He was a wise cracking kid from Brooklyn with a new home in the Midwest. Although he had done well in his very brief coaching career, this was a new ballgame. This was a poor team Jim Jabir was inheriting. This was not a team doing well where the former coach had taken a step up the ladder. This was a team that was to go 7-20 in his first season coaching there. This was no lay down.

It didn’t take Jabir long to turn things around, however. The next season began a string of four consecutive winning seasons. In 1993-94, the Golden Eagles received a call on Selection Sunday that changed a lot of lives. “When we found that we were going to the tournament for the first time, the cheering and laughing and crying was unbelievable. The kids that were really talented that had come to Marquette had no real business there. We had 17 years of losing. They took a chance on me. When you pull 15 people together and you do something that no one believes you can do, that’s powerful. That’s why you wake up in the morning. That was an amazing feeling. I want to feel that again.”

That was just the beginning of his success at Marquette. The following year, the Golden Eagles were again one of the top teams in Great Midwest. When it came time for the conference tournament, the Golden Eagles felt a certain level of pressure because the games were to be played in their back yard. In both the semi-finals and the finals, they found themselves down with but a few minutes to play. In both cases, they found the deep down in the gut fortitude to do what needed to be done, “When we won the conference tournament, we came from 18 down with six minutes to go. It was a great feeling. That crowd loved us. That crowd WAS us. They took ownership of us. You could feel it in the stands. It was a wonderful feeling. I need to feel that again. Our players need to feel that. You need to dream.”

He continued to win at Marquette, but like most young coaches, it just wasn’t enough. He just wasn’t satisfied and the Big East came calling and he was there to answer the call. As most of us have experienced in our lives, what we think we want is not always the thing that we should want and Jabir found that out in a hurry.

Jabir shared his regrets, “I think the biggest mistake that I have made in my career was going to Providence. They really didn’t have the commitment that you need to be successful. I don’t know if I was fooling myself or if I had lost my mind but if you look at the level of commitment in that league, it is hard to compete with a program like Connecticut.

“We were really building a nice program at Marquette, something wonderful. We were building a culture. We would get over 2,000 to show up for games and we eventually had to move off campus because the Fire Marshall said that they would close the gym down because of capacity constraints. I had just signed the 12th best class in the country. That class went to four NCAA Tournaments. I’ve spent a lot of times kicking myself in the head because of the move.

“I left because it was the Big East. It was back on the east coast. I wasn’t very mature at the time and I didn’t realize what I had. I thought I could do anything. I made a grave error, but I learned a lot from it. I’m a better person now. I think I’m a better coach. You have to be a better coach when you play Connecticut. You have to find ways to compensate. You work and work and work. How can I do better with less? I wasn’t a very nice person by the end of my tour there. I was frustrated and blaming everybody. I learned a lot about myself. I left with time on my contract. I just didn’t like who I was becoming and I knew that things were not going to change.”

It is never easy for a doer to admit that he is a failure. Jim Jabir realized that he was not succeeding at something that was part of the core of his being. Worse yet, he was turning into some kind of monster. This is a man that is driven to please. He does it either through laughter or by becoming an integral part of someone’s life. He is his mother’s child. He was put on this earth to bring out the best in people and teach them how to make themselves better in all facets of life. He knew he was failing, not just on the court. He needed to change.

Providence was 7-9 in the league, which was the best the school had done in a dozen years. They had a player on the all-rookie team and had a top 25 class coming in. “We had a lot of things in place that would put us in a position to be good. I just didn’t want to put my family in that place anymore,” Jabir said.

A business friend of Jabir’s offered him a job that would allow him to stay in the Providence area, but Jim just wasn’t ready to give up on coaching. While looking for jobs for his assistants, Jabir stumbled into a job for himself at Colorado. He was on the move again, “When I came home and told my kids that we were going to be moving they all cried as hard as I had ever seen them cry. We all cried, it was the worst day in my life.”

Even tough he was just an assistant, Jabir was prepared to put down some roots and allow his family to make Colorado their home. This stay was to only last a year when Ted Kissell came calling after Jaci Clark stepped down as the head coach at the University of Dayton. Although it wasn’t going to be an easy move for the Jabir family, this was a golden opportunity that could not be dismissed. Although new friends had been made and roots beginning to grab deep into the soil, Jim was ready to pack the U-Haul once again.