By Braedan Shea
@Braedan_Shea
After 32 storied years of working at Springfield College, former Sport Management professor and current assistant women’s basketball coach, Bob Accorsi, is stepping into a full retirement. A legend of the college, and an even better man, Accorsi has built quite the resume, one that includes: being the director of Sport and Recreation at United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) of Western Mass, USA National Team cycling and powerlifting coach for the 1984 International Games for the Disabled, a Cycling Technical Delegate for the 1992 Barcelona Paralympic Games and was the venue director for the 2005 International Games for the Disabled. During his tenure teaching on Alden Street, Accorsi received the Excellence in Teaching Award and was named the 2009-10 Distinguished Springfield Professor of Humanics. Before Accorsi officially retires, The Student wanted to know more about how he got into cycling, his favorite Springfield memory and his dream coaching staff.
The Student: What is your full retirement going to look like?
Accorsi: Honestly, I don’t know. My wife just recently retired, so what I do know is the family is going on a trip to Italy in June. We always rent a beach house, and she really wants to go see the national parks. It’s probably going to look like a lot of traveling, and not necessarily outside the United States. There’s so much to see in the United States. And then [my wife and I] had a conversation the other night about, ‘Do I really want to ride my bike across the United States?’ I’ve done chunks of it already. We’re kind of talking about that now, because the fact of the matter is while I’m still healthy, I would love to do that. Probably the best way to characterize [my retirement] is a little bit adventurous.
The Student: How did you get into the sport of cycling?
Accorsi: There was a time, way back in the ‘80s, when there were a bunch of us that got together and started riding for exercise. Next thing you know, there were a lot of races and we thought, ‘Ah, why not? Let’s try some races.’ So we got into racing way back in the day. Then I was on a cycling team out of Hartford, Conn., and most of the weekends were just tied up with racing bikes with a bunch of guys, and then we got into mountain bike racing. You were training most of the week – especially in the summertime when I wasn’t teaching – and with a lot of the exercise phys-ed people here, they really got me in line to help get in shape. But it was around the time too, when some of the Americans were starting to really do well in international races. Greg LeMond was really good, Andy Hampsten was really good, Bob Roll kind of got it started with the 7-Eleven team back in the late ‘70s, and Americans were starting to win major races. What’s interesting is, it still wasn’t popular in the United States, but many of these individuals who won like that, LeMond in particular, were heroes overseas. We kind of got swept up in that kind of mania. And it was also really a lot of fun.
The Student: How did it feel to be honored during the women’s basketball Senior Day game?
Accosi: “Initially I was shocked, because everybody kept it from me. I had told Naomi [Graves] that I would stick around until my wife retired, and my wife did another year, so that got me into this year. [Graves] has known all along that this was going to be the year. I was really surprised. I was obviously humbled – they didn’t need to do that. I’m honored that I have been able to serve the team in the way that I’ve been able to serve the team. They have – the team, coaches and GA’s – they’ve enriched my life. I have a greater appreciation for the science of basketball and what goes into basketball. People only see the 40 minutes on the court, they don’t see the the 50 hours of practice, film study, one-on-one with students. I was really shocked and humbled and very blessed that they did that for me.
The Student: What is the greatest advice you could give to a student?
Accorsi: By the time you graduate, and each year that you go through, you’re nowhere near your potential. If you have stumbled along the way, and you have been gritty along the way, which means that you tried some things that didn’t work out, but you got back on, you got back in your lane, and you tried doing it again and again. The thing is to really take advantage of what you have here. Because what we do know about potential is that it’s built on a scaffolding model. If you scaffold your freshman year, and then your sophomore year gets a little harder, your junior year and your senior year, and then obviously grad school, and if you get really challenging assignments and projects, that’s really where you start to build academic grit. You start to realize what you’re capable of, and maybe what you’re not so capable of, which gives you an opportunity to either fix it or say, ‘You know what? I’m really strong here. I think I’m just going to go with it.’
The Student: Who is one of the most interesting connections you have made?
Accorsi: Somebody who’s not an alum but was phenomenal to me, Kevin McAllister and Ken Wall was Dave Andrews. He was the president and CEO of the American Hockey League. What he did, if you don’t follow the American Hockey League, he transformed it. It’s the longest running professional sports organization without a strike. He also instituted a reduced schedule. He wanted to protect his assets, and he never called it a development league. It was a professional hockey league team. He was probably one of the closest ones I was to that just impressed me with his vision and his humility.
The Student: We’ve heard that you make your own wine. What does that process look like?
Accorsi: We buy grapes from California from a grape guy down in Hartford. He orders them to come in from Lodi, California and they come on refrigerated train cars in September. What we do is we get them on a Friday afternoon, and depending on how many people want homemade, we buy the requisite number of cases. Then we have a machine, a crusher to stemmer, where you dump the grapes in and it spits the stems out, and it crushes the grapes. Then we add an additional yeast to it so it starts to ferment. Twice a day, somebody’s got to be in the garage because it rises and you have to press it back down. Next, because the barrels have nozzles on them, we strain it three times and we put it in our stainless steel barrel. What we do then, with what we call the mash that’s floating on top, is we dig it out and put it in an old style Italian press, and you get that juice out and you blend that in with the other one. The fermentation is 12 to 14 days, then we bottle. It’s about a two month process. The Italians are supposed to wait until St. Joe’s day, which is the week before Easter, and you sample it and you see how it is. That’s how we make it.
The Student: For a short stint, you worked on a beer truck. How did that come about?
Accorsi: Here I am. I’m unemployed. I got bills. I called Tommy Burke, who’s a lifelong friend. We played basketball together. We played baseball together, and he and his brothers had taken over the business from their mom and dad, and it was big. It was a Coors distributorship. He had every kind of beer you could imagine – you name it, he had it. So I said, ‘Tommy, I need a job. I’ll work part time for you, but if you but if you got a full time slot I want that,’ and he said ‘come on over. I can always use a full time helper.’ I did that for about a year.
The Student: If you were given a head coach and three assistant coaches for your basketball team, who would you choose?
Accorsi: I always marveled at John Wooden, but if I took him aside, it would be a dead tie between Coach Graves and Coach Sullivan. I know Charlie [Sullivan] very, very, very well, so I know how he thinks. And I’ve worked with [Graves] – she was my student intern – I’ve known her for probably 40 years, yeah. I see her intensity, her fire. They would be the head coaches. I always think of assistant coaches as those that would then want to be full time coaches at some point. For the staff, it would be [Alexis Castro, Katelyn McCann and Elizabeth Thompson], and even Colleen [O’Connell] and Carolee Pierce. They’re really smart, they see things that I don’t, their passion for the game and their work ethic – while they’re balancing a lot of other things – that’s really, really impressive.”
The Student: What is your favorite memory at Springfield College?
Accorsi: The Distinguished Professor of Humanics. Somebody nominates you: you completely have no idea. Somebody submitted my name, apparently, for a couple of years, and then in 2009 I got the call. The call comes from the Vice President and Provost. Usually, if you get a call from them, you’re in trouble. So I get a call from Dr Jean Wyld – she was a good friend of mine – She says, ‘Bob, do you have some time this afternoon?’ I said, ‘For you, of course I do. What do you need?’ She said, ‘Well, I need to talk to you about something.’ And I said, ‘Okay. I got five minutes to wrap up this one thing, and then I’ll come over.’ She goes, ‘No, I’ll come over to you.’ I said, ‘You’re going to come over to me?’ She goes, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘What did I do?’ So she comes over, and then we’re talking and she says, ‘How would you like to be this year’s Distinguished Professor of humanics?’ And I was in shock. I talked to my wife, and I called Jean the next day. I said, ‘I’d be honored. I’m humbled.’ That was, that was a really, really memorable moment.
Photo courtesy of Springfield College Athletics