When the decision became public last week, battle lines were drawn, especially after a couple of well-known ESPN basketball analysts repeatedly criticized Grant and his decision on social media.
Most people sided with the well-liked Donlon, but others — including a couple of big-money boosters and some of the anonymous critics that frequent the fan blogs — backed Grant.
There was and still is debate over whether the decision was all based on performance or was the result of a personality clash.
To see all this play out so publicly has pained some of the most faithful WSU followers, none more so than Mark Vest. He was an All-American for the Raiders in the mid-1980s, scored 1,559 points in three seasons (after transferring in) and is enshrined in the school’s Hall of Fame.
He was the color commentator on radio broadcasts of Raiders games and he and Laura have had two sons play for Donlon at WSU.
Matt made the All-Horizon defensive team as a senior in 2014 and now plays professionally in Germany. Alan is a freshman guard on the current team. Daughter Sara spent two years on the staff of WSU women’s coach Mike Bradbury.
The couple has attended almost every WSU game for years. Mark said he’s known Grant for 30 years and considers him a friend and he has nothing but praise for Donlon, whom he’s known for a decade.
“I will be eternally grateful for the love and leadership that he has shown the WSU family, student-athletes and the Miami Valley community,” Mark wrote in what he planned to be a letter to the editor of the Dayton Daily News. “More selfishly I sincerely value the impact he has had on my two sons Matt and Alan and for being, quite honestly, the younger brother I never had.”
Rather than send the letter, he and Laura decided to sit down and share their thoughts with me.
Two ideas Mark repeated often in our conversation were: “I’m not so naïve that I think this was a one-sided issue, but it never should have come to this” and “at this point, our program is at a crossroads.”
He said over the past week or so he kept waiting for someone — especially Grant — to come forward and bridge the troubled waters. When no one did, he said he remembered something his late coach, the legendary Ralph Underhill, had said to him just before he was inducted into the WSU Hall of Fame.
“He asked if I was ready for the honor and I said, ‘Sure, I’ve polished my speech and I’ve got my notes.’
“But he knew I didn’t get it and so like he’d done many times before, he taught me a valuable lesson. He said, ‘Mark, when they put your name on a banner and hang it from those rafters, so too comes a huge responsibility, forever.’”
Finally, this week he said the message hit home.
He felt it’s up to him to try to get people to remember what’s most important — the players still left on the team, the basketball program and the school.
And in so doing he’s drawn on the words of another coach, Xavier’s Chris Mack, who the U.S. Basketball Writers Association just gave the Henry Iba Award as the national coach of the year.
Mack was critical of Donlon’s firing when asked about it during last week’s NCAA Tournament, saying “it’s a bad decision.” He concluded his remarks with, “I don’t know who Wright State is pretending to be or trying to be, but that’s ridiculous.”
In his letter Mark wrote: “I think we all need to seriously listen to what Xavier coach Chris Mack said about the firing. Not the personal comments directed at our AD and Administration, but the comments about what we are ‘pretending to be.’
“I know it’s not what many of us want to hear, but to shy away from the tough questions and tough conversations around this matter is the easy way.”
In brief comments to the press last Friday, Grant stressed WSU should be a perennial top-100 program and make the NCAA Tournament with some regularity, something the school has done twice — the last time nine years ago — since becoming a Division I program in 1987
Mark especially thinks the latter is “doable” because “three of the last four years we were within 40 minutes or less of doing just that.”
As for being a top-100 program, he thinks that could happen if there were “a better commitment” from the administration and the fans.
“It is confusing to hear of a vision without what appears to be a true plan or commitment to get there,” he wrote. “What the men’s program has accomplished with limited resources from the school and outside supporters has driven a remarkable return on investment.
“What we fans have offered is to pack the Nutter Center when the lights are shining bright and a big-name opponent is in town, only to resort back to 3,750 attendees for the very next game. If we are fans let’s be fans every game.
“If fan engagement is a goal, I find it hard to understand how a coach who takes his team to three out of four league championship games and ties the school record for conference wins in a season can be blamed for that.”
As for the top-100 RPI rating, he noted the challenge that presents when the average RPI for the league’s 10 schools is 197 and the bottom seven (which excluded Valparaiso, Wright State and Oakland this year) was 242.
Winning those games, playing four non-conference D-I opponents with an average 213 RPI rating and getting clobbered by heavyweights Kentucky and Xavier in money games on the road makes it tough to attain top-100 status.
As the debate as swirled, he said the guys who have been especially wounded are the returning players, who first learned of Donlon’s firing on social media.
Laura said the players “had absolutely no idea this was coming. The first night was not good. Alan was not happy.”
Mark said: “They’re all 18-year-old kids — it’s been pretty traumatic for them. I went up to talk to the boys when IU played UK (on television). I took 60 chicken wings and a Mehaffies blueberry pie and three kids ate it all.”
He and his wife said for as much as they like Donlon — “the 10 years we had with Billy and his family, wouldn’t trade for anything and I hope we see them a lot in the future,” Mark said — they have stressed to their son and others that “Billy’s not coming back.”
And Laura said she hopes the returning players “get behind the new coach” whoever it will be — “It’s not his fault what happened.”
Mark stressed he especially wants to see the best for his school.
“Billy is going to land on his feet and be OK. He’s too good at what he does. He’s been at it a long time and he has a lot of friends in the coaching fraternity.
“And Bob has a tough job. He has lofty expectations for this program and that’s good. We all should have lofty expectations. But my hope is that as we move forward with a new coach, we all put forth the commitment it’s going to take.
“If not, five or six years from now it’s going to be the same thing all over again.”
About the Author