SSU Basketball Assistant Working His Way Up the Coaching Ranks

Many fans of Salem State University's men's basketball team know him as the guy who wears the orange colored suit coat on the bench with the team.

His friends know him as a loyal, true person who will always be there no matter what the circumstances are. Dan Viscariello, 20, is just like any other college student, chasing his dream.

Viscariello's dream job is to be a head coach, but he's also realistic with his goals and knows things do not get handed out on silver platters. When he graduates from SSU with a Bachelor's degree in Sport Management in 2013, he plans to work towards a master's degree while simultaneously being a grad assistant for a Division I program. "After all schooling is complete, I hope to start my career as a Director of Basketball Operations for a Division I program," he said.

Viscariello enters his third season with the Vikings, where he helps out in all areas of the programs. His duties are, but not limited to, practice planning, charting, scouting reports and ingame statistics.

He began his student-assistant career at Maynard High School in Maynard for the varsity and junior varsity boys' basketball team under Coach Howes.

At the beginning of his career, his duties resembled administrative tasks such as ordering team gear, making practice schedules, registering the team for tournaments, uniform inventory and keeping players up to date with school work and grades. It wasn't until his senior year that he started looking at the X's and O's.

Now Viscariello was not always on the sidelines drawing up plays. At Maynard High School he played two years of varsity football and baseball.

When it came to basketball, he stayed true to his beliefs of being realistic where he realized his subpar talent, and left his days of playing on the hardwood just after the eighth grade.

With experience in three sports, he was faced with a tough question of what made basketball his go to sport. "I've always viewed athletics as a mirror for life, more so than school," said Viscariello. "Looking back on it, even though I did not play basketball in high school, the coach I paid attention to was Coach Howes, who ended up being my mentor with coaching throughout high school."

After being mentored by Coach Howes, he gave coaching a shot for a successful travel team made up of seventh and eighth graders, which went 32-6 in two seasons.

"Enjoying myself and being successful at the same time is why I decided to move it on through college," said Viscariello.

His favorite coach that he watched and grew up with is Pat Summit and she's not his favorite just because she collected over 1,000 wins and several national championships. It's a lot more than that.

"It is more because she cares about her players, plays by the rules, and is never egotistical," said Viscariello. "To me, the most important thing about coaching is after graduation, when the ball stops bouncing and you're forced to be an ordinary citizen, do you as a coach know what your players are doing? Do your players always come back to you? If you know what they're doing, and your players come back to you, than you have done your job."

Viscariello plans to move up the ranks of the coaching ladder until the water runs dry starting with his two remaining years as a Viking. He said that since he has set his mind to something he wants to do, it's attainable so long as he's realistic and honest with himself.