La Salle is saying goodbye to Fran Dunphy, the university’s ‘front stoop.’ Where does the basketball program go next?

La Salle University president Daniel Allen went back Monday afternoon to the old saying of athletics being the “front porch” to a university when he made a colloquial edit befit of the local vernacular. This is Philadelphia, and those things with steps leading to the front door are called stoops.

For the last three years, as La Salle has tried to reverse declining enrollment and keep afloat a men’s basketball program that was once a national power, “the person that you see greeting you on the stoop,” Allen said, “or the person you think of first, is Fran Dunphy.”

In just a few weeks, that will no longer be the case. The school announced Thursday that Dunphy, the winningest coach in Big 5 history, the only coach to lead multiple Big 5 programs, “Mr. Big 5,” will retire from coaching at the end of the season at the age of 76.

Monday, at a news conference open to the public, was about celebrating the life and legacy of Dunphy, one of the most influential figures in the local basketball scene’s history. Chairs inside the John E. Glaser Arena were filled more with family, friends, classmates, and La Salle community members than they were with media. Brother Gerry Molyneaux, professor emeritus, gave an opening prayer and thanked God for bringing Dunphy back to his alma mater to help save La Salle from “a madness that is no longer confined to March.”

» READ MORE: Fran Dunphy served La Salle and the Big 5 better than anyone

Dunphy “is what is right about college basketball,” athletic director Ash Puri said. “While he may be stepping away from the sidelines, his fingerprints are forever on this program.”

Dunphy said it was around the holiday season when he began talking with leadership about the right date to announce his retirement. Why now? “It’s someone else’s turn,” he said.

“I’m at the age that I am, and I’ve been doing this since I was in my late 20s,” Dunphy said. “It’s ridiculous the life that I’ve had. No one should be this fortunate.”

For the last few years, it was La Salle that was fortunate.

Dunphy took a job no one wanted at a time, with myriad reasons making it one of the least attractive coaching destinations in the Atlantic 10. “I came back to La Salle because I was asked,” Dunphy said. “I could never repay La Salle for what it gave to me.”

The Explorers have gone 43-51 over the last three seasons, and while most prognosticators were wrong about where they would finish in Dunphy’s first two seasons, Dunphy said “I needed to do more, and that’s how I felt at the end of the day.”

» READ MORE: For players and alumni awaiting the return of La Salle baseball, the anticipation is the hardest part

It’s hard to imagine more was possible, but La Salle will test that theory with its upcoming coaching search. The school did not want to make Monday about anything more than a celebration of Dunphy, but the elephant in the room — as friendly faces shared laughs with Dunphy on the shiny new floor inside the school’s renovated arena — is what happens next.

La Salle has partnered with Elevate Talent, a search firm, to find Dunphy’s replacement, and a national search is underway. Puri has been instrumental in helping La Salle open Glaser Arena and, among other things, bringing back the school’s baseball program, but this coaching hire will be the most important decision he has made since becoming athletic director in June 2023.

Dunphy said he wasn’t sure how involved he’d be with the hiring process. His focus, he said, will be on coaching his team for the next four games plus the conference tournament, a stretch that begins Wednesday with a home game — Dunphy’s 1,000th as a head coach — vs. Duquesne.

The basketball program, Puri said, is in “a much better place” because of Dunphy.

“I hope that it’s gotten better,” Dunphy said. “[The arena] has made it better. … We’re in a really hard league. It’s an amazing league, so we got to do more. … It’s a good job. It’s in a great college basketball town in a very good conference. All of those things make it a job that I think people should want.”

There is no running from the challenges, though. La Salle is one of the smallest schools in the A-10 by enrollment, and because of that has a smaller pool of alumni to draw on for name, image, and likeness fundraising. The NCAA and its member schools are still a few years away, Dunphy said, from figuring out what this all looks like. Continuous conference realignment could mean a conference change in La Salle’s future.

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It’s a new world, as Dunphy and Co. reiterated Monday. Earlier in the day, Adrian Wojnarowski, the St. Bonaventure basketball program’s general manager and a former ESPN basketball reporter, announced on social media that he was auctioning off old phones he used to break news with and old credentials from memorable NBA events, with proceeds benefiting Bonnies athletics.

Imagine telling Dunphy in 1989, when he became the head coach at Penn, that this would be the state of the game when he was retiring.

“The game is different,” said Dunphy, who also coached Temple for 13 seasons. “The game has changed. There’s no question about it. You can complain about it, or you can try to do the best you can with what you have and where you are. That’s what we’re choosing to do.”

It’s what Dunphy chose to do, to finish off his coaching career by sitting on La Salle’s front porch and ushering his alma mater’s basketball program into the future.

“Overwhelmingly, I thank you for allowing me to do what I’ve done, for these years at La Salle, but for those people that I’ve known all my life,” Dunphy said as his voice cracked, “thank you for letting me be your friend.”