The biggest changes for Farrell is his new job will be the ability to go on the road recruiting and to be on the court coaching.
“Anybody that aspires to be a head coach or coach at the highest level is always looking for opportunities,” Farrell said. “I wouldn’t say that I was beating down the bushes and just looking to leave, but I was very open to conversations if it made sense for me and my family. I’ve been an assistant coach before. It didn’t work out the best. If it’s with the right head coach at the right time in the right city, then I was very open to it and everything just happened to line up with this.”
Maciariello is 64-44 in four seasons and won the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference regular-season championship in his first two seasons. The team was 17-15 last season.
“(Maciariello) and I have actually gotten to know each other over the past probably four or five years,” Farrell said. “We have some mutual friends in the business, and right when he became head coach at Siena, someone said he should speak at the coaching conference that I run, called Rising Coaches. We had Carm come speak right when he got hired as head coach, and he kind of talked about the profession, who he hired, why he hired them. That’s kind of how our relationship started. We’ve served on a couple of coaching committees and just kind of stayed in touch. We’d bounce ideas off each other. We’ve leaned into each other a little bit in this in this profession.”
Maciariello reached out to Farrell about the job opening at Siena and then offered to fly Farrell and his wife Jillian to Albany for the interview. The Farrells have two young kids — Giulianna, 4, and Joshua, 2 — so it would be no easy decision leaving their hometown.
“He realized how important like she was in this decision,” Andy said. “So it was special because he was so in tune with what matters to me with my wife and family that he thought of her.”
Farrell sees many similarities between Dayton and Siena, starting with the fan support. UD leads the Atlantic 10 Conference in attendance every year by a wide margin. It’s the same for Siena in the MAAC. Siena College Athletic Director John D’Argenio is a 1982 UD graduate. The women’s basketball coach at Siena is former UD coach Jim Jabir, who Farrell knows well.
A Carroll High School graduate, Farrell is one of three brothers who have worked in the UD men’s basketball program. He got the tradition started when he tried to walk on to the Flyers as a freshman in 2003 and instead became a student manager. Andy’s brother Matt worked on Brian Gregory’s staff. Andy’s twin brother Eric worked for Gregory and also on Archie Miller’s staff.
Farrell will leave Dayton just as the program’s newcomers start to arrive on campus for offseason workouts.
“It’s an exciting time,” Farrell said, “because it’s a great mixture of some of the staples of the program with the returners, guys that have been in the program for a couple of years who know what it takes. We haven’t achieved what we’ve wanted to because of injuries or youth as the growing pains were taking place, but they know what it takes and they know what it looks like.
“Then you’re going to be able to interject some some new blood and some new life and some new talent into that. The sum of all the individual pieces is really what excites me the most. We had a lot of conversations about recruits that we did or did not pursue because of the individual talents that we have returning added to the individual talents that we have coming in. We liked them individually a lot. But I think collectively this is going to be a true example of the sum of individual parts being so much greater than the individual talents.”
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