BY New York Times

On the morning of July 6, Buzz Williams resigned as the men’s basketball coach at the University of New Orleans after one season.

Skip to next paragraph Hours later, the athletic director, Jim Miller, got a call from Joe Pasternack, who had been passed over when Williams was hired.

“What are you doing the next four years?” Miller asked.

Three days later, the 30-year-old Pasternack was hired, and he is now running the latest post-Katrina reclamation project in New Orleans.

The Privateers are playing for their third coach in three seasons. Their home court, Lakefront Arena, is still not restored, so the team will play another season in a glorified high school gym on campus. A makeshift dressing area has been fashioned in a hall intended for gymnastics, with blue drapes shielding the lockers and cardboard slats duct-taped over the windows for privacy.

This is Pasternack’s first job as a head coach, so it is much too early to know whether he can get the Privateers (2-0) into the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time since 1996. He is baby-faced, and more than once he has been likened to the precocious television doctor Doogie Howser.

“Before Katrina, I had underwear older than him,” Miller said.

Inexperience aside, Pasternack does have one thing in his favor. He is from New Orleans. His parents lost their home in the hurricane. He understands acutely that recovery here demands four-corners patience, that it can be slow and immensely frustrating but ultimately rewarding.

“I felt like I wanted to be back home, regardless of Katrina,” Pasternack said. “But the storm made it even more of a calling.”

Fortunately for him, the basketball infrastructure at the university does not need immediate rebuilding. Four starters return, including the senior guard Bo McCalebb, the reigning Sun Belt Conference player of the year. Lakefront Arena is scheduled to reopen in May. But the basketball team, like the university’s athletic department and much of the rest of New Orleans, has struggled to regain its footing in the muck of this damaged city.

The university fights off rumors — untrue, officials say — that it will disband its athletic program. For reasons that are partly financial, partly aesthetic, this season’s home games will be broadcast on radio, not television. If the 1,500-seat gym remains off camera, officials believe, potential recruits may not be so easily steered to rivals eager to claim that New Orleans is a second-class team playing in a third-tier bandbox.

“It’s something we can’t overcome this season, but we don’t have to draw attention to it,” Miller said.

Since Katrina, the university has become the Robin Williams of athletic improvisation. In the fall of 2005, the men’s and women’s basketball teams were dispersed for a semester to the University of Texas at Tyler. The baseball team wound up at New Mexico State. The swim team relocated to Emory University in Atlanta. The men’s golf team evacuated to Louisiana State at Shreveport. The women’s golf team resettled at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La. The athletic department’s marketing director worked out of a coffee shop.

Before the storm, New Orleans had an annual athletic budget of $5 million. Now it is $3.5 million, $500,000 less than what Alabama pays its football coach, Nick Saban.

Sixty percent of the athletic budget comes from a student fee of $100 a semester, but enrollment declined to 10,500 from 17,300 before the hurricane. It has since climbed to 11,300, but the drastic reduction in revenue from student fees forced hard choices to be made. Men’s and women’s tennis were suspended, as were women’s golf and men’s and women’s track and field and cross-country.

That leaves New Orleans with six sports — eight short of the N.C.A.A. mandate for universities that are considered to play major-college athletics. A waiver has been granted until 2011, by which time the university must restock its athletic cupboard.

Men’s and women’s tennis, and men’s swimming and diving, are scheduled to be added first. To pay for the additional sports, university officials are counting on success and visibility in the revenue-generating sports of basketball and baseball to help draw higher enrollment, more corporate sponsorships and increased scholarship endowments.

“One million dollars to five million would be nice,” said John Barranco, the assistant athletic director for business development and promotions.

The baseball team won the Sun Belt Conference tournament and advanced to the N.C.A.A. tournament last season despite playing in a stadium that has yet to fully repair its lighting system. The basketball team is trying to recover from whiplash after enduring more changing of the guard than Buckingham Palace.

To cope, McCalebb suggested, players have come to consider coaches as office temps or supervisors riding a never-ending elevator of arrival and departure.

“He’s like our boss,” McCalebb said of Pasternack. “What he says goes. He’s got a lot of energy. He wants to win.”

Monte Towe left as coach after the 2005-6 season, returning as an assistant at North Carolina State, where he played point guard on the Wolfpack’s 1974 national championship team.

----------------------------------------------------------------------