Former Nebraska coach Nee gets USMMA basketball job

Brooklyn native Danny Nee, who revived basketball programs at Ohio University and Nebraska during 26 seasons as a Division I coach, has been named coach at USMMA, a Division III (non-scholarship) college.

"Division I, II, III, 14 - I really don't care," Nee said in a brief telephone interview. "What I missed was being head coach. And this fit. My two children live in Queens now, I'm from Brooklyn. It felt like coming home. I feel comfortable."

Nee, with a 409-382 combined record at Ohio, Nebraska, Robert Morris and Duquesne, most recently worked as an assistant at Rutgers and Towson University. He replaces John Krikorian, who took the head job at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va., after four seasons at USMMA, including last year's first Landmark Conference title and advance to the second round of the NCAA Division III tournament's second round with a 24-5 record.

Nee, a high school teammate of Lew Alcindor - later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - at Power Memorial, was a member of the late Al McGuire's first recruiting class at Marquette and captain of Marquette's freshman team before leaving school to serve in the Marine Corps, including a 1968 tour in Vietnam. He said "the military part" of the new job further appealed to him.

A graduate of St. Mary of the Plains College in Dodge City, Kan., with a master's degree from Kansas State, Nee coached at two New Jersey high schools before taking an assistant's job, under Digger Phelps, at Notre Dame, then rebuilt Ohio into a two-time NCAA Tournament team in the early 1980s. At Nebraska from 1986 to 2000, Nee made five NCAA Tournament appearances and his 1996 team won the NIT title.

He said his USMMA team will hold its first practice at 5 a.m. Friday morning.