Tim Welsh got the PC job in the spring of 1998.

He was 37 years old.

The hot, young coach from Iona, ready for a bigger stage.

He was the son of famous Division III coach Jerry Welsh, had grown up in a basketball workshop, basketball as a way of life, coaching as destiny.

“I have a picture of me and my father,” he said on the day he was announced as the new PC coach. “I was a little kid, maybe five or six, and I had a ball in my hand and we were both wearing warmup suits.”

He went to his father’s practices as a kid, was a ballboy at games, back there in the small upstate New York town of Massena. He was a kid whose first world was a gym, a childhood out of some old Chip Hilton novel.

So there he was in the spring of ’98.

The hot, young coach.

The perfect PC coach, young and personable and accomplished.

The one who seemingly had been groomed for this job his entire life, as if he had come direct from Central Casting.

Yesterday he got fired, the announcement coming three days after the Friars’ season ended, this season that had been a referendum on his coaching future.

“It’s what you sign up for,” Welsh said yesterday. “The highs and the lows. They’re all a part of it. There are a lot of things you can’t control.”

This has not been the easiest winter of his coaching life, of course. The boos had been there all year, a smattering of them when he was introduced before games. It had escalated during a home loss to West Virginia in early February, an ugly night when fan discontent seemed to run through The Dunk like an out-of-control fast break.

After that, Welsh was all but on life support, out on the end of some coaching plank all by himself.

Last Saturday night, about an hour after Providence College had lost to Villanova in The Dunk, he had sat in the Friars’ locker room. The players were all gone. The fans were all gone. Just about everyone was gone.

And still Welsh was there, as if he didn’t want to leave just yet. It almost seemed symbolic. As if he sensed that this might be the last time he sat in this locker room, the last time he was in this building as the coach of the Friars.

What he wanted last Saturday night was to have a chance to finish out his contract, which runs through next season, a chance to coach this team that will be senior-dominated next year.

He didn’t get it.

But Welsh has been in this game all of his life. He knows how it works. He knows it’s a high-reward, high-risk business, a profession that spits out coaches every year. He also knows that when you’ve been in a high-profile league for 10 years and wonderful things have not happened, you become a coaching version of an endangered species.

“You need to do something very special,” he said, “or people grow tired of the same thing.”

In retrospect, that was the problem. The Friars have not been bad in his tenure here, in fact far from it. They went to two NCAA Tournaments. They went to three NITs. Add it up and it was five trips to the postseason in 10 years. They have stayed afloat in a Big East that all but devours its weak teams.

In the end, though, it wasn’t enough.

Not for a school that wants more success.

Not for a fan base that wants more success.

Not in a basketball world where you either win big or the wolves gather at your door, fangs and all.

“A lot of it is timing,” he said, “and the timing wasn’t right.”

He was referring to the fact that he played this year without point guard Sharaud Curry, his returning leading scorer. But he could have been talking about the new, expanded Big East, a league that’s become more difficult, a league where you better be very good or the good times and the big cheers are going to be in some other zip code.

And, in truth, Welsh is right: people did get tired of him. Not him personally, but the sense that the Friars always seem to be swimming against the current in today’s Big East. And he became the signature of that, the public face, fair or not.

Yesterday that ended.

But not before he had to meet with his team for the final time, the toughest thing he ever had to do as a coach.

For a coach getting fired is never just about the coach. It’s about the assistant coaches whose lives get uprooted. It’s about the players who are all in limbo now, their comfort levels blown apart. In short, it’s like a death in the family. It’s also a declaration of institutional failure, the other side of the cheers. It’s never just about the coach, and it’s never easy.

“I told them that when I’m old and gray and out of coaching I will remember how they were today,” Welsh said.

He said he has loved living in Rhode Island, has made wonderful friends here, has no regrets about his time here.

He also said he wants to keep coaching.

“It’s what we do, and I will keep doing it,” said Tim Welsh.

No surprise there.

Wasn’t he all but groomed to be a coach, growing up as an apprentice in a basketball workshop, coaching as destiny?

Didn’t he seem to be the perfect PC coach back there in the spring of ’98, back when he was the hot, young coach?

But that was 10 years ago, and things have changed.

Yesterday told us that.

The day Tim Welsh cleaned out his office, a hot, young coach no more.

breynold@projo.com