Another Palestra reunion for Donahue

For most of this decade, Steve Donahue could not win at the Palestra – which made sense since Donahue coached perennial doormat Cornell while Penn was a perennial power.

Those days are long gone as Cornell is now the best team in the Ivy League, Donahue is one of the hot coaching names in the entire county and Penn – well, Penn, is struggling.

Before he left Ithaca for a key Ivy League weekend against Penn and Princeton, Donahue was nice enough to give me a few minutes of his time. He also talked to the Inquirer and Daily News for stories, which you can find here and here.

It makes sense that the former Penn assistant is the talk of the town heading into tonight’s game against the Quakers. Cornell, after all, has become the first Ivy League team to be nationally ranked since Princeton in 1998.

It’s also noteworthy, and a bit tragic for Quaker fans, that Donahue interviewed for the Penn job following the 2005-06 season, a job that would eventually be given to then-Brown coach Glen Miller. Everyone knows how that worked out, but it should be noted that Cornell lost by 40 to Penn at the Palestra in 2006. It wasn’t until the 2007-08 campaign that Cornell’s dominance over the rest of the league truly began.

“I was not upset about it,” Donahue told Penn Gazette Sports, just as he told the Inquirer. “They called me and asked if I was interested in the job and if I was willing to talk about it. That was really the extent of it. I was never upset or disappointed or angry. I appreciated they thought enough of me to think I may be a good coach there.”

Among other things, Donahue also talked about his relationship with Jerome Allen. Although he said he didn’t play too big a role in his recruitment, he credits a lot of his success as an assistant coach to Allen and the rest of that 1995 senior class: Matt Maloney, Shawn Trice, Eric Moore and Scott Kegler.

That 94-95 team, he admitted, was similar to this current senior-laden Big Red squad. Both groups even boasted key transfers (Maloney at Penn, Jeff Foote at Cornell) that pushed the team over the top.

“I feel the same way about this group as that group,” Donahue said.

And like seemingly everyone else who’s come in contact with Allen, Donahue had the nicest things to say about Penn’s new head coach.

“He meant a great deal to Penn basketball and to me personally,” Donahue said. “The thing I remember most about Jerome was it really didn’t matter if he scored or didn’t score; he just wanted to make guys compete harder and lead by example. He was like a coach on the floor…

“It’s a very difficult thing to be a coach, but he’s doing all the right things. They play hard and share the basketball. It’s only a matter of time until Penn basketball gets back where everyone wants it to be.”

At the same time, Donahue said he didn’t like to see a fellow coach get fired midseason, though he’s tried to distance himself from the Penn program.

“I feel bad for Coach Miller,” he said. “I think he’s a very good basketball coach. His teams were well-prepared, they played hard and they played the right way. … But I’m kind of separated from all that. I feel differently about Penn because the people I was there with (aren’t there anymore). I’ve been so engulfed with Cornell for the past 10 years that I don’t have those same feelings anymore, and I’d be speaking out of turn if I said I did. But I feel bad for any program that goes through stuff like this because I feel bad for the kids.”

Naturally, there were some things Donahue was tight-lipped about – like whether he would use this dominant three-year run to springboard himself to another, better coaching gig. (At this point, Penn might not qualify.)

But here’s some scary news for the rest of the Ivy League: Even when the team’s “Big 3” of Foote, Ryan Wittman and Louis Dale move on after the season, Donahue is confident Cornell’s grip on the Ivy League won’t loosen.

“The level of talent,” he said, “is not going to drop off dramatically.”

And to think he could be coaching at Penn.