to the NBA, the best and most famous of whom was Ray Allen though the list also includes many other luminaries such as Richard Hamilton, Cliff Robinson, Ben Gordon, Donyell Marshall, Rudy Gay, Caron Butler, Emeka Okafor and many others.<\/span><\/p>\n<p> \t<span style=\"font-size:14px;\">Calhoun had dinner yesterday with some of his former players at Connecticut, including Nadav Henefeld, Gilad Katz, and the parents of Doron Sheffer. While he is in Israel Calhoun will hold two coaching workshops, in Abu Gosh and in Haifa. Calhoun\u2019s host during his stay in Israel is his old friend Ilan Kowalsky, Athletic Director of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Legendary basketball coach Jim Calhoun, 71, who is visiting Israel, took time yesterday (Sunday) for a special meeting with the head coach of Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":497771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"custom_author":[],"class_list":["post-497772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-54"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497772"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=497772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}