Diaco Aims For Team-Family Balance At UConn

In the coaching profession, they call it work-life balance.

Knowing there’s a time to work and a time to be home with family can be a tough balance for football coaches. They always seem to be gearing up for something — summer practice, weight programs, training regimens, recruiting, signing day, spring practice, games.

Bob Diaco, 40, is a head coach for the first time. He’s also a husband and a father of three. Time to strike the balance.

The new UConn coach has been around some great one: Hayden Fry, for whom he played at Iowa; Al Groh at Virginia; Brian Kelly at Central Michigan, Cincinnati and Notre Dame, where Diaco served as defensive coordinator the past four seasons. He was also assistant head coach at Notre Dame the past two seasons.

“I work very hard and spend a lot of time here,” Diaco told The Courant last week. “I’m not saying more than most or more than some or whatever, but it’s a lot. So if I’m organized and my staff is organized, there’s no reason that when I leave here I need to do, by design, more work. Now, things come up with players. Things come up with staff that you have to address when you’re on your own your time. Things come up with recruits. I get that. But other than something coming up, I should be good to move on and give my family my full attention.”

Diaco and his wife, Julia, have two sons — Angelo, 16, and Michael, 9 — and a daughter, Josephine, 14.

“I’ve always said there reaches a point in everybody’s life when you have to ask, ‘Are you working long and hard or are you working hard and smart?'” UConn athletic director Warde Manuel said. “Is it just a component of time? I think that’s where a lot of people miss as it relates to the work-life balance, if you will: ‘I’ve got to work 14-hour days. I’ve got to work 16-hour days,’ as opposed to ‘I need to get things done and I need to be smart and diligent about my time and then I go home and spend time with my family.’

“It’s a good perspective not only for coaches. It’s difficult for me. It’s difficult for a lot of people to try to figure out that work-life balance.”

Diaco has mentioned family priorities, how he’s missed opportunities to do something as simple as building sand castles with his boys because he’s jumped from one staff to another without a break in between.

Now, as a head coach, he gets to control things. Even as he goes about hiring eight assistant coaches, who he wants in place as soon as possible, he talks about slowing down so everyone can enjoy the holidays.

“For him to have that feeling of wanting that balance, wanting that balance for him and his coaches, is a good approach and he’s going to figure out what that means as he takes over the program,” Manuel said. “He’s probably going to work longer hours the first couple of years, as he gets settled into it, and the routine of it.

“That really starts to allow you to have that flexibility and how you manage things and the expectations are set — clear guidance to what people are expected to do, the work they have on a daily basis. I think, as most new head coaches find, they have to adjust to all the requirements that come with that particular position, and I think he’ll learn it fast. But it’s good going in that you know you want to search for that work-life balance as opposed to not having that perspective before you get into and then try to find it.”

Diaco, introduced as the Huskies’ 30th coach a little more than a week ago, described his first few days on the job as a menagerie of issues that needed to be addressed.

“It’s exciting, it’s anxious. … To list the adjectives in [one] day I’d have to open a thesaurus,” he said.

None of this means Diaco won’t be putting in long hours. Everything is new for him, and the expectations are that UConn will start winning again. The Huskies are coming off a three-year stretch of 5-7, 5-7 and 3-9 seasons. So no doubt there is work to do. It’s all about how efficient a coach can be with his time, what sort of balance he strikes.

“Why is that important? Because my children should not have their happiness tied to the team’s happiness,” Diaco said. “My wife’s happiness should not be tied to the team’s happiness. They all have to live their lives. They all have their ups and downs in a day. I shouldn’t add to their ups and downs with the organization’s ups and downs.”

Another lesson might come from Urban Meyer.

When Meyer, now the Ohio State coach, resigned from Florida after the 2010 season, he said that football had consumed him and his priorities. He took a year off to reportedly get his life and health together, and spend time with family.

As Diaco said, “I want my children to know me as Dad, not Coach Diaco.”

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