Dom Amore: It’s all about goals for the new UConn men’s soccer coach; meanwhile we’re about to find out just how fast Jim Mora’s Huskies are

Chris Gbandi’s career goals are the last thing he sees before falling asleep at night, the first thing he sees when he wakes up each morning. He makes a point of it.

“I write everything down in terms of goals I want to achieve,” Gbandi said. “When I started coaching, I told myself I wanted to be a head coach by age 36. At the time I was 32 and I wrote it down and plastered it down on the top of my bed. I took over at Northeastern at 36.”

He took down that piece of paper, tore it up, and wrote another. “I wanted to coach at two places, Brown or UConn, at age 42,” Gbandi said, “and it was plastered on top of my bed and it just so happened when I turned 42 both Brown and UConn came open. I never thought UConn was a possibility because I didn’t know if I had done enough at Northeastern to be considered.”

When Ray Reid retired as UConn coach, he endorsed Gbandi and UConn AD David Benedict and his search committee concurred. A new era begins Thursday as Gbandi, who scored the winning goal for UConn in the NCAA championship game in 2000, will debut as the Huskies’ coach against Charlotte.

If his headboard continues to serve as a crystal ball, things are looking up. He won’t reveal all he plans to achieve by age 52, but the goals of returning UConn to national prominence, and winning a championship, are now posted in writing.

“Now I’m sitting here, just turning 43, and obviously it’s a dream,” Gbandi said. “But there’s a lot of pressure that comes with it, which I welcome because I want to be the guy who turns this thing around and gets this place a national championship.”

Reid, 62, is now technical director and interim coach for USL’s Hartford Athletic and is about to name a new head coach. He had a long, spectacular collegiate run at Southern Connecticut, where he won two Division II titles, and at UConn, where he stepped in for legend Joe Morrone, won the 2000 championship and went 311-132-63 across 24 years. It’s a lot to live up to; a lot to build on.

Gbandi’s first team has 13 newcomers, 20 holdovers.

“It’s a fresh start,” said Kyle Briere, one of the captains. “He’s very passionate. You can tell this means the world to him, and there is nothing else on his plate, just the team, the guys and our mission, and we really take his passion and his drive to be better as motivation for us.”

Gbandi, born in Liberia, grew up in Houston, where Reid recruited him. He got to UConn at a moment very similar to the current time, with the program transitioning to a new coach after Morrone’s retirement and hunting for another title to add to the one UConn won in 1981.

“We were a little bit hungry,” Gbandi said. “When our group came in, they were coming off a year that was 8-8, a similar situation. They had been so high, and then went through a little bit of a dip at the end of Morrone’s time, and then Ray came in and it was new, fresh, and he wanted to establish himself. There was a hunger. When we went into games, it was ‘We’re not the UConn of old any more, we’re trying to prove ourselves.’

“We’ve got to try to get some of that hunger back and say, ‘We’re the team that’s hunting those teams now.’ That’s where I am with this team right now, trying to get us to be more of the hunter side rather than being the team other teams are always hunting.”

Gbandi won the Hermann Trophy at UConn then had a long pro career. He started coaching as an assistant at UConn in 2011, after stints at Holy Cross and Dartmouth, became the head coach at Northeastern in 2016. By 2021, he had things moving in the right direction with an 11-6-2 record. When UConn called last Janurary, he moved his family, his wife, Crystal, and their young children to Connecticut.

UConn, 2-6-2 in the Big East last season, is hunting Georgetown, which finished 8-2 atop the conference. The Huskies will use two strikers and play a more aggressive, attacking style but, as Gbandi noted, “entertaining” soccer is only relevant when you win.

“Can we have balance?” Gbandi said. “Can we we be entertaining? Can we be attacking, play more vertical and still find a way to win these games? Because if we do, this place is going to be rocking.”

More for your Sunday Read:

Another fresh start

Elsewhere in fresh starts, we will know Saturday how the Jim Mora era started for UConn football. It’ll start the usual way, with the Huskies major underdogs, roughly four touchdowns, against a very good team, Utah State.

One thing Mora seems to like is the Huskies’ overall team speed which, of course, has not matched up well with top opponents in recent years. Utah State will show right away if UConn’s roster overhaul has yielded the necessary upgrade.

“I like where we are in terms of team speed,” Mora said this week. “With team speed a lot of people just talk about the perimeter, but I look at our defensive line. I think our line runs well, our safeties run well, our receivers run well. The burners on our team are Devontae Houston and Brian Brewton, those guys can flat get out and go. But guys like Kaleb Anthony and Aaron Turner can challenge them. And all our quarterbacks can run, all four of them.”

There will be plenty to unpack as the season come up, but for UConn football it comes down, again, to this: Be fun to watch, be easy to root for, be interesting. It starts there.

Hartford Public High Hall of Fame

Hartford Public is inducting its new Hall of Famers Oct. 9 at the Chowder Pot in Hartford. Class of ‘22 inductees are:

Joe Amaio, soccer coach; Martin Aroian, 1938, tennis; MuDarris Jihad, 1973, football, basketball, track; Butch Ciccaglione, 1968, baseball; Ed Cotter, 1922, baseball; Courtney Dunstan, 1994, basketball; Helen Greene, cheerleading coach; Billy Gilmore, 1965, basketball; Tony Harrington, 1973, wrestling, football; Chester Kobialka, 1941, cross country; Brendan Lynch, 1964, football, baseball; Erwin “Terry” McKinney, 1976, baseball and basketball; Ken McBride, 1961, track; Warren Morrow, 1939, cross country; Marvin Riley, 1992, football, basketball; Betsy Ruiz, 1991, basketball; Joe Smith, 1916, multi sports; Charlie Vann, 1970, track; Joe Wirzbicki, 1974, swimming; Tyrone White, 1993, basketball; George Woodend, 1939, baseball; Donkor Hardie, 2003, football; Orlando Rosa, 1987, wrestling;

The class includes five Lifetime Achievement awardees: Les Payne, 1958, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist; Paul McBride 1964, businessman; Hank Lodge 1962, HOF director; Paul Knight, 1984, basketball; Charlotte Gemmell, HOF director, teacher;

The HPHS Hall’s annual golf outing at Goodwin Park is Sept. 17. Visit the Hall website for more information at www.hphsathletichof.com or email Mike Forrest at forrest.mike.r@gmail.com for more information.

Sunday short takes

* If you’re wondering why the UHart men’s basketball coach is suing one member of the Board of Regents rather than the university over the move to Division III, the likely explanation is that any dispute he has with the university would be subject to arbitration, which would not be public record.

* Somerset, the Yankees’ Eastern League affiliate, comes to Hartford to play the Yard Goats Sept. 6-11. Some rehabbing Yankees, such as outfielder Harrison Bader, pitchers Luis Severino, Clay Holmes or Zack Britton could be in town with them.

* Former UConn baseball star Reggie Crawford, drafted by the Giants at the end of the first round as a two-way player, won’t be recovered from Tommy John surgery to pitch until next year, but he made his pro debut as a hitter in the Arizona Complex League, picking up a hit in his first game. He also put on a BP show in San Fran this week.

* If the Deshaun Watson news this week indicates anything, it’s that the NFL still cannot get these things right.

Summer reading

Since Mets history is a hot topic this summer, with the franchise turning 60, fans might want to dig into Cleon Jones’ auto biography: Coming Home: My Amazing Life With The New York Mets. Jones had quite a journey from Mobile, Ala, to the Miracle Mets of 1969.

Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com