THE KIERAN SHANNON INTERVIEW: Pete Strickland is rekindling an Irish romance

The pied piper of Neptune is back. He’s recruited and coached against NBA talent, scouted Steph Curry and watched more game film and planned more sessions than just about any coach involved in Irish sport. Now, after three decades in the all-consuming ‘rabbit hole’ that’s NCAA basketball, Pete Strickland is back where his coaching career began, in Ireland, masterminding the revived national senior team programme.

BEFORE any of the others — his namesake Terry, or Jasper, or Lennie, Kelvin, Jerome, or Ed — there was Pete.

He was the first great pied piper of Irish basketball, arriving here in the autumn of 1980 and soon mesmerising the chain of local kids that followed him around the hills of the northside of Cork, only too glad to show him from his flat in Patrick’s Hill through Shandon to the Parochial Hall in Gurranabraher, so they could catch some of the American accent, charisma and showmanship.