And that’s when he drew on that mantra Dorothy kept repeating to Toto when they were stuck in Oz: “There’s no place like home … there’s no place like home.”
For a couple of reasons, he reached out to his father, Bill Donlon Sr., who was dean of students at Lake Forest High School in Illinois and before that had coached more than two decades of prep basketball as well as a dozen years as a top assistant to Rick Pitino at Providence (where he recruited the Friars’ 1987 Final Four team) and Bill Foster at Northwestern.
With the blessing of the WSU administration, Donlon hired his dad as director of basketball operations. But just a few days into their new union he had to set Pop straight:
“We were in a staff meeting and Dad kept calling me ‘Coach’ in front of the rest of the guys,” Donlon said. “Finally, I said, ‘Dad, just call me Billy. I’m always your son. I’ll be that forever. That will never change. So don’t call me Coach. These guys will understand. I’m gonna call you Dad and you’re gonna call me Billy. That’s how it is.’”
As Saturday proved once again in this young season, the Billy-and-Dad dynamic is working pretty well for Wright State, which defeated a tenacious Morehead State team, 66-57, at the Nutter Center.
It was the 5-2 Raiders’ best team effort of the season and one of the 35-year-old Donlon’s best coaching jobs since he took over the program as one of the youngest coaches in NCAA Division I.
Against a veteran Morehead team that gave Kentucky fits 10 days ago and nearly beat Marshall on Wednesday, Donlon started an unexpected lineup that left three of his top four scorers — Reggie Arceneaux, J.T. Yoho and Miles Dixon — on the bench alongside starting 6-10 post player A.J. Pacher, who was nursing injuries.
“I just hadn’t liked the way our guys were running the offense lately,” Donlon said. “It helped to have my dad around. I talk with him at night about things and I felt comfortable with this move.”
The new lineup, which featured Tavares Sledge, Kendall Griffin, Matt Vest and Joe Bramanti alongside Cole Darling, jumped out to a 14-4 lead and WSU never trailed after that.
Darling finished with a career-high 29 points, Vest and Griffin held top Morehead scorer Milton Chavis (17.4 ppg.) to 4 points and Sledge had his best game as a Raider, taking several charges inside to frustrate the aggressive Eagles.
“With a little over three minutes left in the game, we had like a seven-point lead and they were shooting foul shots when my dad called me over,” Donlon said. “We stood there together and he said, ‘You’ve got two time outs left. They can only win if you guys turn the ball over.’ It was good to hear that right then. It struck a chord and helped me focus the rest of the way.”
Born to coach
While that’s the latest on-court snapshot Bill Donlon has of his son, one of the first is from when Billy was 8.
“I was coaching with Pitino at Providence and we were playing St. John’s,” he said. “They were very good that year. They had Chris Mullin and, of course, Coach Lou Carnesecca, who’s in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
“I have a photo from that day. Billy was a ball boy for us and he’s out there in the center jump area just before the game. The officials had brought the captains from both teams out there and the official ends up handing Billy the ball to hold. And he’s just talking away to the players like he’s part of the team.”
Billy Donlon smiled as he remembered another moment from back then: “Coach Pitino let me on the bus for a game at UConn. I sat in the back — I was in the third grade — and it was great. Well, they won, so Coach Pitino allowed me to ride to the next road game. It was Boston College. We lost that one, and that was it for me. No more bus rides. It made me somewhat superstitious as a young man.”
Although he would go on to his own heralded career as a prep player, then at North Carolina Wilmington and some pro stops in Europe, the coaching seeds were sewn early.
“I used to go to a lot of camps and I heard a lot of coaches speak, guys like Jeff Van Gundy, Coach Pitino, Bill Foster, Mike Krzyzewski, Bobby Knight, my own college coach, Jerry Wainwright, and a lot more. They didn’t just talk about shooting, passing and dribbling, they emphasized living your life.
“But the thing that really swayed me was when I came across a letter a Northwestern player, Jeff Grose, wrote about my dad when that job came open after Coach Foster left. I don’t know if I was supposed to see it, but I was the kind of kid who snuck through my parents stuff and read things.
“The letter he wrote to the selection committee about my dad made me want to get into coaching. There were three paragraphs about what my dad had done to help those players become men….I was so proud… In fact, I have that letter today.
“To me it’s what basketball should be about.”
A chance to bond
In September 2010, Maryann Donlon — Bill Sr.’s wife and Billy’s mom — died of breast cancer. The loss hit the whole family, which also includes Billy’s two older sisters, hard.
Then came last season when the Raiders stumbled to a 13-17 record and, as Donlon admits, “it was a hard year on a lot of levels.
“When everyone’s upset with you and you come home at night alone it can be tough. … Losing my mother two years ago changed me. It gave me a different perspective, and I realized the importance of family.”
Bill Sr. felt the same way: “When Billy was playing high school and college ball, I was gone a lot of the time coaching. This gave me an opportunity to bond with my son and, at the same time, help some young men here.”
And Bill Donlon’s old-school ways seemed to be striking a chord with the young Raiders players.
Away from the court, father and son share Billy’s condo. They go to movies together, sometimes go out to dinner and this past week, they’ve both been entertaining Billy’s 7-year-old daughter Maren, who is visiting from North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where she lives with her mom, Billy’s ex-wife, Lena.
Maren was in the stands Saturday, wearing a green WSU t-shirt and Raiders face paint.
After the game her dad had promised her — win or lose — they would go have fun at the big entertainment center in Vandalia. They’d bring Grandpa along, too.
When the game ended Bill Sr. waited just off the court until the players and other coaches had filed past and, for just a brief moment, he wrapped his arm around his boy’s waist and father and son smiled.
Then they all headed over to the basketball offices at the Mills Morgan Center, where each coach’s door was decorated with one of Maren’s large drawings.
Each had a Christmas theme — there was a reindeer, an elf, a snowman, a gingerbread man, Christmas tree, a decorated house — and each bore the words “Home Sweet Home” written by a little girl’s heartfelt but wobbly hand.
Maren, though, had added something extra to Grandpa’s picture. Across the top she had scrawled “You Rock.”
Billy Donlon laughed: “She’s right. He does rock.”
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