Bob Hurley stands on the sideline of a gym in Jersey City, only a block from the now-vacant St. Anthony’s High School, where he won more than 1,000 games as the legendary basketball coach.

“Close your eyes,” Hurley says, a smile creasing his ruddy cheeks. “Listen.”

The gym echoes with the boom-slap-boom of basketballs pounding the wood floor, the squeak-squeak-squeak of sneakers cutting back and forth on the court, the “hey-throw-it here” yells and giddy laughter of kids playing a kids’ game.

“That's the success we have,” Hurley says.

As the rest of America settles into the hectic, buzzer-beating, multimillion-dollar college basketball spectacle known as “March Madness,” Hurley, who is still considered one of America’s top coaches, has created his own self-defined madness of sorts.

Whistle in hand and his booming, listen-up-or-else voice still in full throttle, Hurley is back to coaching. But his players are not the elite, high-flying athletes who dunked and dribbled for him for near half a century at St. Anthony’s and then went on to stardom at Duke, Villanova, Seton Hall and other top-flight college basketball powers. At 71, Hurley is teaching fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders how to play the game he loves.

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Three days a week, he runs an after-school program with his wife, Chris, and a handful of other volunteers. There are no fees for the kids to play; no salaries for the adults. Hurley raises a $50,000 budget on his own to pay for the gym rental and other incidentals.

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“This is like a walk in the park,” he says of the effort. “I used to have to raise $1.2 million at St. Anthony’s.”

St. Anthony’s shut its doors in June 2017, a victim of declining enrollment and the unrelenting pressure to find new revenue and build a $500,000 budget cushion demanded by the Newark Archdiocese. The school's demise, although inevitable at the end, nonetheless left Hurley with a deep sense of loss and an unsettling wish to keep coaching.

But where? And how?

Hurley had offers to guide teams at colleges and other high schools. But he turned them all down.

“I had no interest,” says Hurley, who coached five years with St. Anthony's freshman and junior varsity teams in the 1970s, then another 45 years with the varsity until 2017.

“I wouldn’t want to go somewhere else,” he adds. “St. Anthony’s is all I’ve ever done. And I think 50 years was enough."

But he still felt something was missing.

“I don’t want to be home,” Hurley says. “I don’t want to say that I’m at a point in my life where I should be home in the afternoon reading.”

So began the after-school program.

On a recent afternoon, Hurley, clad in a burgundy long-sleeve T-shirt, gray sweats and burgundy Reebok sneakers, with a red coach’s whistle dangling from a black cord around his neck, strode into the gym at the Hudson County Technical School on Ninth Street in Jersey City.

It’s the same gym that Hurley’s St. Anthony’s teams called home in the decade before the school closed. And many of the reminders of those teams are still around: a banner listing Hurley’s 28 state titles, another banner celebrating his 13 wins in the state’s Tournament of Champions and yet more banners for his four national championships. Even an inscription on the gym floor tells you that this is “Coach Hurley’s Court” — as if anyone needed a hint.

Hurley doesn’t seem to notice the reminders of St. Anthony's glory days that drape the gym's walls. Likewise, the children don't seem to realize that one of America's most acclaimed coaches — only the third high school coach inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame — is teaching them the basics of the game.

Hurley spots two boys with jackets over the uniform shirt that each child is required to wear — a free basketball shirt, donated by a granola-making company.

“Yo,” Hurley bellows, his voice bouncing off the gym walls. “Get your stuff off. Put the ball down. Where is your shirt?”

The boys look up at the coach towering over them and start to mumble an incoherent, inaudible excuse.

Hurley cuts them off in mid-sentence.

“We can't do this next time,” he says. “We can't have this conversation twice over something as simple as taking your jacket off.”

If this sounds tough, it is.

But Hurley’s in-your-face style, honed from years of coaching, is deliberate. The idea of every player wearing a uniform, even in practice — and then taking it home and washing it — is part of the discipline he tries to instill.

“If nobody teaches them, they don’t know,” he explains.

He pauses a second or two, then turns to watch the other children playing — including his grandson, Gabe Ursic, 9, and granddaughter, Anna Ursic, 7.

After another minute, he jabs his whistle between his lips.

“Watch this,” Hurley says.

He blows a quick tweet. The yelling, dribbling and squeak-squeak running stops. All the kids run to the circle in the middle of the court and sit down, some of them sliding to get there first.

"No one wants to be last to the circle," Hurley says before turning to the children seated on the floor.

“Why did I just do that? Anybody know?” Hurley asks.

No one responds.

“Because I can,” Hurley says. “And what does that mean? It means we’re not talking. Everybody’s supposed to be listening. Everything stops.”

Later, away from the children, Hurley describes this as a teaching exercise.

As a coach, he has long felt that the first step to building a cohesive, successful team — even with ultra-talented players destined for college and professional stardom — is to instill the sort of discipline that not only governs personal behavior but also teaches teamwork..

He has his own definition for his methodology: "socialization."

Players need rules, Hurley believes, especially if they are coming from neighborhoods so broken by drugs and economic hardship that the usual societal rules — and laws — don’t apply.

It’s the kind of strategy that Hurley honed during his years at St. Anthony’s.

What earned St. Anthony’s a special place among New Jersey’s schools was not just its basketball prowess but its commitment to educate children living below the poverty line. Many St. Anthony's students lived in substandard housing, with families fractured by drugs, prison and murder. One year, the school's valedictorian paid her own tuition by working at a local fast-food restaurant in the evening each day after school.

In its last year, St. Anthony’s charged $6,100 a year — certainly a hefty amount for a family struggling to pay the electric, water and food bills, but well below the five-figure tuition bills at many parochial and private high schools that dot New Jersey's wealthy suburbs, and certainly not enough to cover all costs at St. Anthony’s.

Although St. Anthony’s was run by the Felician sisters, the Catholic religious order of nuns that also administers Felician University in Lodi, Hurley, a retired Hudson County probation officer, was arguably the school’s most recognizable face. Not only was he a nationally famous basketball coach — the subject of a film documentary and a best-selling book — but he took on the job as the school’s chief fundraiser, often looking for donations from Wall Street or from his former athletes who had become high-salaried professional basketball players in America and Europe.

Now, with his focus on young children and without the intense pressure of fundraising, he feels he has returned to the basics of coaching.

Hurley blows his whistle again. This time, it's two rapid tweet-tweets.

The children stop.

Hurley quickly barks out instructions on a dribbling drill — first with one hand, then the other, without watching the ball. Then, with two balls, one for each hand.

The gym resounds with the pounding of balls. Hurley’s blue eyes dart from player to player.

“Chin up,” he yells, a signal for the children not to watch the balls they are dribbling. “Chin up. Now dribble game speed.”

The pounding quickens.

“Jersey City is the most diverse city in the state,” Hurley says, introducing players from Turkey, Pakistan and Russia.

Some of the children are still learning English. But all seem to understand Hurley’s omnipresent greeting when he is offering instructions — “dude.” He says he picked up the expression after watching the 1998 film "The Big Lebowski."

“'Dude' seems to cover everyone,” Hurley jokes. “'Dude' makes me hip. And, God knows, I’m not hip. But it's hard to use 'dude' with girls."

Hurley’s wife, Chris, walks up from the table where she has been signing in the children as they arrive. Hurley does not call her "dude."

“What do you think of Bob’s new life?” Chris asks, chuckling as Hurley turns and walks across the court to help a group of boys and girls with their dribbling.

Chris and Bob Hurley, who have been married 48 years, both grew up in Jersey City’s Greenville neighborhood — a place where residents were not known by their address but by what Catholic church they attended. Bob, a member of St. Paul’s Catholic Church, met Chris, who worshiped at Sacred Heart parish, after Mass one Sunday.

Each day during Lent now, the Hurleys attend Mass together, leaving their apartment near the Hudson River waterfront and driving to one of three local Catholic churches. Bob says his Lenten resolution this year is to give up cursing and not "flip out" and lose his temper the way he often did in his coaching days at St. Anthony's.

He concedes he is struggling — except around the children he now coaches in his after-school program.

"I’m very easygoing, but with a short fuse," he says.

"But here," he says, looking around the gym, "the fuse isn’t going to go. How can you get mad at these kids? They’re babies."

“This is our madness,” Chris says, chuckling at the notion that her husband — the nationally famous coach with the short fuse — is teaching dribbling to small children during March Madness while also trying to tone down his renowned coaching intensity that sparked so much success at St. Anthony's.

"We do it because we love working with kids," Chris says.

Julius David Sr., a former St. Anthony’s assistant coach and Felician University star who now runs the basketball program at Perth Amboy High School, agrees.

“He has a love for the game, his enthusiasm for the game. That’s infectious,” says David, who also volunteers with Hurley’s after-school program. “He’s got more energy than half of the high school coaches that I’ve seen in these past two seasons.”

It is now almost 5 p.m. A group of high school players arrives.

As with the younger children, Hurley instructs the older group in a series of basic dribbling and shooting drills. From the other side of the gym, the younger kids are now playing four-on-four games.

Hurley looks across at a group that includes his grandchildren, Gabe and Anna. His forehead is now coated with sweat. But he doesn't try to wipe it away.

A loose ball rolls toward him, and Hurley casually picks it up and tosses it to a boy.

"Do I look comfortable here?" Bob Hurley asks, turning and smiling.

He looks around the gym again.

"I love this," he says, reaching again for his whistle.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com