National attention, a million-dollar office suite and a team with the 35th highest RPI in the country has been a long time coming for Jim Kwitchoff, assistant coach for the UB men's basketball team.
The coaching spotlight is normally on UB head coach Reggie Witherspoon, but Kwitchoff has always been part of the Bulls' success the past two seasons.
A long time friend and fellow coach of Witherspoon, Kwitchoff took a leap of faith six years ago when invited to become assistant coach of the UB Bulls, one of the 20 worst teams in America at the time.
Kwitchoff had a stable, well paying job as an assistant principal at Lockport High School. The UB coaching job paid significantly less and was for a trial three-month interim.
As a married man starting a family, the decision to accept the job was a difficult one. Ultimately Kwitchoff decided he could not pass on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be a part of transforming a program with potential to emerge into something great.
"The opportunity to coach Division I basketball at a university in my hometown was something I couldn't pass up," he said. "I love a challenge. There wasn't a coaching job more challenging back in December 1999."
Kwitchoff graduated from Sweet Home High School five years after Witherspoon in 1984. The two have been a coaching tandem ever since, bringing Sweet Home's men's basketball program to four straight division championships. Later they joined the ECC basketball program, elevating the program to 17th in the country, becoming Division I, Region II junior college champions.
Out of a mutual love of coaching, Kwitchoff and Witherspoon went on to become co-founders of Buffalo Team Athletes Committed to Excellence All-Star Program, a non-profit league open for young athletes in the area, free of charge.
When Kwitchoff and Witherspoon outlasted their interim tags, they knew it would be a long haul to the top; four years passed before the Bulls began consistently winning games. But love of his new job made the cut in pay, stress on his family and difficulty of the task of saving a floundering program much easier to bear.
"There were days I wondered if I had done the right thing," he said.
In 2000, the pair gathered their first recruiting class who are the current crop of stellar seniors. Turner Battle, Mark Bortz, Daniel Gilbert and Jason Bird have helped lead the Bulls from 305th in the nation in 1999, to a possible NCAA bid this season.
"We shared with them our vision and they bought into it," Kwitchoff said. "Thankfully, the university gave us the time to see it through."
As a behind-the-scenes coach, Kwitchoff said he doesn't mind having his efforts go unnoticed.
"I've always preached to my players the importance of being a team player and I am a team player myself," he said. "I don't crave the attention or need the attention."
Kwitchoff attributes this mindset to Witherspoon's open management.
"Reggie treats me and the other assistant coaches with the utmost respect and he makes it a pleasure to be an assistant coach," he said. "He acts as though we work with him, which we do."
Kwitchoff also commented on the Bulls' chemistry from having been together as long as they have.
"There is not a staff in the conference that has been together as long as ours. That says a lot about Reggie's leadership," Kwitchoff said. "We're friends first and colleagues second."
As one of the most surprising teams in the country, winning 32 of their last 42 games, Kwitchoff no longer regrets his decision to join the UB coaching staff.
"These last two years have been everything I could have hoped for," he said. "What makes it special is I know what we've had to overcome to get here."
Where once a trickle of 800 fans barely filled Alumni Arena, the success of the past two years have home games packed with 6,000 plus people decked out in blue and white.
Kwitchoff recalled a conversation with former President Greiner the year he started coaching in which Greiner told him his goal was to walk across campus and see students wearing UB gear in school pride.
Kwitchoff believes the success of men's basketball has inspired just that.
"We hope the success we have had can carry over to the other teams and throughout the campus," he said. "Nobody can tell me it's just a game."
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
