Former New York Knicks first-round pick Mike Sweetney has died at 43, and while tributes across the basketball world have focused on his brief NBA career and later mental health advocacy, those close to Yeshiva University’s men’s basketball program say his years coaching the Division III team in New York left just as deep a mark.
Yeshiva head coach Elliot Steinmetz first met Sweetney in 2019 through Tamir Goodman, an Orthodox Jewish basketball star Sweetney had known from the high school circuit in the Washington, D.C. area. When Sweetney later moved to New Jersey and wanted to get into coaching, Goodman connected him with Steinmetz.
“He literally just was one of the guys,” Steinmetz told the New York Post. “From the outside, I get it. It’s a different look when it’s a bunch of Jewish kids, and you have the [6-foot-8] former NBA African American guy in there.”
Sweetney stayed on Yeshiva’s staff until 2022, when a full-time job made it impossible to keep coaching. But Steinmetz said his connection to the program never faded.
“Every year beginning of the season, [he’d text], ‘First game’s coming up, how’s it going? How’s the team looking? Wishing you guys a great season. Hope to get there for a couple of games.’ Just larger than life in terms of the way he cared about people,” Steinmetz said.
The bond went beyond basketball. Steinmetz was in Israel when Hamas attacked Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, 2023, and said the first text he received that night was from Sweetney, checking that he was safe. Sweetney reached out repeatedly over the following days until he knew Steinmetz was home. Years later, when Steinmetz’s son Noah was in Israel during an Iranian attack, Sweetney checked in again.
“It wasn’t like he wasn’t checking boxes when he reached out to you,” Steinmetz said. “He genuinely cared … It’s so easy to talk about people when they pass away and how great they were. He’s one of the guys that we talked about him like this when he was alive.”
A fixture in the Jewish community
Sweetney got his coaching start running Goodman’s basketball camp, and he went on to run summer camps and hold training sessions at synagogues, becoming a familiar presence well beyond the Yeshiva campus.
“I’ve gotten 1000s of texts today from people in the Jewish community who are just absolutely heartbroken,” Steinmetz said. “He just was a part of our community, like to a point where I literally have had hundreds of people reach out today asking where they can give money for his family, send something.”
On the court, Sweetney’s three seasons on staff coincided with a 61-5 record for the Maccabees. The team reached the Division III Sweet 16 in 2020 before the rest of that tournament was canceled due to COVID-19, went a perfect 7-0 in the shortened 2020-21 season, and earned a tournament berth the following year in his final season.
Still, Steinmetz said the wins mattered far less than what Sweetney meant to the people around the program.
“He spent the later part of his life really trying to help other people,” Steinmetz said. “It was something that was so key for our guys with everything going on in the world and everything around them. He was just somebody who had been through it that they could always talk to on a level of openness and comfort and trust, and he just was kind of that guy for everybody.”
“The basketball part was irrelevant,” Steinmetz said. “He was obviously great to have around on the basketball side, but he was just—he was so much bigger than that.”
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