04/19/24
April 06, 2010
Boston College to hire Steve Donahue: explaining who will coach their basketball team next year. Still-unanswered is why it won't be Al Skinner anymore.
posted by yerfatma to basketball at 12:18 PM - 4 comments
Skinner is an awesome coach who consistantly won without a lot of talent. Don't know much about Donahue but he's got some big shoes to fill.
posted by cixelsyd at 02:28 PM on April 06, 2010
Donahue no doubt had a very good NCAA tournament. But, he had three Ivy League championships in 10 years, and now he is in the ACC. Is BC sure he is an upgrade?
After some scandals over the past few years in their basketball program, BC tends to look at a little more than the ability to coach and recruit, and Donahue, coming from an Ivy school, would seem to fit the stress on character and academics that the school needs. It remains to be seen if Donahue's ability will be enough to maintain a winning ACC program. I'm glad of his hiring for one reason. It left Bill Coen at my alma mater, Northeastern, where he has developed a first-class mid-major team that is an annual contender in the Colonial Athletic Conference.
posted by Howard_T at 03:24 PM on April 06, 2010
Even then, he always had a strong sense of self. He played pickup basketball every noon time. He never was someone who spent every waking minute in the office, like the new breed of coaches were doing. He was never going to spend a lot of time glad-handing alumni and boosters. That was never his style.
I believe that the article answered the question of why Al Skinner was fired. BC has always had a much higher opinion of itself than it is actually entitled to in the sporting world and the fact that they would fire Al Skinner for such reasons is proof of this.
The day after Skinner was fired, there was a poll in a local newspaper asking who people thought should be the new BC coach. I posted a suggestion that I hoped it was Steve Lappas so that he could destroy BC the same way he destroyed UMass. Sadly the comment was taken down before too many people had seen it.
posted by Demophon at 03:26 PM on April 07, 2010
Donahue no doubt had a very good NCAA tournament. But, he had three Ivy League championships in 10 years, and now he is in the ACC. Is BC sure he is an upgrade?