LIBERTY STUDENT NEWS



Liberty University Director of Athletics Jeff Barber has announced Dale Layer has been relieved as head men’s basketball coach.

Liberty Athletics has hired Collegiate Sports Associates to help with the immediate national search for the ninth head coach in program history.

Liberty concluded its 2014-15 season tonight, falling to No. 6 seed UNC Asheville, 80-70, in the first round of the 2015 VisitMyrtleBeach.com Big South Men’s Basketball Championship in Conway, S.C.

Liberty, who was the No. 11 seed in the tournament, concluded the season with an 8-24 overall record and a 2-16 mark in Big South play.

During his tenure at Liberty, Layer posted the second highest win total in Liberty’s program history, finishing his career with an 82-113 record in six seasons as Flames’ head coach. In 22 seasons as a collegiate head coach at three schools (Queens College/1989-98; Colorado State/2000-07 and Liberty/2009-2015), Layer has posted a 352-306 career coaching record.

Layer led the Flames to the program’s third Big South title in 2013 and a third trip to the NCAA Tournament. He was named the Big South Men’s Basketball Coach of the Year in 2011 after the Flames posted a program-best 13-5 mark in Big South play and finished the year with a 19-13 overall record.

Layer championed community involvement within his program. Liberty’s men’s basketball teams worked numerous camps and clinics in local Lynchburg area schools in conjunction with the 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative.

Liberty’s men’s basketball program currently has a 971 multi-year APR (Academic Progress Rate), which reached as high as a 980 single-year rate during Layer’s tenure as head men’s basketball coach.

Author Craig Daliessio has just released his new book; “The Accidental Mobster…The Legend of Joey Trucks” to great acclaim! A hysterical story of mistaken identity, ridiculous stereotypes, and one man’s over-active imagination turning a wonderful law abiding family into the second coming of the Corleone’s!

A Philadelphia native, Craig Daliessio has lived in the south for the past eighteen years, and most of the stories in this book actually come from misconceptions he experienced from his friends and neighbors. “What I discovered is that people love mob movies, but they don’t really love the crime. They love the family, the tradition, the respect and loyalty and the funny way we talk to each other,” says Daliessio. “What they really love is being Italian, we’re funny, loud, cantankerous, wisecracking and loving, and that’s what draws people. This book is about THOSE things.”

Craig’s life story is as amazing as the stories he tells in print. In 2008, after ten years as a highly successful mortgage banker, Craig lost his career when the industry collapsed. Not long after, he lost his home and his way of life. “A man in his mid-forties with two years of college and ten years in an industry that had all but disappeared is not going to find a job,” Craig reveals. Over the next six years, Daliessio worked to rebuild his life. He returned to his alma mater, Liberty University and completed his degree through their online option. He wrote three other books. He started a small carpentry company. And he did all this while living in his car!

“I didn’t have the money to rent a home and I refused to leave my daughter behind (his then-ten year old daughter Morgan. Craig has been divorced since 1999) and so I had only one option…live as a homeless man so I could remain a part of her world. It was the hardest period of my life, but so much good came from it, among those things I reconnected with my lifelong passion for writing and storytelling.” In fact, The Accidental Mobster was begun while Craig was still homeless, and finished after he and his now-sixteen year old daughter had moved to Virginia and he took a position with Liberty University.

“The book is exciting. People seem to really love the story because for once, they can read about all those things we love in those great movies and TV shows but we don’t have to be rooting for a criminal. It really is everything we loved about mob stories without the crime. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a Corleone if you could do it without the whole horse-head thing?”

Find this wonderful book at:

www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Joey-Trucks-Accidental/dp/0984533613