Rye Brook Father-Son Coaching Team Makes Its Mark at SUNY Purchase

Rye Brook’s legendary three-sport coach Jeff Charney knows a thing or two about March Madness.

Charney has coached SUNY Purchase into the Division 3 NCAA March Madness tournament for the past two years after engineering one of the most amazing program turnarounds in college basketball.

This year, for the first time in program history, Charney’s SUNY Panthers won the league’s regular season title, took the Skyline Tournament Championship and advanced into the second round in the NCAA “Big Dance” on the Division 3 smaller, less competitive collegiate level in Philadelphia.

In another Purchase first, Charney’s assistant coach is his son, Jeff, a former Port Chester and SUNY Purchase baseball and basketball standout who teaches English and history at Rye High School. Chad commutes to basketball practice after school with his dad, who has taught math at Port Chester High School for 39 years and is retiring at the end of the year to concentrate on his college coaching job.

“The Charneys coach and teach; it is in the Charney blood,” Jeff said as he talked about his career.

Long before Uconn and Butler competed in the championship game on Monday, the Charneys were already prepared to start the recruiting season, which effectively begins when March Madness comes to a close. The Charneys will be scouting the Westchester Section One High School All-Star Basketball game at SUNY Purchase on April 6.

“It becomes a waiting game for Division III coaches,” Jeff explained. “Most of the better players expect to be recruited by the Division I and II colleges, but that doesn’t happen for a lot of them who want to keep on playing on a collegiate level. That’s where Division III teams like SUNY Purchase come in.”

Jeff was, in effect, recruited to turnaround the SUNY Purchase program four years ago. He came in as an interim coach and inherited a team with less than a handful of scholarship players. He recruited his son Chad and several other talented players, including Marvin Billups, who made All America this year and led Purchase to one of the great turnarounds in school history, taking the Panthers from a disastrous three-win season to 15 wins and a playoff berth in his first full season in 2008-09.

He led Purchase to the Skyline Conference Championship and its first ever trip to the Big Dance in 2009-10. They lost in the first round. This year—Purchase’s best ever—they won the league and Skyline title and were leading in their second round Big Dance game when one of their starters got knocked out of the game. They lost in the final minutes. 

Jeff was nonetheless named the D3 All-Atlantic Region and All Met Coach of the Year. 

Winning coaching awards is nothing new to Jeff. His Blind Brook basketball teams, for example, won state and Federation championships and made five consecutive Final Four appearances at the Westchester County Center during his five years as coach. His accolades included being named Madison Square Garden Tri-state Coach of the Year.

In baseball, he also was named New York Daily News and Journal News high school coach of the year. He won the Junior College National Coach of the Year in 2002 when he led Westchester Community College into the Junior College World Series for the first time.

He also was part of Dino Garr's Rye High School football coaching staff that won three state championships.

All of which helped Jeff land the SUNY Purchase job. His son, Chad, one of his prime recruits, captained the basketball and baseball teams at Purchase, setting the then-NCAA record for the most consecutive 3-pointers in a row in 2008 and making All Conference as the most winning pitcher (16) in school history.

So, it was no surprise that when Jeff’s assistant coach left SUNY, Chad became the natural choice to replace him. Their relationship and coaching dynamic may prove fruitful for SUNY Purchase as it seeks another league crown. In this case, once can only hope the adage "Like father, like son" is true.