Jim Boeheim
James Arthur Boeheim Jr. is an American former college basketball coach and current Special Assistant to the Athletic Director at Syracuse University. From 1976 until 2023, he was the head coach of the Syracuse Orange men's team of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Boeheim guided the Orange to ten Big East Conference regular season championships, five Big East tournament championships, and 34 NCAA tournament appearances, including five Final Four appearances and three appearances in the national title game. In those games, the Orangemen lost to Indiana in 1987, and to Kentucky in 1996, before defeating Kansas in 2003 with All-American Carmelo Anthony.
Boeheim has served as the President of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, chairman of the USA Basketball committees, and on various board of directors. He served as an assistant coach for the United States men's national basketball team at the Summer Olympics and the FIBA World Championships. He has been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame twice: in 2005 for his individual coaching career, and in 2025 as part of the coaching staff of the Redeem Team.
Boeheim intended to retire in 2018 but departure of expected successor Mike Hopkins for the head coaching position at Washington would keep him at Syracuse until his eventual retirement in 2023. During the 2021–22 season Boeheim coached both of his sons, Jimmy and Buddy Boeheim. Boeheim would become the winningest active coach in Division I basketball on April 2, 2022, after the retirement of Mike Krzyzewski. As a result of the Syracuse athletics scandal in 2015, the NCAA vacated 101 of his wins.
After suffering from cancer in 2001, Boeheim founded with his wife the Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation, which is devoted to child welfare, cancer treatment, and prevention.
Early life
Boeheim was born in 1944 in a German-American family to parents Janet and James Boeheim Sr. in Lyons, New York, a small town about 57 miles west of Syracuse. His family owned a funeral home, started by his great-grandfather in the mid-1800s. He graduated from Lyons Central High School, where he starred for coach Dick Blackwell's team.Career
Playing
Boeheim enrolled in Syracuse University as a student in 1962, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in social science. During his freshman year, Boeheim was a walk-on with the freshman basketball team. By his senior year, he was the varsity team captain and a teammate of All-American Dave Bing, his freshman roommate. The pair led coach Fred Lewis's Orangemen to a 22–6 overall win–loss record that earned the team's second-ever NCAA tournament berth. While at Syracuse, he joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He played as a student at SU for two seasons and in 1970s served as the university's last golf coach.After graduating from Syracuse, Boeheim played professionally with the Scranton Miners of the Eastern Professional Basketball League, during which he won two championships and was a second-team all-star. While working as a graduate assistant, he earned a graduate degree from Syracuse in 1973.
Coaching
In 1969, Boeheim decided to coach basketball and was hired as a graduate assistant at Syracuse under Roy Danforth. Soon thereafter he was promoted to a full-time assistant coach and was a member of the coaching staff that helped guide the Orangemen to the 1975 NCAA tournament, where Syracuse University made its first Final Four appearance.In 1976, Danforth left to become the head basketball coach and athletic director at Tulane University. A coaching search then led to naught, and Boeheim was promoted by athletic director Les Dye in a 3–2 split hiring decision to become Syracuse's seventh head coach. He won the first game against Harvard by 20 points, and finished the season with a 26–4 record and a Sweet 16 appearance.
Apart from his brief stint in the pros, Boeheim has spent his entire adult life at Syracuse, as either a student-athlete, assistant coach or head coach, a rarity in modern-day major collegiate athletics. In 2018, CBSSports.com writer Matt Norlander emphasized this in a piece where he speculated on potential successors for Boeheim, stating:
Boeheim does not have a parallel in major college athletics. There has never been a Division I coach in men's basketball, women's basketball or football who has spent more than 40 years at their alma mater and never coached anywhere else. Boeheim's the only one. There is no coaching figure more synonymous and literally affiliated with only one school.
Norlander also noted that Boeheim entered the 2018–19 season with nearly as many wins on his official coaching record, and more when counting wins vacated by the NCAA, than all of his predecessors combined, and in his various roles at Syracuse had been involved in over half of all games in Syracuse's 114-year basketball history.
In 1986, Boeheim was offered the head coaching job at Ohio State but turned it down to stay at Syracuse.
During a Syracuse–Georgetown game on January 10, 1983, Hoyas star Patrick Ewing was nearly struck by an orange, and at times had endured racial taunts from the SU student section. Boeheim borrowed a microphone and threatened to forfeit the game if fans continued to throw objects at Ewing.
In his first 41 years as head coach at Syracuse, Boeheim guided the Orange to postseason berths, either in the NCAA or NIT tournaments, in every year in which the Orange have been eligible. The only times Syracuse missed the postseason were in 1993 when NCAA sanctions barred them from postseason play despite a 20–9 record and in 2015 when Syracuse University self-imposed a one-year postseason ban related to the 2015 NCAA sanctions against the university's sports programs. In 2022, he had his first losing season, and missed the postseason. During his tenure, the Orange have appeared in three NCAA national championship games and won the national title in 2003.
Boeheim has been named Big East coach of the year four times, and has been named as District II Coach of the Year by the National Association of Basketball Coaches ten times. In 2004, Boeheim received two additional awards. The first was during the spring when he was awarded the Clair Bee Award in recognition of his contributions to the sport of basketball. During the fall of the same year Boeheim was presented with Syracuse University's Arents Award, the university's highest alumni honor.
Boeheim's coaching style at Syracuse is unusual in that, whereas many highly successful coaches prefer the man-to-man defense, he demonstrates a preference for the match-up 2–3 zone. Having been fond of the zone, he implemented the defensive style early on among other, but went almost exclusively to the zone only around 1996.
File:20140814 World Basketball Festival Team USA assistant coaches.JPG|thumb|Boeheim, Monty Williams, and Tom Thibodeau served as assistant coaches for the 2014 United States FIBA World Cup team.
In an exhibition game on November 7, 2005, against Division II school Saint Rose from Albany, New York, Boeheim was ejected for the first time in his career after arguing a call late in the first half in the Orange's 86–73 victory. He was also ejected from Cameron Indoor Stadium on February 22, 2014, against Duke after arguing a player control foul call.
Boeheim has also been a coach for USA national teams. In 2001, during his seventh year as a USA basketball coach, Boeheim helped lead the Young Men's Team to a gold medal at the World Championship in Japan. During the fall of that year, he was named USA Basketball 2001 National Coach of the Year. He was an assistant coach under Mike Krzyzewski for the US national team in the 1990 FIBA World Championship and 2006 FIBA World Championship, winning the bronze medal both times. He returned as an assistant coach under Mike Krzyzewski for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, and again at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England, where the United States won the gold medal both times.
Boeheim has served as the chairman of the USA Basketball 2009–12 Men's Junior National Committee, as well as the 2007–08 President of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, where he also served on the board of directors.
In the 2012–13 season, Boeheim led Syracuse to its first Final Four appearance since its 2003 NCAA National Championship. The Orange lost 61–56 to Michigan. In the 2013–14 season, he led the Orange to the NCAA Tournament and lost in the third-round game to the Dayton Flyers.
After Syracuse sat out the 2015 tournament via a self-imposed postseason ban, Boeheim again led Syracuse to a surprise Final Four berth in the 2015–16 season. This included a 15-point comeback versus the No. 1 seeded Virginia Cavaliers. The team lost to North Carolina 83–66.
The following season Syracuse started ranked 19th in the AP Poll, but failed to make the NCAA tournament. In the 2017–18 season Syracuse would return to the NCAA tournament despite going 8–10 in conference play. In the tournament Syracuse upset 4-seeded Michigan State before losing to Duke in the Sweet 16. The next year saw the Orange make back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances for the first time since the 2013–14 season. On January 14, 2019, Syracuse upset Duke in Cameron Indoor Stadium, marking the first time that the Blue Devils had lost to an unranked team at home. They would lose to Baylor in the opening round of the NCAA tournament. Syracuse started the 2019–20 season slow, losing 48–34 to Virginia, the lowest amount ever scored by a team in Boeheim's career. SU would win its final game of the season in the ACC tournament beating North Carolina 81–53 and defeating the Tar Heels for the first time since 2014. This would be the last game played due to COVID-19/ In the 2020–21 season SU would once again upset its way to the Sweet 16 beating 3-seeded West Virginia before losing to eventual Final Four participant Houston.
The Syracuse basketball program has been investigated for major NCAA violations on two occasions during Boeheim's tenure.