Over the last nine days, there’s been no shortage of 50th anniversary recollections of Hofstra’s first appearance in the NCAA Tournament as a Division I program, 25th anniversary memories of the most recent Flying Dutchmen team to appear in the big dance and plaintive what-could-have-been odes about the 2020 team that won the CAA two days before the NCAA Tournament was canceled due to the pandemic.
But the presence of assistant coach Tom Parrotta on the sideline is a reminder of one more round-numbered anniversary this month — this of the 2006 Flying Dutchmen, the team that should have earned the school’s fifth NCAA Tournament berth long before anyone on the 2020 team stepped foot on campus.
But the Dutchmen, as anyone reading these words knows all too well, were robbed of the opportunity when a selection committee featuring George Mason athletic director Tom O’Connor gave the CAA’s second bid to Mason even though the Dutchmen beat the Patriots twice in the final 12 days of the season — including a 58-49 win in the CAA semifinals that ended with Tony Skinn punching Loren Stokes in a sensitive spot.
Stokes labored throughout a loss to UNC Wilmington in the title game loss the next night while Skinn was suspended for the Patriots’ first NCAA Tournament game…but not their second, third, fourth or fifth.
“It’s actually pretty grounding, because I’m going back all those years and being in a room like this — we weren’t sure what was going to happen,” Parrotta, who was also an assistant coach in 2006, said Sunday night. “We couldn’t open it to the public. And then it was just a somber moment at the end because we really thought deep down that it was going to happen.”
Twenty years later, Parrotta is much more diplomatic than the rest of us.
“Mason got the nod, they went on a roll and got to the Final Four,” Parrotta said. “So I guess somebody in that room knew what they were doing. But they backed it up. So no hard feelings.”
(Lots of hard feelings, albeit possibly fewer than 10 days ago, but we’ll move on)
Parrotta has plenty of reason to focus on the positives as he prepares for his first NCAA Tournament in a career that began with four years as a player at Fordham from 1987-91.
Since 1996, Parrotta has coached entirely at mid-major schools, including three years as an assistant to Joe Mihalich at Niagara before he spent five years alongside Tom Pecora from 2001-06. Parrotta went back to the MAAC as the head coach at Canisius from 2006-12, after which he served as an assistant at Fordham, Fairfield and Columbia before returning to Hofstra as one of Speedy Claxton’s first hires in 2021.
Before last Tuesday, he was within one step of an NCAA Tournament berth just twice — in 2006 and again in 2018, when Fairfield fell to Iona in the MAAC title game.
“I’ll tell you what, every time you go into a new year, this is the ultimate goal,” Parrotta said. “And you fall short a lot more times than you punch through. So did I sit back and say this is never going to happen? I never really approached it that way.”
But as the CAA Tournament approached, Parrotta started to believe this was finally the year he’d get the validation every mid-major coach wants to experience — and perhaps, by extension, a little satisfaction for the 2006 team that never got the chance to dance. Parrotta still talks regularly with Pecora and is in touch with many of the players he recruited.
“I had a feeling that this team — not early on, but as we went through things and we started to plateau, I felt really good going into the tournament,” Parrotta said. “And then I aid you know what? This could actually happen. And then it hit me that there were so many decades that came and went and it never happened.
“It’s a surreal moment,” said Parrotta, who will have his 92-year-old mom, Roseanne, in attendance Friday. “I couldn’t be happier at this stage of my career.”
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