Seton Hall basketball assistant basketball coach Shaheen Holloway with his daughter Shatanik. Five years ago, he walked away from the second year of a professional contract with his German club team to move back home and assume full custody of then 11-year-old Shatanik.

“I called a timeout and coach [George] Blaney was like, ‘What’s going on?’ I told him I did it because I needed to yell to someone to watch out for my daughter,” Holloway recalled. “There weren’t too many people in the stands back then and I could see her running around all over the place.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Holloway interrupted basketball life with real life.

“That’s Shaheen. That’s responsibility,” Blaney said. “That’s him stepping up and not being afraid to do what’s right, to do what he had to do. I respected him for doing that rather than being upset with him.”

Holloway learned to straddle the line between being one of Dick Vitale’s famous Diaper Dandy college basketball stars to changing plain old diapers from a precariously young age, becoming a father as a 15-year-old sophomore at St. Patrick High School in Elizabeth. For years afterward, he would travel the globe earning a winter paycheck for his dazzling point guard play and retuning home for summers when his daughter, Shatanik, would move in with him.

But when Shatanik’s mom (she and Shaheen did not stay together) needed more help, when she wanted to return to school herself, Shaheen made a life-changing decision.

“It was my turn, my time,” he said.

Five years ago, he walked away from the second year of a professional contract with his German club team to move back home and assume full custody of then 11-year-old Shatanik. And today, as Holloway celebrates his first Father’s Day since returning to his alma mater as associate head coach to new coach Kevin Willard, he still is framing his every move around his daughter, now 16, a high school senior-to-be.

“I felt we needed to make a bond and have a stronger relationship,” he said. “Fatherhood came at me at a young age. Growing up I never had a dad. My brother and I always said when we had kids we were definitely going to be there for them. For all the read dads out there, they know I’m not looking for a pat on the back. I had plenty of people who said to me, ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy? You’re going to stop your career?’ I was like, ‘What do you mean? Who else is going to do it?’”

Most absentee fathers don’t just come from absentee fathers but tend to become one themselves. To break that cycle takes courage and support, and Holloway was blessed with both. His father wasn’t around, but the five-bedroom house where he was raised in South Jamaica, Queens, was overflowing with helpful relatives, including his grandmother, his mom Claudette, his brother Deshawn and his sister Shawntay. Countless aunts, uncles, cousins and neighborhood friends chipped in, too, guiding Shaheen onto the path of adulthood.

Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at a new desk inside Seton Hall’s Walsh Gymnasium last week, Shatanik surfing prom pictures on Facebook, father and daughter are unmistakable relatives, locked by so much more than the genes that gave them identical expansive smiles. They easily pass for brother and sister and often are mistaken as such, but over the past five years going from occasional roommates and vacation partners to living together full time, the level of trust between them has deepened. So much so that Shatanik is moving back in with her mom to finish high school in New York with her friends.

Her admittedly overprotective dad is ready to let her go – if only a little. Nothing could separate them now.

“Having Shatanik made me the person you’re talking to today,” Shaheen said. “When she first came into my life I had to grow up quick. It made me more patient, better aware of everyone around me. I had to raise her so that one day she could take care of me, to put her in position where she doesn’t have to depend on no man, not on anybody, to see her go to college, have a successful career. At the end of the day, I want to be able to sit and say I had a part in that.”

When Shaheen was littering the high school sports headlines alongside Paterson Catholic’s Tim Thomas and another great 1996 player from Lower Merion High School in Pennsylvania named Kobe Bryant, outsiders might not have predicted his path into coaching, not with his occasional youthful bouts of impatience with teammates not up to his skill level. But rather than give up on them, Shaheen chose to teach, to help, to guide.

Kind of like a parent.

When he returned from Germany, Holloway would need all those skills and more. He got an apartment in Hillside, took a volunteer assistant coaching job at Bloomfield Tech High School and took over with Shatanik.

“It was tough — I didn’t know what to expect going from being with someone for two to three months in the summer to nine months,” he said. “I had been doing all the fun stuff, but now I had to be the good guy and the bad guy. I had to deal with woman things. I would wonder why she was so moody, why she would change in five seconds. Thank goodness I had a lot of help.”

With advice from his sister and his girlfriend, Kim, they made it through, and as they did, Shaheen’s coaching career took off. He worked the 2006-07 season as an administrative assistant at Seton Hall before hooking up with Willard at Iona. This March, he followed Willard back to Seton Hall. Someday, he hopes to be follow Willard into the corner office.

“He’s going to be a terrific head coach, no doubt,” says Blaney, now the associate head coach at Big East rival Connecticut. “He has such a way with people. He has that kind of personality that just makes you feel better because he’s there.”

Perhaps because he understands how important it is to, in fact, be there. Five years ago, he proved it.