Boca Raton has been good for Mike Jarvis
Ex-St. John's coach finds home, religion, and new job at Florida Atlantic
 Frank Franklin II / AP file | Mike Jarvis was hired at Florida Atlantic more than four years after he was fired at St. John's. |
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BOCA RATON, Fla. - Mike Jarvis believes in fate.
There was a reason he moved to Boca Raton instead of other spots in the Sunshine State that his wife preferred. A reason offers he submitted to buy homes in different South Florida cities weren’t accepted. A reason he wound up living on a golf course, although he rarely plays the game.
For 4½ years, he wondered why it happened that way.
“Now I know,” Jarvis said. “Something was calling me here.”
Here is Florida Atlantic, a public university with a campus 10 minutes from that golf-course home Jarvis moved into not long after St. John’s fired him in December 2003. It is never been a basketball hotbed, with only one NCAA tournament appearance to its credit and just three winning seasons since 1997. Since going to Division I 15 seasons ago, the Owls’ winning percentage is a paltry .346.
The program needs to be reborn, and hired Jarvis last month to do exactly that.
“I’m very happy for him,” said Patrick Ewing, the 2008 Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinee who played for Jarvis in high school in Cambridge, Mass. “Mike Jarvis is an outstanding coach. He’s done an outstanding job everywhere he’s been and it was a shame to see him out of the game as long as he was. I’m not surprised he still wanted to coach. If you’re doing something you love, your lifespan can be a lot longer.”
The way Jarvis sees it, life started when he moved to Boca Raton.
When St. John’s fired him, Jarvis asked his wife where she wanted to move, noting that they never had the chance before to choose where they wanted to live — until then, it was always dictated by the job. She said she wanted to leave New York and head someplace warm. Her first choice: Naples, Fla., on the state’s Gulf Coast. But Jarvis suggested that, because of television work he would do, it would make more sense to live in South Florida, where three airports are clustered an hour apart.
The couple agreed, and found Boca.
Though Jarvis found more than that.
Soon after moving, Jarvis was introduced to the Spanish River Church, which boasts a congregation of 6,000. It is a mega-church, with Sunday services streaming live on the Internet. Never particularly religious — spiritual, but not necessarily devout — before moving to Boca, Jarvis quickly became enamored with the church.
“It’s only through the grace of God that I finally realized I didn’t know enough about what I needed to know most about,” Jarvis said. “So then I really, really became a student of the most important playbook I’ve ever been in, the Bible. And to be very honest with you, that had very much to do with me getting this job. There’s no doubt about that.”
FAU’s search for a replacement for Rex Walters was nationwide, all-encompassing, with more than 100 names making their way across athletic director Craig Angelos’ desk. Jarvis quickly was at the top of the list, and many members of that 6,000-person church — “my family,” Jarvis said — called FAU to lobby for their favorite candidate.
Clearly, the local support didn’t hurt.
“I know a lot of people here,” Jarvis said. “They better be coming to these games.”
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