Calhoun Says He's ‘Feeling Better'

Depending on the day, it sure doesn't seem like Jim Calhoun will let that fractured hip he suffered early last month keep him from his appointed duties as the Huskies basketball coach. He spoke to the team the Sunday night before classes started, and updated his status a few days later.

"I'm feeling better," Calhoun told TheDay.com's Gavin Keefe last Wednesday. "It appears, from what they told me, that I'm ahead of schedule. Hopefully, I can move fairly quickly through the pain. Right now, I'm on crutches. But I can do one crutch at a time. I can stand by myself without crutches. There are some good positive steps."

The 70-year-old Hall of Fame coach gave a similar prognosis Tuesday when the Hartford Courant's Dom Amore caught up with him.

“I feel much better,” Calhoun said while using crutches to get from his office to the court. “I have to stay on the crutches to make sure the [stabilizing] screws stay in place.”

Amore notes that Calhoun, as he's done before, isn't quite ready to put the retirement talk to rest while at the same time sounding quite happy about his current situation as the Huskies coach.

“I’m going day by day,” he said. “I was out on the road more this year than I had been in years. We’re deeper into  it now, which is good, we’re getting closer to the season.”

Calhoun still has about a month of rehab left, which means that it'll be the first week of October before his hip is fully healed. His coaching future beyond that will come down to “a combination of a number of things," not all of which pertain to his health.

This sounds a lot like the conversation Calhoun had with former player Jake Voskuhl in late July.

"I'm looking at different things, trying to determine [the future]," the coach said at the time. Of course, it wasn't long after that he spoke about motivating his 2012-13 team. “No, no I don’t think at all [it will be an issue],” he told SNY.tv. “I think that last year we had motivation from talented kids and I don’t think we always played as well as we could’ve.”

For now, no one -- maybe not even Calhoun -- knows what the future holds. In the meantime, he continues to sound like a man who will be on the bench when the Huskies' season gets underway in November.

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