On March 3, 2026, five guys from the 1980 JV and 1982 Varsity champion OLS basketball teams gathered together—Jamie Giangrande and Frank Bensel in Florida, Steve Hillebrecht in New Jersey, Ed Byrne in Pleasantville, NY, and Steve DeLuca in Minnesota—thanks to Zoom, to take a nostalgic trip back to talk about what went into the fabric of those winning seasons. Here’s their story.
The scene: JV basketball practice, OLS gym, 1979. Coach Tom O’Toole would come straight from work at Merrill Lynch. “He’d have his button-down shirt, his black pinstripe pants, and his Chuck Taylors on,” recalls Jamie Giangrande, laughing. “He’d get in the defensive stance and grab you by your jersey and get you in that defensive position.” For this group of fifth graders, many of whom had never even touched a basketball, it was both baffling and mesmerizing.
Steve Hillebrecht, only a fourth grader, had been hanging around at basketball practices in the OLS gym ever since second grade, watching his older brother Rich coach the varsity team. But one day, Coach O’Toole said, “Hey, you want to come to the JV practice?'” Even though you usually had to be in 5th grade to play on JV, the rules were a little looser back then. So Steve “Hicks” Hillebrecht ended up on the team.
Granted, they weren’t very good that first year, finishing the season with a record of 3 wins and 13 losses. But even in defeat, Coach O’Toole was building something. He was instilling a philosophy, a way of playing the game that went deeper than what was on the scoreboard.
It was fundamentals — unglamourous, non-negotiable fundamentals. To warm up at games, while the opposing team would be in their layup lines, the OLS boys would be doing calisthenics. “We were all lined up, had to be 20 of us, all in a line doing jumping jacks and stretches and doing slides back and forth,” says Frank Bensel. “People would be like, ‘Look at these guys, they look so dumb.’ And a few minutes later, we would run them off the court.”
Frank draws a comparison to the movie Hoosiers. “In that movie they did all the same stuff. It was so similar to how Mr. O’Toole coached. It was all about character, hard work, the little things.”
Jamie remembers Coach O’Toole’s approach as almost counterintuitive — it was praise for anything other than scoring. “He was never like, ‘Great shot,'” Jamie remembers. “It was always, ‘Way to box out’ ‘Way to cut off baseline’ ‘Great pass’ ‘Good hustle.’ It was always the little things. He could take people who weren’t offensive players and get you to focus on contributing to the team. It was those little things that led up to the shot and led to the win.”
O’Toole would drill the team on the details. “You’d be sitting there, watching plays, and he would stop us so many times to make sure we got it right. Every little pick, how to box. He drilled it into our heads so well.” Steve “Duke” DeLuca says he doesn’t think they fully appreciated what they were learning at the time. “When we got to high school, that’s when we realized, ‘Wow, the things we learned. We were good!”
What those drills produced was a kind of telepathic fluency with one another on the court. These teammates knew each other’s rhythms. “When we played, we knew exactly where everybody was going to be and how to get them the ball,” Jamie says.
Frank puts it plainly: “It wasn’t individual at all. We never were like, ‘Oh, I scored 10 or 20 points.’ It was that we won, and that we did it together. We were good, and it was fun because we were good.”
There were tournaments against teams from Mount Vernon and Rochelle. There was the St. Vito’s tournament. There was the St. Bernard’s tournament, won on a last-second play. There was the kid from Our Lady of Victory who could dunk a basketball in sixth grade. The double-elimination game they won against that team—and then lost in the rematch that same afternoon.
And then there was St. Joe’s.
“We were always smaller than St. Joe’s — I hated them because they were always good,” remembers Steve. “They were bigger than us. But we could have beat them on a bigger court — we were quicker.”
They were three and thirteen in fifth grade. They learned to slide their feet and box out and make the extra pass. The following year, 1980, they were champions, finishing the season with 30 wins and only two losses, culminating at the WCAA championship.
Coach Rich Hillebrecht, then in his early 20’s, inherited them the following year. A different kind of coach, more laid back, like the big brother he was. “He was cool and had this sarcastic humor,” says Jamie. “He built on what Coach O’Toole had begun with us. He was like everyone’s big brother and you wanted to work hard to make him proud of you.” And in the 1982 season, as eighth graders, they did, with 31 wins and only 4 losses, bringing home the WCAA championship once again.
Besides the winning, of course, the guys talk about what made playing basketball at OLS so special.
Ed Byrne says it simply: “Camaraderie. Absolutely.” 
Jamie agrees. “We just pick right back up. We’re talking about all this like it was yesterday.”
“We played together and had so much fun together,” Frank says. “To go into these tournaments against teams from Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, and win — even if we didn’t win, they were great memories, because of the guys.”
On the court, they learned to find each other, knowing before the ball was even in the air where the next person would be standing. And forty-some years later, sitting on a Zoom call in their fifties, they still know exactly where everybody is.
PS: We’d be remiss not to make special mention of our friend, Rob Sullivan, who passed away too young. Rob was our “glue guy” — always keeping the rest of us motivated, always demonstrating his distinct brand of hustle. Rob was an amazing teammate and from childhood through adulthood, an amazing friend. Shortly before he died, Rob and his wife Suzanne were honored by their parish out on Long Island for their dedicated service. A group of us went out there to celebrate with them. It just goes to show that OLS graduates, especially those like Rob, bring the spirit of OLS with us and share it with others, no matter where we live. We miss Rob to this day and always will.