Playing basketball has never been a sure thing for Greg Tarca—but he has consistently found his way onto the court
It’s a Monday night in October at the TD Bank Sports Center. Six college students walk onto the basketball court with the same dream: being able to walk-on to the men’s basketball team at Quinnipiac. One of them, wearing his neon green shoes and Montgomery Cougars T-shirt, is more familiar with Quinnipiac basketball than the other five. Just two years before, he sat in those stands, watching his older brother play in the Bobcat uniform. But for Greg Tarca, there are no guarantees on this basketball court, and there never have been.
Tarca is the youngest of four from Skillman, New Jersey. He has two older brothers, Kevin and T.J., and an older sister, Megan. For the Tarcas, there was one thing that everyone could relate to: basketball. Their dad, Thomas, painted half-court lines in their driveway to give the kids a realistic court to play on. Tarca’s mentality growing up was that he would go anywhere he could park his car and play basketball.
The Tarca family has always possessed competitiveness. Whether playing a pickup game of basketball or winning the family card game, the four kids always tried to one-up each other. As the youngest, Tarca always used his competitiveness to keep up with his older siblings. Growing he was always being compared to Kevin and T.J., and had the nickname “Tarca’s brother.”
“If I had a dollar for every time I was compared to my brothers, good or bad, I would be a very rich man,” Tarca said.
The Tarca basketball tradition went from the backyard to Montgomery High School. While Kevin and T.J. played in high school, Megan kept stats and Tarca served as the waterboy. Kevin was a star at Montgomery. He was the team MVP and named to the second team All-Conference. He went to several exposure camps and was told that he could play at a Division III program, at best. Despite what people told him, after graduation, he went to a school named Quinnipiac and walked on to the basketball team.
By the time Kevin graduated from Quinnipiac, Tarca was entering his junior year of high school. After a summer filled with knee injuries and a concussion, Tarca sat down for a meeting with Montgomery’s varsity head coach Kris Grundy. At the time, Grundy was entering his eighth season at Montgomery. Prior to this meeting, Tarca played as an everyday junior varsity player his sophomore year, unlike his brother Kevin, who was starting varsity by that time. Now, Grundy had to give Tarca tough news. He would be starting the season on the junior varsity roster.
Grundy thinks most kids would have given up, coasted through the junior varsity level, or even quit. But Tarca isn’t like most of the kids that Grundy has coached. He worked hard on the JV team, and by the middle of the season, he had exchanged his old junior varsity jersey for a Montgomery varsity one. By the end of the season, according to Grundy, Tarca was playing major varsity minutes for the Cougars. It was something Tarca had known that he could do all along.
“When it comes down to it, the people around you don’t know what you’re capable of,” he said. “Only you know what you can accomplish.”
The next season, Tarca was a senior leader on the Montgomery basketball team, a team that finished with a 27-2 record, a team that played the New Jersey state sectional final at home against Trenton High School in front of 2,500 fans dressed all in white. Tarca was named to the first team All-Conference and to the second team All-County. What he remembers most though is the time spent with his teammates, his second family.
During Tarca’s junior and senior seasons at Montgomery, a new coach joined the Cougar’s coaching staff. The new coach had played against Tarca in the backyard growing up. Kevin had returned, and he was there to make sure his younger brother worked hard.
“He knows that no matter how much I love him, I am still going to hold him accountable for things,” Kevin said. “I always tell him if he is putting up 500 shots after practice, then there is someone out there taking a thousand.”
When Tarca began looking at schools, he looked for places where he could play at the next level, but not many showed interest. Like his older brother Kevin, he wasn’t getting any real Division I consideration, but the Division III schools weren’t calling either. Only McDaniel College in Maryland guaranteed a spot on the roster for Tarca. But he decided to go to school that wasn’t going to hand him a jersey with ease. He chose a school he was very familiar with—a school whose basketball program he had known since he was a teenager.
Quinnipiac men’s basketball coach Tom Moore got a phone call on a summer day—it was from an incoming student that wanted to tryout for the team. Another Tarca wanted to be a Bobcat. Despite Moore’s excitement for him to come to Quinnipiac, he told Tarca the same thing he has told every other walk on, including Kevin.
“There are no guarantees,” Moore told him. “Being a walk on is not for everyone. There a lot of boxes that need to be checked off to make the team. If a box can be checked, we don’t need you.”
But according to Grundy, Quinnipiac needed Tarca.
“Division I programs love guys like Greg Tarca,” Grundy said. “They love the guys that are willing to put the time in and work hard, that aren’t worried about playing time or getting in the scoring book.”
The tryouts would be in October, so for the first few weeks at Quinnipiac, Tarca went wherever he could play. He knew what the coaching staff was looking for—he needed to be able to run. A lot. He trained on his own wherever he could, played as much basketball as he could, ran as much as he could, and worked out as much as he could until the day of the tryout.
On the TD Bank Sports Center court, Tarca, along with five others, started showing the coaching staff what they had. They started with dribbling drills, and then came the conditioning. They played full court one-on-one and two-on-two. The nerves were going through every square inch of Tarca’s body. This is something that he wanted so badly, to play Division I basketball.
Grundy was back in New Jersey at home. He and his wife had just put their three sons to bed, and he was about to fall asleep when he got a phone call. It was Tarca. Grundy told his wife he had to answer, and went into the bathroom so he didn’t wake up his kids. On the other end there was an excited voice, Tarca would be practicing with the team so the coaches could keep evaluating to see if he would be a good fit.
Tarca was practicing with the team for another month when he got the news. The team was doing a two-on-two rebounding drill. He was on defense and had to box out someone and get two rebounds to finish the drill. With one rebound to go, there was a loose ball. Tarca dove for the ball and beat his opponent to it. Like in every other hustle play, the team started screaming in excitement. Moore then brought the team together, and announced that Tarca would be the newest member of the team.
Tarca received the number 33 jersey. The very same number his brother had worn two years earlier. It was a moment of satisfaction for Tarca. He was back on a team.
Now working in sports management in Los Angeles, Kevin streams all the team’s games to watch his alma mater and brother. In a December game against Maine, he watched Tarca step onto the court. The first time down the court on offense, Tarca cuts backdoor, gets the ball, and hits a layup—his first points in a Quinnipiac uniform.
“Not many people get to say they played in a Division I basketball program, but even fewer people get to say that their younger brother is playing for the same program wearing the same jersey number that you wore,” Kevin said. “It’s just really cool seeing him experience something that I got to experience.”
Division I college basketball is fast and physical, and Tarca has learned that. It was tough at first to keep up with his teammates, but it’s like back in high school—he’s just playing with his team.
“I go through the same practices as these guys, I go through the same workouts as these guys, I go through the same lifts as these guys,” Tarca said. “Personally, I look at myself as ‘one of these guys.’”
