“I grew up in the Big East Conference for 30 years. We were a conference that was nothing. We were a bunch of schools thrown together and within five years we were one of the top two basketball conferences in the country.”

American former college basketball coach

Jim Boeheim is an American former college basketball coach, born in 1944. He is known for his long tenure at Syracuse University, where he led the Syracuse Orange men’s team from 1976 to 2023 and later served as Special Assistant to the Athletic Director. At Syracuse, Boeheim built one of the most familiar programs in college basketball. His teams won ten Big East regular season titles, five Big East tournament titles, and reached the NCAA tournament 34 times. They made five Final Four appearances and played in three national championship games, losing to Indiana in 1987 and Kentucky in 1996 before beating Kansas in 2003 behind All-American Carmelo Anthony.