Red Sarachek, who died Monday at 93, was the blustering, long-serving coach of the Yeshiva University basketball team.

Sarachek was a mentor to such coaches as Red Holzman of the Knicks and Lou Carnesecca of St. John’s, who once called Yeshiva “the birthplace of modern basketball” due to Sarachek’s innovative ball-handling schemes. “I can’t think of any man who has had more influence on coaching basketball to the City of New York or anywhere in the country,” Mr. Carnesecca said in a statement issued by Yeshiva.

While Sarachek’s Mighty Mites rarely achieved a winning season during his 31 years as coach, it was a miracle he could field a team at all; the university lacked a gym. Students worked feverishly, studying Hebrew intensively in addition to keeping up with their regular course load, so practice normally occurred late at night in a borrowed Midtown gym far from campus. Sarachek used the long subway ride from 181st Street to 23rd Street for chalk talk and diagramming plays. Academic scholarships were out of the question, and, according to Mr. Carnesecca, “Mostly he played with 5’2″ scholars with inch-thick eyeglasses.”

He also had a tendency to berate his players, as typified by this exchange, recalled by Holzman in a 1988 Newsday article:

“Katz, get in the game,” Sarachek yelled.

“Who for?”

“Go in for that dummy Katz.”

“I am Katz.”

“Go sit down; you stink.”

Perhaps in part because there were so few players, nobody was ever cut from a Red Sarachek team, and the coach was beloved by his players. According to the current Yeshiva coach, Jonathan Halpert, who was a Mighty Mite in the 1960s, Sarachek was “the ‘rebbe’ for thousands of basketball coaches all around the metropolitan area. Coaches went to Red to get plays the same way people see their rabbis to ask questions.”

A former star basketball player at New York University, Sarachek worked briefly for Manischewitz as a wine bottler before finding work as an assistant coach at Stuyvesant High, his alma mater, in the mid-1930s. He came to Yeshiva at the invitation of students, who paid his monthly salary of $300 themselves.

“I went down on a Sunday night, and it wasn’t a gym, it was a basement,” Sarachek said in an interview last March. “And I saw some small, anxious guys running around, and they asked me if I wanted to coach. I headed for the door, but the door was locked.” He eventually became Yeshiva’s athletic director.

Over the years there was the occasional winning team, and there was one stretch in the 1950s when his teams went 16-2, 12-7, and 14-4, but most years the record did not approach those lofty heights; Sarachek’s overall record was 202-263.

On the side, he coached a number of other teams, many of them to championships. During World War II, he coached at Pearl Harbor, and his Schofield Barracks team won an armed forces title. His Grand Street Boys Association won New York’s Amateur Athletic Union championship in 1947 and 1948.

Sarachek was also coach of the Scranton Miners of the American Basketball League, which he coached simultaneously while coaching a barnstorming team representing Herkimer in the New York State League. In 1946, both teams made the playoffs. He told the story of what happened next in different ways. In one telling, he coached Scranton and was sued by Herkimer. In the other, there weren’t two teams at all, just one, with two sets of uniforms. On the night when the two teams were set to play each other, he split the squad, hired a couple of ringers, and told officials that the other coach was sick.

With his wide experience, Sarachek might have been tempted to take a higher salary coaching at a school where basketball was taken seriously enough to at least have a gym. But he had financial security thanks to Circle Athletics, a sporting-goods store he owned on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. As a non-practicing but proud Jew, he seems to have found great satisfaction helping young men who were determined to supplement their bookish educations with physical activity.

In 1956,soon after his best-ever 16–2 season at Yeshiva, Sarachek told Gay Talese why he never cut a boy from his squad. “If a boy has the desire and willingness to study and then go through our punishing athletic system, then how can we say he doesn’t have it? He does have it. He has guts. And that’s more important than anything else.”

Sarachek finally retired from coaching in 1969 and worked briefly as a scout for the Nets, while remaining the athletic director at Yeshiva.

In 1974, following a horrendous 1-19 season, the Mighty Mites changed their name to the Maccabees, Macs for short. Yeshiva eventually built a basketball gym, and today plays host to an annual basketball tournament for Jewish high school basketball teams, a tournament named for Red Sarachek.

Bernard Sarachek

Born October 19, 1912, in the Bronx; died November 14 at his home in Deerfield Beach, Fla.; survived by his children, Arlene Weissmann, Esther Blitner, Jules Sarachek, and Michael Sarachek; eight grandchildren; three great-grandchildren, and a sister, Mildred.