NY Girls HS Coach fired after yanking player’s hair

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TROY — This was going to be a story about the remarkable rebirth of a legendary coach amid personal heartbreak. A feel-good piece about the Northville girls' basketball team and the North Country community that supports it.

That column disappeared immediately after the Falcons and coach Jim Zullo lost their game in the Class D state championship Friday night at Hudson Valley Community College. That’s when television cameras caught the 81-year-old yanking the hair of senior Hailey Monroe and berating his players — an ugly scene that spread like wildfire across social media, sparking understandable outrage.

Soon after, Northville Central School District Superintendent Sarah A. Chauncey sent me an email that said, “Please know that he will no longer be with us. We take this incident very seriously. … We are addressing this unacceptable situation.”

And with that, Zullo’s long and storied career was over.
As many of you will know, Zullo taught fifth graders for 34 years in the Shenendehowa Central School District and spent 26 years as the varsity boys' basketball coach. His 1987 state championship at Shen stands among many other accomplishments, and it was during his time in Clifton Park that words like “legendary” began appearing in front of his name.

In 2006, he was inducted into the state Basketball Hall of Fame.
Zullo retired, supposedly, in 1998 but returned to coaching for two additional stints: at Broadalbin-Perth from 2001 to 2004 and Indian Lake from 2006 to 2010. At that point, it seemed he had left coaching for good. He worked as a North Country fly-fishing guide. He embraced pickleball.

But Zullo and his wife, Linda, moved to Northville when she was diagnosed with cancer, to be closer to family. And when a coaching position opened at the nearby high school, Linda encouraged him to take the job. Despite 13 years away from coaching, he did.
“I needed to get out of the house and do something other than sit there and watch her waste away,” Zullo told me. “It wasn’t something I was looking to do.”

Zullo, who had never coached a girls' basketball team before, quickly remade the team in his image — meaning the squad began playing with an incredible intensity marked by a swarming and aggressive defense. In his first year at Northville, he led the team to its first sectional girls' basketball title in 27 years and to the state championship game, where the Falcons lost to the North Country's Hammond Central High School.

“It was a difficult year, because my wife died in the middle of it,” Zullo said immediately after that game last year. “I did the best I could and I’m very proud of them. They play very hard and try to make up for a lack of skill, sometimes, with effort. We need to get better, is the bottom line — and we will.”

The team did get better, remarkably returning to the state championship final. And Zullo’s son told me the team’s progress and discipline pleased his dad even more than the back-to-back title games did.

“There isn’t a thing that goes on out there on the court that he hasn’t worked on with his players,” said Sam Zullo, who resigned last year after leading his Simsbury, Conn., girls' basketball team to its first state title. “He’s spent hours thinking about every pass and every pivot.”


All the while, Zullo became something of a hero in Northville, the idyllic village along Great Sacandaga Lake. A recent Associated Press profile described how he could hardly go anywhere without being stopped by fans wanting to talk about the team, how it took him 10 minutes to extract himself from well-wishers at the Stewart’s near the school campus.
“It’s amazing,” a longtime Zullo friend told me. “They think he walks on water up there.”

I didn’t see Friday night’s ugly moment firsthand. But during that game and another Thursday night, I did see things that made me pause. Zullo was commanding and very tough on his players in ways that have largely disappeared from youth coaching. When two girls jumped up in shock at a referee’s call, Zullo rushed over and used the back of his arm to command them back into their seats with a furious bark.

Moments like that could be dismissed as old-school discipline. But there was something in Zullo’s coiled, angry pacing — and the joyless tension of his players — that brought to mind Bobby Knight, the legendary Indiana University basketball coach fired in 2000 for what the school described as “unacceptable behavior.”

To be clear, my suggestion here isn’t that Friday night’s incident was part of the sort of prolonged pattern cited in Knight’s dismissal. If there’s more to learn in that respect, we’ll no doubt hear about it in the coming days.


But a statement posted to the Northville district’s website a few hours after the game cited “behavior that is completely unacceptable.” Without naming Zullo directly, it went on to say that the district is “deeply disturbed” by “the conduct of the coach of the girls’ varsity basketball team" and that "this individual will no longer be coaching for the Northville Central School District."

The online anger provoked by the video is entirely justifiable. When a raging Zullo pulls on Monroe’s ponytail, he does so with enough force to jerk her head backward. Almost worse is the fear on the faces of several of her teammates as they edge away from a clearly furious coach.

What provoked Zullo? It doesn’t matter, because there is no excuse for what he did. Notably, he ducked the media after the game, and, as of this writing, I haven’t been able to reach him for comment.

We can assume Zullo was upset that his team had lost (43-37) and he appeared angered by the distress expressed by Monroe, a star player who sobbed on the bench after fouling out with 55 seconds left in the game.


Earlier Friday, Zullo said that dealing with the emotions of the players was one of the challenges of coaching girls, as was an age gap of more than 60 years.

“They think I’m some kind of old dinosaur,” he said. “I’m not on their wavelength.”

Zullo also told me he hadn’t decided whether he’d continue coaching or retire for good.

Hours later, the decision was made for him.

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