Hofstra's Cassara, Jenkins relying on each other

Charles Jenkins walked into Mo Cassara's office at Hofstra last week as if he were walking into his own dorm room. He didn't bother to knock. Nor did he ask for permission before flopping down behind Cassara's desk and logging onto the basketball coach's computer.

"This is the kind of relationship we have," Cassara said with a shrug. "We're that close."

Cassara, Hofstra's first-year coach, and Jenkins, the Pride's star guard, are so close that they are often in the same room. And when they're not, they're usually on the same page; the two communicate almost hourly through various forms of social media.

The relationship is surprisingly tight considering the chaos that brought it into being.

"We went through a lot and we both discovered pretty quickly that we needed each other," Jenkins said. "We both need a big year, and we both have something to prove."

Cassara, 37, needs to prove that he can coach on the Division I level, that he belongs in a job that fell into his lap because of the misfortunes of two of his mentors.

A year ago, Cassara was an assistant at Boston College under Al Skinner. When Skinner was fired last spring, Cassara landed at Hofstra under the newly hired Tim Welsh, who replaced Tom Pecora. Then, shortly after Welsh resigned May 3 after a DWI arrest, Cassara, who had never been a head coach at a Division I school, was tabbed to take over the program.

The whole situation could have been a serious blow to Jenkins, who was last season's Colonial Athletic Association player of the year. Jenkins is looking to have a big-time senior year, the kind that proves to NBA scouts that he has what it takes to flourish as a pro despite being slightly undersized for an NBA shooting guard and coming from a smaller school.

The 6-3 Jenkins averaged 20.6 points, 4.5 rebounds and 3.9 assists last season. He could have tried to leave for the NBA or transferred to another school, like teammates Halil Kanacevic and Chaz Williams. But Jenkins said there was something about the way Cassara and the coaching staff handled the situation after the DWI arrest that made him want to stick around.

"There was a week that he didn't know if he was going to be here anymore, but he was there every day with the rest of the coaching staff, talking to us and keeping us in the gym," Jenkins said. "I mean, these guys' jobs were up for grabs, but they were in there talking to us and working with us and trying to tell us that everything was going to be OK. To me, that said a lot."

It also said a lot to the coaching community that Cassara was able to keep a big-time player in Jenkins from leaving. Cassara's biggest previous head-coaching job was a two-year stint at Division III Clark University in Worcester, Mass. But he does have some friends in high places. Among his mentors, Cassara counts Skinner, Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, whom he knows from having gone to the same Massachusetts prep school, and Dayton coach Brian Gregory, with whom he worked when he was a Dayton assistant for a season.

Cassara said his team will play a hybrid system, drawing on what he used from those mentors plus picking up some of the Syracuse zone that two of his coaches with Syracuse connections, Wayne Morgan and Allen Griffin, know well.

The bottom line is that the team's fortunes largely will be riding on the play of Jenkins. He says that in a way, he likes the pressure of having to have a big senior season, both individually and for the team, which was projected to finish fifth in a preseason CAA coaches' poll.

Said Jenkins: "As a team, we have all the excuses in the world not to be successful. We can say we don't have coach Welsh. We can say we don't have coach Pecora. But I like what we do have. This is my last year here, and I want to make it something special."