Dave Bike has never met Jim Boeheim face to face, but of course he knows who he is. Boeheim is the only head coach in the country who’s been at one school longer than Bike has.

“I said, ‘You know, I could see myself staying for a long time at a place like Sacred Heart,’” Bike said, looking back on the beginning of his coaching career. “I’ve been pretty content to come to work and enjoy coaching and enjoy the game.”

Now in his 35th year as the Pioneers’ head coach, Bike is the second longest tenured head coach in Division I. Bike has reveled and struggled in his share of highs and lows, from winning the 1986 Division-II national championship, to the program’s difficult transition to the Division-I level.

As the 65-year-old approaches the soon-looming end of his coaching career, the Pioneers (9-18, 7-9 Northeast Conference) are striving for their first Division-I NCAA Tournament appearance, a berth the team would like to clinch before Bike walks away.

“This is my last year and my last opportunity to do so myself,” said senior guard Shane Gibson. “It would be great if my team was the first team to take him there. It’d be something he would never forget.”

Now at 529 victories, Bike began this season ranked 20th in wins among active NCAA coaches. He coached his 1,000th game in the Pioneers’ season-opener.

Bike admits his career is not far from running its course, but Johnny Kidd, his assistant coach for 13 seasons, said Bike is capable of coaching for much longer.

“He can coach as long as he wants, because the guy has a sharp mind,” Kidd said. “He takes care of all the financials – travel, things like that. Most head coaches don’t do that. He does that, and I think that’s what keeps him sharp. He is very meticulous to the penny.”

But before Bike was a basketball coach, he had a career in another sport.

Bike was an All-New England and All-state basketball selection, and standout baseball player at Notre Dame High School in Fairfield, Conn., but turned down a scholarship to play both sports at Fordham.

After the Detroit Tigers drafted him in the eighth round of the 1965 Amateur Draft, he signed a contract, intrigued by the chance to make the majors and the salary that would accompany it.

“I always liked basketball better,” Bike said. “But what happened was that I thought that I had a better chance to make the big time in baseball than I did in basketball. Wow, if I did that for five months work, making $7,500 a year, what a life that could bring. Times have changed, huh?”

The 6-foot-4 catcher spent eight years in the minor leagues, mostly at Single-A, and reached the Tigers’ major league roster once, he said. In Detroit’s farm system, Bike said, he “went from a prospect to a reject to a suspect” after coming in with high expectations and enduring a “disastrous” slump in 1968.

So, when baseball didn’t pan out, Bike knew he could go back to his favorite sport.

“I think in sports, to stop playing or stop coaching is the hardest thing to do, to retire in sports,” Bike said. “So being a little bit disenchanted at the time, I decided to retire from baseball and pursue basketball.

After four seasons as an assistant coach at Seattle, Bike returned home to Fairfield and SHU – which now includes the building in which he attended high school, he said – in 1978, and hasn’t left since.

Bike’s tenure hit rock bottom from 1999-2006, the program’s first seven years at the Division-I level, during which the Pioneers struggled to a 54-141 mark. But the positives of Bike’s 35-year career severely outweigh the hardships.

In the 1985-86 campaign, Bike garnered coach of the year honors after leading the Pioneers to a 30-4 record and a national championship – “the highlight” of his career. Also among Bike’s favorites were the regional championships SHU won in the 1980s, all on the road, Bike said, because the Pioneers’ gym was too small to host the four-team tournament.

Bike doesn’t know exactly when he will put down the drawing board and call it a career, but he appreciates the experiences he’s had thus far.

“It’s been a good run. I enjoyed the university itself. I watched it grow,” Bike said. “I watched the change from Division II to Division I, watched it change from a commuter school to now a very comprehensive university. Like my wife always says, ‘You find a job you like, you never have to work a day in your life.’

“Well, I found a job I like, I found a place I love and it’s been a good ride.”