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St. Joe’s Makes Steve Donahue Permanent Head Coach After Billy Lange Quits on the Hawks
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SJU wasting no time here:
No interim tag, nothing temporary about it. Donahue was fired by Penn, brought in by Lange to be an assistant, and now he’s a head coach once again, at a better program than the one he just coached. It’s funny how the world works sometimes. Call it “failing upward” if you will, but you can do a lot worse than Steve Donahue as an immediate and stabilizing presence. He’s a local guy with 25 years of head coaching experience, not even counting the 10 he spent as an assistant on Fran Dunphy’s staff.
Donahue had four winning seasons during nine years with the Quakers. It’s been a minute since he’s coached a good team. But you never know. Sport works in mysterious ways. Perhaps this has a goofy galvanizing effect as the players rally around their new coach and each other after watching Lange forsake them for the Nova Knicks. What’s most quirky, perhaps, is that you have four of the six Big 5 coaches now in their first year with their new teams. That’s Donahue, Fran McCaffery, Darris Nichols, and Kevin Willard. Adam Fisher is on his third Temple season and the dean of Big 5 hoops is Drexel’s Zach Spiker, who enters his 10th with the dragons.
Whatever it is, it’s not boring. Let’s get some jam back in the Big 5, as Peter Laviolette would say.
The Hawk will never die, but this afternoon it was in a raptor sanctuary receiving specialized medical care.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com