Coach Donahue rebuilds struggling basketball program

Cornell’s historic run in the 2010 NCAA Tournament began at Springfield High School in 1984. That year, the junior varsity basketball team got a new coach. His name was Steve Donahue.
Donahue, now head coach of the Big Red, has come a long way since then, as he is now preparing his team for a Sweet 16 game against No. 1-seed Kentucky tonight.

After spending three years as the junior varsity coach and assistant varsity coach at Springfield, Donahue served as an assistant coach at Monsignor Bonner High School for one year before moving on to his first college job—assistant coach at Philadelphia University. In the two years he spent there, the Rams won 20 games each season and made it to the 1989 NCAA Division II tournament.

Donahue’s Ivy League tenure began in 1990, when then-head coach of the Penn Quakers Fran Dunphy hired Donahue as an assistant. Dunphy is now the head coach of the Temple University Owls, a team Donahue and the Big Red defeated 78-65 in the first round of this year’s NCAA Tournament.

For 10 years, Donahue served as an assistant to Dunphy, and in that time, the Quakers won six conference titles, which led to five tickets to the Big Dance. The 1993-1994 Penn team even won its first-round game, defeating No. 6-seed Nebraska before falling to Florida, a three seed.

That was all just preparation for what was to come, though. In 2000, Donahue took over a struggling Big Red program that was just 3-11 in Ivy League play and 10-17 overall.
Donahue came on just over two months before Cornell’s first game of the 2000-2001 season, though, and was unable to improve the team in his first year, as the Big Red finished tied for last in the league with a 3-11 conference record and a 7-20 overall record.

Though the team’s record steadily improved, Donahue didn’t achieve a winning Ivy record until the 2004-2005 season, when his first recruits were all seniors. That year, the Big Red finished second in the league with an 8-6 record, and Donahue earned CollegeInsider.com’s Ivy League Coach of the Year title.

Donahue and the Big Red finished with winning records the next two years, earning third place in the league both times.

“I think they got better and better every year,” Columbia head coach Joe Jones said. “He kind of took a program over that … wasn’t one of the better programs in the league, and he’s consistently built it up.”

One of the keys to Donahue’s success as a coach is his ability to recruit players. Recruitment in the Ivy League is particularly challenging because schools cannotoffer athletic scholarships, but because Donahue was heavily involved in recruiting at Penn, he had a lot of practice.

“I guess I’m fortunate because I’ve been doing it for 20 years now,” Donahue said in a press conference Wednesday, when asked about the challenges of recruiting in the Ivy League. “This is what I’ve been doing in recruiting. I think it’s made me a much better recruiter in that sense.”

Donahue’s knack for finding and attracting talented players is what helped take the program to the next level in the 2007-2008 season. The year before that, when the Big Red finished third with a 9-5 record, the members of Cornell’s current senior class—including standouts Ryan Wittman and Louis Dale—were only freshmen. But in only their second season as collegiate players, they were able to help carry the team to its first Ivy title since 1988.

“They’ve added some very good players to their program … and they’ve done it in a different way,” Jones said of Cornell’s steady improvement. “The class of Louis Dale and Wittman really solidified their program.”

Wittman, who just become the fifth player in the history of the Ivy League to break the 2,000-point barrier, was not heavily recruited due to a deep thigh bruise sustained in the summer before his senior year and doubts about his athleticism.

“What we probably try to do is try to find kids that aren’t necessarily great as 18-year-olders, but have a little vision of what that young man will be when he’s 21 or 22,” Donahue said about recruiting in the Ivy League. “Mostly, it’s strength, it’s size, it’s quickness, that if can you anticipate someone like a Ryan Wittman growing three inches and putting on 25, 30 pounds—because that’s what he did—he would be a very good basketball player.”

Wittman was named Ivy League Rookie of the Year as a freshman, made the all-Ivy first team in his sophomore, junior, and senior years, and was just named Ivy League Player of the Year this season.

Besides looking beyond a player’s present ability, Donahue also admitted that he searches for players that other schools might not notice.
“The other part is we try to get kids that people overlook, and try to do it as hard as we can,” Donahue said. “These are easy things, but these take hours and hours and hours of really trying to find guys that people overlook. And I think Louis Dale is a great example of that.”

Dale had to send a highlight tape to several schools as he wasn’t being recruited, and Cornell was the one that showed the most interest. Dale earned the Ivy League Player of the Year title his sophomore year and has also been named to the all-Ivy first team every year since his sophomore season.

After finishing atop the Ancient Eight in Wittman and Dale’s sophomore year, the Big Red headed to the Big Dance for the first time in 20 years, but was blown out by Stanford.
Cornell and Donahue got another chance to make some noise in the tournament the next year, though, as the Big Red picked up its second consecutive conference championship in the 2008-2009 season. But once again, Cornell lost in the first round.

The 2009-2010 season would be the last chance for the Big Red’s decorated senior class—which now included center Jeff Foote, who transferred to Cornell as a sophomore—to advance in the tournament, and Donahue prepared a nonconference schedule that would help them do just that.

The Big Red defeated Alabama and St. John’s, and even scared No. 1 Kansas at Allen Fieldhouse. Games like those, plus another first-place Ivy finish, earned Cornell a 12 seed after two consecutive 14 seeds.

The Big Red defeated Temple in the first round to earn the first Ivy League tournament victory since 1998 and Cornell’s first-ever tournament victory. It didn’t falter in the next round either, as many expected it to, dismantling the No. 4-seed Wisconsin, 87-69. This victory was another historic one, as it marked the first time an Ancient Eight squad moved beyond the second round of the tournament since 1979.

“You know, I just thought in all my coaching, all the experience I had on any team that I ever played on, this game here was as well executed that I couldn’t even imagine that we could play that well in the stretches that we did,” Donahue said in a press conference after the Wisconsin game.

With all this success, and with eight seniors graduating, many have predicted that Donahue will move on to a better job next year, but he is not thinking about that now, as he has to worry about tonight’s matchup against the Wildcats at the Carrier Dome.

“Obviously I get calls about different things,” Donahue said Wednesday. “What goes through my mind is, I shouldn’t be talking about this. That’s the honest truth. Because it’s unfair for this group. … I’m going to try to work my tail off to get us to somehow compete with Kentucky and try to win the game.”

Though many people think a Cornell win tonight would be the upset of the century, if the Big Red plays like it has so far, it could make history.

“I’ve seen a lot of the teams that are still in the tournament, and I think they’re playing as well as any team in the tournament,” Jones said when asked about Cornell’s chances tomorrow night. “I think they play much better together, I think they have a great center who is a great passer, I think they really enjoy playing together, and I think their brand of basketball is very good. If they can handle their pressure, handle their athletic ability, I think it’s going to be a much closer game than people think, and I do think that they can win the game. I really do.”

Whatever the result is, and no matter what Donahue decides to do after this season, he will definitely be remembered as one of the better coaches in Cornell’s history.