The Net Result

It’s the ultimate in college basketball: cutting down the nets at the end of March Madness. The time-honored ritual is a privilege conferred upon the sport’s national championship winner, the only team left undefeated at the center of everyone’s brackets. In the sport, what could possibly be better than ascending that ladder, scissors in hand, to clip your own little piece of that white nylon twine?

How about doing it two years in a row?

Because that’s what Mathew Johnson ’13 had done the past two springs as a member of the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball staff. As the Huskies’ video and scouting coordinator,  Johnson is in charge of film production for the team, as well as the management of recruiting efforts for the program. For a squad that absolutely steamrolled every opponent it faced during the NCAA Tournament in 2023 and 2024, every aspect of the program had to be firing on all cylinders. The coaching staff, led by Dan Hurley, seemed to know every tendency of their opposition as they advanced through the brackets, and that began with Johnson’s work.

“Mat is somebody I have deep ties with. He’s from Jersey and he comes from a basketball family,” said Hurley, a Jersey City native, when Johnson was promoted into his current role in 2022. “We have the same circle we kind of grew up with in the game.”

Having now finished his third year in the role, and his sixth overall at UConn, Johnson does have a history with the Hurley family. He spent his first two years of high school at St. Anthony in Jersey City playing for Hall of Fame coach Bob Hurley Sr., who won four national and 28 state championships in his 39 years coaching the Friars. Johnson’s father, Herman Johnson P’13, coached under the elder Hurley at St. Anthony. Spending time at his father’s various workplaces put the basketball bug in Mat Johnson.

“From the time that I was born, I was in the stroller and I would go with him to the gym,” Johnson told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2023. “He was the person that introduced me to basketball, taught me basketball, and really just made sure that I kept it as a daily thing.”

With a coach for a father, Johnson was bound to pick up the habits that would make him a winner.

“The thing I loved about him is that he always wanted to do things the right way,” Herman told the Inquirer. “I would tell people, if you put the team in the gym and tell them to run ten laps, half the team would be cutting the corners. Mat was that guy that would make sure he ran outside of the lines.”

After he transferred closer to his South Jersey home, Johnson’s high school basketball career was interrupted by a heart ailment that came to light only after he passed out during a workout. Once two specialists diagnosed it as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, his playing days appeared to be over, but the Minneapolis Heart Institute told Johnson that he did not have HCM. It was literally a lifeline to continue playing the game he loved, but collegiate programs weren’t as convinced, fearful of taking on the liability. Johnson enrolled at Lawrenceville as a postgraduate in the hopes of proving himself his talent and his health.

It was a fortuitous decision. Playing for head coach Ron Kane ’83 P’20, he averaged 16 points per game, with six assists, four rebounds, and three steals. College coaches began calling again, and Johnson chose the Division II University of Tampa. In his four years there, he never experienced another cardiac episode, but having fulfilled his dream of playing college basketball, he decided to turn the page.

Mindful of something Bob Hurley had told him a few years earlier — “You can still have an impact on the game of basketball through coaching” — his next move came into focus. When a graduate assistant’s role opened up on Dan Hurley’s UConn staff, Johnson went for it.

Since then, he has played an integral part of the Huskies’ rise to the top of the college basketball world. UConn’s 2023 title team beat each of its six opponents in the NCAA Tournament by at least 13 points, the first team since the Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 to do so. The 2024 squad did them one better, winning every game by 14 or more. The Athletic called the ’24 Huskies the most dominant national championship team of the last forty years. After UConn won it all two years ago, Johnson was reflective about overcoming his obstacles to be part of something great.

“You make sacrifices to accomplish hard things,” he told the Inquirer. “Whether it’s being told that you can’t play basketball anymore, it requires a lot of sacrifice to achieve those things. I’m just so grateful that it all paid off.”