|
|
 |
William John "Billy" Donovan (born May 30, 1965) is the head men's basketball coach at the University of Florida. He has taken the men's team to three NCAA championship game appearances; the first appearance occurred in 2000, the second appearance was gained in 2006, and the third appearance occurred in 2007. The University of Florida Gators lost to the Michigan State Spartans in the 2000 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball final. The Gators won the national championship in 2006 with a 73-57 win over UCLA and again in 2007 with a 84-75 win over Ohio State, making Donovan the first coach since Mike Krzyzewski to win back-to-back titles. He is one of only three (Dean Smith and Bobby Knight being the others) to play in the Final Four and win the national championship as a coach. Donovan and Bobby Knight are the only active male coaches with this distinction, and is joined by current Baylor women's coach Kim Mulkey-Robertson. Playing careerBorn and raised in Rockville Centre, New York, on Long Island, and the son of the third leading scorer in Boston College men's basketball history, Donovan graduated from St. Agnes High School in 1983 before going on to Providence College, where he played guard on the basketball team. His first two seasons with the Friars were unimpressive; he produced an average of 2 points per game as a freshman and three points as a sophomore. His junior year, however, the team received a new head coach in the form of Rick Pitino, and Donovan flourished in Pitino's system. "Billy the Kid", as Providence fans soon nicknamed him (after the 19th century outlaw, Billy the Kid), averaged 15.1 points as a junior and 20.6 as a senior, when he took the Friars to the Final Four and earned the Southeast Regional MVP. Donovan was drafted by the Utah Jazz in the 3rd round (68th overall) of the 1987 NBA Draft. He was waived after the preseason and played briefly for the Wyoming Wildcatters of the Continental Basketball Association. He then signed a 1 year contract with the New York Knicks, coached by Pitino. Donovan averaged 2.4 points and 2.0 assists over 44 games. Coaching careerAfter an unsuccessful year playing for Pitino on the New York Knicks, Donovan worked for a Wall Street investment firm before joining Pitino as an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky in 1989. His success there secured him the head coaching job at Marshall University. In two years at Marshall, he accumulated a 35-20 record and a league championship with a team that had gone 9-18 the season before his arrival. In 1996 Donovan took over head coaching duties at Florida, whose men's basketball team had fallen startlingly far from its 1994 Final Four appearance. Donovan took the team to the National Invitation Tournament in his second season, 1997-1998. The following season saw the team make its third ever Sweet Sixteen appearance and become only the second squad in school history to appear in the final Top 25 polls (17th in the ESPN/USA Today Poll and 23rd in the Associated Press Poll). The next season, 1999-2000, saw Donovan lead the Gators to their second Final Four appearance, defeating North Carolina in the national semi-finals before falling to Michigan State in the championship game. The team has reached the NCAA Tournament in every season since 1999, currently making a streak of nine straight appearances; in eight decades of Florida men's basketball prior to Donovan's arrival, the school had never reached the Tournament more than three years running. On 3 February 2003, the team achieved a No. 1 ranking in the ESPN/USA Today poll for the first time in school history, returning there the following season on 8 December 2003. In the 2005-2006 season, Donovan's young Gator squad posted the school's best-ever win streak to start a single season, reeling off 17 straight wins and reaching #2 in the nation in the AP Poll. However, the team failed to reach the top spot as it lost its first game of the season to Tennessee. This win was followed by a surprising season sweep at the hands of eventual 2006 National Invitational Tournament Champion South Carolina Gamecocks. Florida avenged those losses by ending South Carolina's surprising SEC Tournament run in the finals, and thereby winning the SEC Championship. 2006 ended as the most successful in the history of both Donovan and Florida basketball, as the Gators defeated UCLA 73-57 in the NCAA championship game, winning the school's first NCAA title. On December 20, 2006, Donovan became the winningest basketball coach in Florida history, earning his 236th Florida win over Stetson and surpassing Norm Sloan's 235 victories at Florida. During the 2006-2007 season, with the return of all his starting five: Lee Humphrey, Joakim Noah, Al Horford, Corey Brewer, and Taurean Green, the Gators pulled off a trifecta by winning the Southeastern Conference regular season title, SEC Tournamant title, and won their second straight NCAA Tournament. Coaching protégésLike his own mentor, Rick Pitino, several of Donovan's assistants have become college head coaches in recent years. The following head coaches all spent time under Donovan at Florida:
Career coaching record
EndnotesExternal links
Marshall Thundering
Herd Head Basketball Coaches
Crotty • Chambers • Reilly • Shelton • Cramer • Barnes • Strickling • Meredith • Tallman • Strickling • Stuart • Dandalet • Henderson • Rivlin • Johnson • Way • Tacy • Daniels • Aberdeen • Zuffelato • Huckabay • Altman • Freeman • Donovan • White • Jirsa • Jones
Florida Gators Head
Basketball Coaches
McCoy • Kline • Byrd • White • Cowell • Clemmons • Cody • McAllister • Cherry • McAllister • Mauer • Sloan • Bartlett • Lotz • Visscher • Sloan • DeVoe • Kruger • Donovan All text is available under the terms
of the GNU Free Documentation
License |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
