Billy Donovan

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Billy Donovan bigraphy, stories - American college basketball player, professional basketball player, point guard, college basketball coach, NCAA Tournament championship coach

Billy Donovan : biography

May 30, 1965 –

William John Donovan, Jr. (born May 30, 1965) is an American college basketball coach and a former college and professional basketball player. Donovan is the head coach of the Florida Gators men’s basketball team of the University of Florida. He is best known for leading the Florida Gators to two consecutive National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national championships.

Donovan has coached the Gators in three NCAA championship game appearances in 2000, 2006 and 2007. The 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 an 84–75 win over the Ohio State Buckeyes, making Donovan the first coach since Mike Krzyzewski to win two NCAA titles in a row. He is one of only four men (Dean Smith, Joe B. Hall and Bobby Knight being the others) to appear in the NCAA Final Four as a player and win the NCAA national championship as a coach.

After a brief stint as head coach of the Orlando Magic that lasted only five days, Donovan re-signed with the Gators on June 7, 2007. The deal made him the highest-paid head coach in college basketball at $3.5 million per year.

Coaching career

After 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.

Marshall University

Donovan’s first season as the Marshall University head coach saw him turn around a Marshall Thundering Herd team that had finished 9–18 the season before his arrival. In 1994–95, the Herd doubled its wins from the previous year to go 18–9 and win the Southern Conference North Division.

His first full recruiting class at Marshall included a high-profile local recruit, point guard Jason Williams. In Donovan’s second season, 1995–96, the team went 17–11, and led the Southern Conference in scoring and three-point field goals.

In two years at Marshall, his Herd teams compiled a 35–20 record and a conference division championship.

University of Florida

In 1996 Donovan took over head coaching duties at University of Florida, whose Florida Gators men’s basketball team had slipped from its peak during its 1994 NCAA Final Four appearance under previous coach Lon Kruger. Donovan took the Gators to the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in his second season, 1997–98. The following season saw the team make its third-ever NCAA Sweet Sixteen appearance and become only the second squad in school history to appear in the top 25 of the final polls (No. 17 in the ESPN/USA Today Poll and No. 23 in the Associated Press Poll).

The next season, 1999–2000, saw Donovan lead the Gators to an SEC Championship and their second NCAA Final Four appearance, defeating North Carolina in the national semi-finals before falling to Michigan State in the NCAA championship game.

The Gators again won the SEC regular season championship during the 2000–01 season.

The Gators were invited to the NCAA Tournament in every season between 1999 and 2007, 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 consecutive years. On February 3, 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 December 8, 2003.

The 2004–05 season was highlighted by Florida defeating Kentucky 70–53 to win the SEC Tournament Championship, a first for the Gators.

In the 2005–06 season, Donovan’s young Gator squad posted the school’s best-ever win streak to start a single season, reeling off seventeen straight wins and reaching No. 2 in the nation in the AP Poll. However, the team failed to reach the top spot as they lost its first SEC game of the season to the Tennessee Volunteers. This loss was followed by a surprising season sweep at the hands of the eventual 2006 National Invitation Tournament champion South Carolina Gamecocks. Florida avenged those losses by ending South Carolina’s surprising SEC Tournament run in the finals, winning the SEC Tournament championship. The 2005–06 season was 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.