Fran McGlinn

The Player Who Stayed

Fran McGlinn was told before his junior year at Archbishop Wood that his basketball career had to end. The diagnosis was a heart condition. The decision — for almost any other high school kid — would have been to walk away. McGlinn chose differently.

He stayed on the team. He suited up for every game. He sat in the scouting room, studied film, and helped prepare the Vikings' game plans. He lent support to his teammates and coaches. And, quietly, he started thinking about the next stage of his basketball life: a career as a coach.

The Dec. 29 Point

On December 29, in the morning consolation game of a holiday tournament, the kind of game nobody writes about afterward, McGlinn was allowed on the floor and scored a single bucket. Ted Silary wrote about it weeks later in the Daily News and called it "the most significant point of the city-leagues basketball season." Nobody who saw it would argue.

Senior Night — The Dunk

On February 16 on Senior Night at Archbishop Wood, the Vikings hosted Archbishop Ryan. McGlinn had hoped to play the first three minutes of the game and had even received tentative clearance. The clearance didn't come all the way through. Instead, the coaches put him on the floor for the opening tip, with 20 family members in the stands, Comcast SportsNet cameras rolling, his close friend Ryan's Eric Dethloff waiting across the center circle — and Fran McGlinn opened the game with a dunk.

Legacy

McGlinn was a celebration, not a memorial. He kept his connection to the game through coaching and scouting and the kind of quiet team-first contributions that don't show up in the box score but run every championship locker room in every league. The original TedSilary.com tribute page collected the comments of his Archbishop Wood classmates, teammates, and coaches.

Tributes

Below are the archived tributes submitted by Fran's Archbishop Wood teammates, coaches, and classmates — preserved here from the original TedSilary.com page.