SMITHFIELD — Tim O’Shea first came to Rhode Island as a grad assistant on Brendan Malone’s staff at URI.

It was 1985, and he lived across the street from Scarborough Beach.

He was a year out of Boston College and he wanted to be a coach, primarily because before his sophomore year in high school in Wayland, Mass., he had gone to the famed Five Star camp in Honesdale, Pa., which was the unofficial spawning ground for a generation of coaches.

He was just a kid who wanted to get close to the game then, and Five Star was one of the places where the game’s culture was on full display.

It was run by New York City superscout Howard Garfinkel, Hubie Brown was the alpha wolf, and among the staff were Rick Pitino, Mike Fratello and Jim Lynam. They were all young coaches on the rise, all with charisma that seemed to run off them as easily as sweat, and O’Shea looked at them and saw himself in the future.

“It seemed to be the greatest job in the world,” he said.

So he became a Five Star kid. He worked as a waiter, and Garfinkel took an interest in him. At a young age, he had become part of the unofficial basketball fraternity. During high school, he played on an AAU team that was coached by Mike Jarvis and had Patrick Ewing on it, and he was good enough to be named a high school All-American. By the time he went to Boston College, O’Shea already was on the inside of the game.

“That kept the coaching bug alive,” he said.

Which is how he got the opportunity to be a grad assistant on Malone’s staff, for Malone was a Five Star guy, too.

“That was the year I fell in love with Rhode Island,” he said. “It was my first exposure to it and I thought it was a great place to live.”

Three years later, he was back at URI as an assistant on Al Skinner’s staff, for Skinner had been an assistant on Malone’s staff, and they used to play pickup basketball.

By this time, he already had spent a year at BC as a grad assistant with Gary Williams, for whom he had played for two years, and two years as an assistant at Yale.

He would be at URI for nine years as Skinner and his staff developed a reputation for finding a lot of kids who seemed to have fallen through the recruiting cracks, a lot of kids who turned out to be appreciably better players in college than anyone ever thought they were going to be.

It’s the reason the Rams had success, the reason Skinner got the Boston College job in the spring of 1998 and took O’Shea with him. The second year, they were 6-21, and even lost to Harvard.

“It’s one thing to lose to Harvard in a spelling bee,” he said. “But you’re not supposed to lose in basketball.”

But Skinner and his staff took BC to great success, essentially using the same blueprint they had used at URI: Find kids who have fallen through the recruiting cracks, then coach them up.

Seven years ago, he finally got a chance to run his own program, to be a head coach.

He was 39 years old, roughly 25 years from the time he first went to Five Star and thought coaching seemed like the greatest job in the world.

Yesterday, he came back to Rhode Island, introduced as the new coach at Bryant, the one who now will shepherd the school into Division I, the landscape where the big dogs of the sport roam.

Only O’Shea is no longer the young kid, the game all ahead of him. He has been a head coach for seven years. He has been to big arenas, coached in big games. His Ohio University teams beat North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. Last season he finished 20-13 and reached the second round of the new College Basketball Invitational.

In short, he had reached his childhood dream: he was a college coach in a Division I program where people cared about basketball.

And yet…

He and his wife, Beth, missed the East. They especially missed Rhode Island, where they own a home in Newport, as if Rhode Island was a siren song they kept hearing in their heads. So this spring he began exploring other opportunities, more to see what was out there than anything else. He was on the periphery of the PC job; UMass, too. For a while he had an interest in the Brown job.

And then the Bryant job opened up, Max Good deciding to go to Loyola-Marymount as an assistant.

Talk about timing.

He got a big push from both Dan Gavitt, the former Bryant athletic director, and Dave Gavitt, too. He got a big push from Good, who essentially told Bryant that if Tim O’Shea was available they should get him.

So there O’Shea was yesterday, starting a new basketball journey.

“I’m more excited about coaching than I’ve ever been,” he said. “This is more of a challenge. This can be what we make it to be.”

The transition to Division I success will not be easy. That’s why O’Shea has an eight-year contract. The first step is to be competitive. The second step is to be more competitive. That, and get better players, of course, the kind who fall through the recruiting cracks, the kind he’s made his reputation on.

So it begins, 33 years after he first came to Rhode Island, Tim O’Shea is back, as the coach of Bryant, in the biggest challenge of his coaching life.

“We’re thrilled to be here,” he said. “This is our home.”

breynold@projo.com