By Kerry Van Malderghem
Jim Jabir '84 cannot overstate how incredibly blessed he feels to be the head women's basketball coach at the University of Dayton. But, Jabir is also incredibly blessed for another reason…he's lucky to be alive today.
At the beginning of the 2004-05 basketball season, Jabir had just started running five or six miles a day and was feeling healthy. One day after basketball practice, he was sitting at home with his children when he started feeling nauseous and achy. His whole body hurt.
The scariest part was that his heart was beating so fast, he could feel it in his feet, and didn't know what was happening. He immediately called one of his assistant coaches who rushed him to the nearest hospital.
“They took my heart rate and I saw the lady's eyes just open and they slammed me on the table and all of a sudden there were 12 people running around me,” Jabir recalls.
Members of the medical staff were concerned because Jabir's heart rate had spiked to 205. Typically the heart beats about 60 to 80 times a minute when a person is at rest.
“They couldn't get my heart rate down with medicine and they knocked me out and put those paddles on me…that you see in the movies, and I got zapped,” Jabir said. “My assistant was sitting in the corner and he said that my body just went off the table like six inches. “
Doctors performed medical tests on Jabir in an attempt to determine the cause of the increased heart rate. He was diagnosed with Arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia (ARVD), which is difficult to detect and the chance of carrying it is one in 5,000. It is most prevalent in young men, with a majority of the cases diagnosed before the age of 40.
According to the ARVD website, “although ARVD is a relatively uncommon cause of sudden cardiac death, it accounts for up to one-fifth of all episodes of sudden cardiac death which occur in patients below the age of 35. Exercise has been identified as a common precipitant of the arrhythmias which occur in patients with ARVD.”
Jabir understands exactly how the disease has affected his own heart and his life.
“What happens is I have a code, but my genetic code is missing something,” Jabir said. “When you exercise, your heart muscle expands, the cells separate and then they go back and the walls touch again but mine don't.
“There's a space in between the cell walls and that space gets filled up with fibers and fatty tissue and scar tissue; and we all have an electrical current that goes around our heart and the scar tissue screws up the pathway for my current.”
While doctors had detected the cause of Jabir's increased heart rate, he wasn't out of the yet. He was in the hospital for another three weeks and had to have a pacemaker as well as an internal defibulator implanted in his body. Doctors told Jabir that he would go home in a couple of days when all of a sudden his blood pressure dropped and he couldn't breathe. He had been allergic to one of the medicines that that was prescribed for him.
“I had blood clots on my lungs and they shoved tubes down my throat and masks on my face. I'm looking around the room wondering what's going on and I almost died again a couple of times that night,” Jabir recalls.
He spent another three weeks in the hospital before he was allowed to return to work, but he could only sit on a stool and watch as Dayton practiced. What surprised Jabir the most was how he felt after the experience.
“The scariest thing is when you get really sick and when your life is threatened in that way, you don't realize it but it's the loneliest thing you could ever do. . . even with a room full of people that love you,” he said.
He couldn't get the fact out of his head that he would have to leave his family, friends, and the Dayton basketball family.
“I had this recurring dream, I had it every night when everybody left and I was alone and I'd dream that I was in the sea, in the ocean treading water and the sea was black, and there was a lifeboat full of everybody I knew. They were reaching for me and I was trying to swim to them and I couldn't get to them.”
Jabir wanted to see his kids grow up and there was still so much more of life for him to experience, so many more games to coach, practices to attend, and student-athletes to mentor. He wanted things to be different if he made it through this difficult time.
“The one thing that I'm most disappointed in myself about is I pray every night and I say 'get me out of this and I'm going to value things differently and I'm going to do this and do that' and as soon as I got out, I went back to work and I forgot all that,” he said. “I didn't change as much as I wanted to.”
He wanted to have an appreciation of his life and see it in a different way. So, he rolled up his sleeves, went to work and made changes.
“I'm a little more forgiving now,” he said. “I'm demanding, but I'm not as intense as I used to be. I'm probably more understanding. I want them (the Dayton women's basketball team) to get it more than I want to give it to them.”
And what he's given them is an opportunity to obtain a great education while competing at a high level in the Atlantic 10 Conference. He also enjoys the little things now, like sitting at the back of the team bus on a recent road trip to Fordham and sharing stories from his childhood in New York City.
It's something he also used to enjoy when he was a student at Nazareth in the early 80s. Jabir was the first person Jeff Van Gundy '85, the former coach of the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets, met when he came to Nazareth. While the two have taken different coaching paths, Van Gundy coaching professionally and Jabir at the college level, the mutual respect and appreciation for each other are evident.
“I had so many more advantages, but he's earned everything that he's gotten,” Van Gundy said. “Every job that he's taken over has been a massive rebuilding but his positive energy and spirit has allowed him to have the success that he's had.”
Coaching success that began at Nazareth as the assistant coach during the 1984-85 season. Jabir then received his first head coaching position at Buffalo State the following year. He's also made other stops along the way including Siena, Marquette, Providence and Colorado before arriving at Dayton.
“I have a daughter and if she was at the level that he's coaching at, there's no one I'd want my daughter to play for than Jim Jabir,” Van Gundy added. “He'd coach your daughter the way he'd coach his own daughter. He wouldn't overlook the intangibles that you're supposed to instill in your players.”
After seven years as the head coach at Dayton, he's now in a position where he can recruit the players he wants to surround himself with on and off the court.
“I treat all my players the way I'd want my daughter's coach to treat her,” he said. “It's nice to work so hard to get to a point and then watch what you've worked so hard to do come to fruition. You're creating something that wasn't there before.”
What he's created is an Atlantic 10 Conference contender. He's been the architect of a Dayton program that was the No. 2 seed for last weekend A-10 Tournament. The Flyers lost to Temple in overtime in the tournament semifinals and, at 24-7 overall, are hoping for an at-large berth to the NCAA Tournament.
The team has also posted three consecutive 20-win seasons. Dayton was 3-25 in Jabir's first season in 2003-04 and has consistently improved since. But it hasn't just been about the wins and losses for Jabir, it's about the people.
“I love watching people succeed, I love watching people grow up and I love being a part of it,” he said. “For me that's magical.”
A magical finish to Dayton's season would be an NCAA Tournament appearance, but for now, Jabir is savoring every moment he has on and off the court. It's something both he and Van Gundy understand because of the profession they chosen.
“Not many coaches put their health where it should be in relation to their job, but Jim now understands the importance,” Van Gundy said. “No question no matter what his record is on the court, he's undefeated off the court. He's a special coach.”
