Conan McCusker, a Lower Mills native who has just wrapped up his first season as a graduate assistant for the men’s basketball team at Lasell University in Newton, has high hopes when it comes to his future in hoops.
“I want to see where the coaching scene takes me. I just finished up my first year actually coaching, and it was a good experience,” said McCusker, 23.
“I plan to continue staying here for a little while. But I would love to kind of just see where it takes me. I’m not putting a limit on where I can go, whether that be Division three, Division two, Division one, or even the NBA.”
While “Coach” Conan McCusker, who earned his bachelor’s degree in sports management, has quite the ring to it, he was a 6-foot guard for the Lasers before he joined the courtside staff, and put up 548 points in 98 games.
“A kid from Dorchester going to play college basketball … I didn’t really know what to expect,” said McCusker, who wore No. 2 for the light blue. “But growing up and just the way that I am, I put in work every single day, and it showed. I’m top 10 in three-pointers made at Lasell for their history, and my senior year, we ended up making the conference championship game.”
But basketball wasn’t always on McCusker’s radar. “With my family being from Ireland, basketball wasn’t one of the main sports I played growing up. It was pretty much just soccer and Gaelic football,” he said.
“In sixth grade, I played in a spring league for basketball, and after that, it was just something that I fell in love with, and I’ve been playing ever since.”
In high school, McCusker was a star for the John D. O’Bryant team and played AAU with the MCIB Mass Commanders, with whom he is also now a coach. During his senior year, and not knowing they would one day become coworkers, he met Lasell head coach Aaron Galletta.
Galletta thinks McCusker’s Dorchester roots set him apart from his peers.
“I think playing in the city league, you’ve got to be pretty tough, right? You’ve got to learn to roll with it, and there’s going to be a lot of ups and downs. It’s a physical league and physical play, and I think that helped him out at the next level for sure.”
He added, “He improved every year. He was able to get minutes, a little bit as a freshman, and then he kind of got more as his years went on. He became more than just a shooter; he was a guy that we could get in there. He has a very, very high basketball IQ, so he really helped.
“If he wasn’t on the floor, he was on the bench helping guys, in the film room helping the team. He was able to have an impact not only on the court, but in the team room and the locker room, and that really helped us.”
Knowing how he was as a team player and captain, Galletta wasn’t surprised to see McCusker become a coach.
“I think early on you could see that coaching was going to be something that was interesting to him because he was really leading by example,” he said. “His impact was not just when he was on the floor playing. He had a bigger impact for us as a team.”
Now he just gets to do that as a coach. From one-on-one workouts to film sessions, McCusker knows from experience what it takes to succeed as a collegiate athlete, and he uses that to his advantage.
“I played with some of the guys who were on the team this year, so already knowing them and having a connection with them made the transition a little easier,” he said.
He added, “As a coach and as a person, I’m pretty laid back. I’m not going to be somebody who’s going to yell 24/7 and get into you. If I have to, I will. Whenever I was working guys out or kind of just talking and trying to help them out, I wouldn’t do anything that I wouldn’t expect of myself when I was playing. Showing them that and showing them that I really believe in them as not only players but as people too, definitely went a long way.”
In May, he will graduate with his master’s in athletic administration and spend the spring and summer coaching the Mass Commanders.
His advice to Dot kids like him: “Be consistent.” He added, “There’s going to be days where you don’t want to do things and there’s going to be days that you do want to do things but as long as you stay consistent and you have the small goals and you work towards the small wins, the small goals, the bigger wins, and the bigger goals will eventually follow and then once you get those bigger wins, you just keep staying consistent after that and you’ll just keep going up and up.”
