Corchiani gives school an assist

The sports news these days is dominated by our local college basketball players trying to decipher their chances at an NBA contract. Go or stay – it all depends on the dollars.

In the real world, students scramble for acceptance to N.C. State and Duke and UNC. But in basketball, those schools are way stations on the road to professional riches.

So Tuesday morning, it was refreshing, again, to hear from Chris Corchiani, whose perspective goes beyond the games. I chuckled when I looked at the program for my son’s fifth-grade graduation and saw Corchiani listed as the speaker.

It still feels like only days ago when he was playing at N.C. State and I was covering the basketball team his senior season, 1990-91. That was an emotional time for N.C. State and for Corchiani, who admired Jim Valvano and believed the coach had been pushed out unfairly.

But Corchiani embraced new coach Les Robinson and joined Rodney Monroe for one of the great seasons in Wolfpack history. Corchiani was astute enough to answer questions about Valvano maturely and wise enough to make the most of the situation at hand.

After school, he had married a woman from Raleigh, played overseas and then settled here. He played in the NBA, and I’d run into him sometimes, but mostly I had lost track of him. Then suddenly, I started seeing him again. We have sons the same age who landed on a youth soccer team together. One day we were all munching pizza at a team party at the Salvation Army.

“Mr. Huffman used to write about me when I played at State,” Corchiani told his son, Tommy.

“Yeah,” I joked, “your dad wasn’t very good. All he did was pass the ball to Rodney.”

Corchiani did a little more than that, of course. But he is still one to give freely. He was roundly applauded at Raleigh’s Joyner Elementary School Tuesday and had all the kids engaged by asking for a show of hands on who pulled for Carolina, for Duke and for State. And the kids laughed when he talked about how he had to guard Michael Jordan.

But he also talked about how his father, a coach, wouldn’t let him play unless he’d done his school work. He talked about the importance of making good choices, especially when it comes to friends, and how you have to have confidence in yourself.

He also talked, at length, about school.

“Education is going to be there for you for the rest of your life,” Corchiani said. “The degree, nobody can take that away from you.”

Who can say what would have happened if Corchiani and Monroe had been projected as lottery picks. But I suspect all he said Tuesday would have held true in 1991.

Certainly players have the right to make their own choices, but the current era of athletes putting games first seems empty and disappointing.