In his 36 seasons as a college head coach, Jabir guided several teams into postseason play. Two of his Marquette teams made the NCAA Tournament as did six of his UD teams in a row, including the 2014-15 Flyers who made the Elite Eight and gave mighty UConn all it could handle before falling.
Now retired, Jabir has been following three of his former players who are now assistant coaches and had teams in this year’s Tournament — Justine Raterman at Michigan; Olivia (Applewhite) Malcolm at Missouri State and Jenna Burdette at Tennessee.
Yet none of that has surpassed the March Madness experience Jabir had last Saturday at his Menlo Park, California home, when he lay propped up in his bed with his wife Angie and their six-year-old son Jude at his side as they watched the games on TV and laughed and cheered and snuggled close.
“That was pretty special,” Jabir said by phone in a soft, raspy, sometimes breathless voice a couple of days ago. “The only downside was not being able to stuff my face with wings and pizza like you normally would.”
But these aren’t normal times for the 63-year-old coach.
He’s bed-ridden and his only nourishment — now down to clear liquids — comes via a feeding tube.
Jabir has terminal pancreatic cancer and is in hospice care at his home.
He said his young son only knows that “Papa is sick.”
“We haven’t broached…We’ve never used the term cancer with him,” Jabir said quietly. “I don’t want him to go to school and say, ‘My papa has cancer,’ and then have another six-year-old define what that means to him.
“But I know we’re going to have to have that conversation with him sooner rather than later.
“I think I may be gone in anywhere between a couple of weeks to a couple of months.”
Two years ago — just after Jim finished his season coaching Siena’s women’s team and retired from a head coaching career that encompassed 1,088 games at six schools — Angie, a former University of Dayton women’s basketball assistant and administrator, accepted a job as the Executive Associate Athletics Director at Stanford University.
With her new position, she would oversee the needs of 18 intercollegiate sports at the school.
“I was going to be her wingman,” he said. “I was going to take care of the house and Jude.”
Twice during the move he drove from their old home in Albany, New York to California and on the second trip especially, he began experiencing severe stomach cramps.
A colonoscopy in April of 2024 came back clear, Angie said, but three months later doctors found a baseball-size tumor on his pancreas.
“We thought we were pretty fortunate because we were part of the just 10 percent that has a chance to treat the cancer,” Angie said. “Most of the time when people find out they have pancreatic cancer it’s too late to do anything.”
Following chemotherapy and radiation treatments, the shrunken tumor was removed in February of 2025. But last September the cancer returned in a different form — it was in the stomach lining — and it was much more aggressive, painful and frightening.
And that’s when the medical teams at Stanford Cancer Institute learned — just as had the folks back here in Dayton a decade and two earlier — that Jim Jabir is a special breed of person who cares about others and wants to lift them even when he is burdened.
Dr. Brendan Visser — the world-renowned surgeon who is the medical director of the GI Cancer Care Program at Stanford Cancer — has been treating Jabir.
“Jim has had a physically tougher battle with cancer than most and while it’s hard to be positive when you physically hurt and when things are not going the way anybody hoped, he still has been relentlessly positive with the people around him,” Visser said.
“And I don’t mean this in a Pollyanna sense. He’s not one of the people who puts their head in the sand. He’s a super smart guy who clearly has known what his odds are. He knew his options.
“He’s really kind of remarkable. Not everybody can pull that off. Most regular humans can’t because it’s so hard and sometimes things get so dark that it brings people to a cracking point.
“I’m not saying he hasn’t had his rough days, but there’s a bravery about him, a relentless positivity.
“He and Angie — and she’s been his rock — have been in this fight together in a way that is really special to everyone that is trying to shepherd him through the terrible cancer journey he faces all day, every day. The oncology team and the surgery team really love and admire them.”
Visser’s voice trailed off as his emotions rose.
After a moment’s silence, he admitted he was in tears:
“For him, for his young family, it just breaks my heart.”
In an attempt to buoy himself, Visser recalled the blanket on Jabir’s bed made up of old basketball t-shirts from his career:
“Even when he is feeling unwell and beaten up, he’ll point out a shirt and tell me a story about the outstanding team or special player it represents.”
Many of his stories often return to the 13 years he spent in Dayton.
“I don’t think we would have done what we did if it wasn’t for some kind of magic that came from being around the great atmosphere, the great people in Dayton,” he said.
“I love Dayton.
“To me, it’s the best job in America. The support and the commitment you get is great, but what makes it amazing is the people and the love they give you.
“I just love Dayton so, so much.”
‘He always knows what to say’
Jabir was just 23 when he got his first head coaching job at Division III Buffalo State in 1986.
Four years later, after a stop at Siena, he was hired to take over a Marquette program which had had six straight losing seasons. Within four years he had his team in back-to-back NCAA Tournaments.
An ill-advised detour to Providence — which was short on commitment — led to six straight losing seasons and his resignation.
After a year as a Colorado assistant, he was hired by Dayton athletics director Ted Kissell to rebuild a Flyers program that had had one winning season in a decade.
His first Flyers team went 3-25 and lost its last 12 games. Undaunted, Jabir managed to sell his vision to a few talented recruits including Kendel Ross out of Sarnia, Ontario; Kristin Daugherty from Fresno, Ohio; and Justine Raterman from Versailles.
“He had what I consider as a super power of belief he poured into you,” said Raterman, now an assistant coach with the No. 2 seeded Michigan women’s team that beat No. 3 Louisville, 71-52, Saturday in Fort Worth to advance to an Elite Eight game Monday with Texas
Credit: Jan Underwood
Credit: Jan Underwood
“He had this insane belief in me — something far more than I ever saw in myself — and he made you do more than you ever imagined you could.”
Raterman would go on to become one of the greatest Flyers players ever. She was an integral part of Jabir’s first three NCAA Tournament teams here; won All Atlantic 10 honors four years in a row and her 1,832 career points and 915 rebounds both are fifth best all time in program history. She was inducted into the UD Hall of Fame in 2019.
“Players like Justine and Andrea Hoover got it right off,” said Olivia (Applewhite) Malcolm, who was part of most of those same Raterman teams and now is an assistant coach at Missouri State, another NCAA Tournament team this year.
“I was a late bloomer and Coach Jabir and I had our battles on and off the court,” she said with a laugh.
He ended up becoming her great champion — he helped her land a spot on a pro team in Denmark and later helped her get on as an assistant coach at Saint Louis — but first there was the day he kicked her out of practice at UD for what she calls “a misunderstanding” on his part.
“The thing is, I roomed with his daughter Lauren,” she laughed. “I remember coming home and going ‘Your daaad!’
“But the next day you never would have known anything happened. Other people might hold onto things like that, but he truly wanted the best for you. He was positive and caring and now, the older I get, the more I appreciate it.”
After an ill-fitting season at Colorado State, Elle Queen transferred to Dayton on the recommendation of another coach who had worked with Jabir on the Colorado staff.
Credit: Lisa Powell
Credit: Lisa Powell
She knew nothing of UD or Jabir, but soon got to appreciate her new coach:
“He treated us like we were his own daughters. Sure, there were times we PO’d each other, but he put together a team that felt like family.
“The four or five years you spend in college are a short time, but they are the formative years and they play a big part of who we become.
“He was someone who pushed us farther than we thought we could go and yet he loved us at the same time and that’s very impactful.”
Queen now lives in Denver. For nine years she’s been an agent and talent manager for social media influencers across the nation.
She’s married, has two daughters, eight and five, and coaches her oldest daughter’s rec league basketball team.
She has stayed in contact with Jabir over the years and in January she flew out to California to spend the day with him.
And then there’s Sam MacKay out of Dublin Coffman High who fancied trick passes and sometimes unadorned comebacks.
She became one of the Flyers’ finest guards ever and played nine seasons overseas in six different nations.
Now an assistant coach at Wittenberg University, she laughed as she recalled her first days as a Flyer:
“Look, he’s from Brooklyn, he can speak his mind and my very first day of practice, he so graciously told me if I didn’t get down the floor a little bit faster my transcripts would be signed and waiting for me in the morning.
“After practice I came up to him and said, ‘Don’t worry coach, I’m not going anywhere.’
“And his response was, ‘Yeah, because no one would take you!’”
But to truly understand the relationship she’s had with Jabir, she said you need to know about the start of her pro career in Hungary.
She was on the Uni Gyor team bus headed to a game when they were hit by a drunk driver.
The bus catapulted off the road and flipped violently. She was ejected through a window and landed in a ditch with three fractured vertebrae in her neck and broken ribs.
Sixteen teammates were injured. The player in front of her had her leg amputated. Two coaches were killed.
Far from home and unable to fly because of her neck, she was overwhelmed by her situation.
“He was the first person — even more so than my family and friends — I was able to break down to and actually pour out what was happening,” she said. “When he called, I just lost it.
“Like always, he was the one who could bring me back down to life. He’s always been there for me. He always knows what to say.”
Embrace the pain
This past February, after Jabir was hospitalized for 16 days with sepsis, Dr. Visser informed the couple that Jim’s cancer was no longer responding to treatment and that jarred them into another realm.
Suddenly they were faced with the inevitable and as they went home to begin hospice they were left with uncertainty.
“We didn’t know if he had two weeks, a month, two months? But the doctors didn’t know either,” Angie said.
They quickly assembled the family. Jim’s three older children from his first marriage — Shawn, Lauren and Jackson, all of them with UD connections, all married and with kids of their own — came out.
Lauren lives in Marysville, while the two boys live in the Columbus area.
Jim’s brother and sister came out, too.
“We spent the weekend together laughing and eating and drinking some wine,” Angie said. “And everyone said their goodbyes.”
There was a lot of love that weekend. And more comes now as Jim’s former players and several of his coaching colleagues regularly call or visit.
Olivia (Whitehead) Malcolm had her team’s film person put together a compilation of game clips from her days at UD and sent them for the family to watch. Raterman regularly calls.
Jabir has immersed himself in the games of his former players’ teams and he spent the past season as an online consultant for an old friend, Jim Crowley, who’s coaching the St. Bonaventure women’s team.
Although he’s the winningest coach in the history of the UD women’s program, he said he wishes the man he now is at 63 would have been who he was at 40.
“Have you ever read the book ”Man’s Search for Meaning"?” he asked.
“It’s changed my life’s perspective. More than what you do, I think what matters most is how you handle things.
“Now I’m trying to embrace the pain and embrace the suffering.
“We’re all going to die but I want to die with dignity. I want to die knowing I had the best life I could and that I went out the way I’d be proud to go out.”
And there is one other thing he wants Angie said:
“He loves Dayton so much that he told me, ‘When I die, I want to be buried in my Dayton shirt.’”
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