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Billy Donovan (b. 30 May 1965) is a basketball coach who has taken the University of Florida men's team to the NCAA Final Four and national championship game. He is one of only six men to reach the Final Four as both a player and a head coach.
A native of Rockville Centre, New York, and the son of the third leading scorer in Boston College men's basketball history, Donovan graduated from St. Agnes High School in 1983 before going on to Providence College, where he played guard on the basketball team. His first two seasons with the Friars were unimpressive; he produced an average of 2 points per game as a freshman and three points as a sophomore. His junior year, however, the team received a new head coach in the form of Rick Pitino, and Donovan flourished in Pitino's system. "Billy the Kid", as Providence fans soon nicknamed him, averaged 15.1 points as a junior and 20.6 as a senior, when he took the Friars to the Final Four and earned the title of Southeast Regional MVP.
After an unsuccessful year playing for Pitino in the New York Knicks, Donovan worked for a Wall Street investment firm before joining Pitino as an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky in 1989. His success there secured him the head coaching job at Marshall University. In two years at Marshall, he accumulated a 35-20 record and a league championship with a team that had gone 9-18 the season before his arrival.
In 1996 Donovan took over head coaching duties at Florida, whose men's basketball team had fallen startingly far from its 1994 Final Four appearance. Donovan took the team to the National Invitation Tournament in his second season, 1997-1998. The following season saw the team accumulate a school-record 22 regular season wins, make its third ever Sweet Sixteen appearance and become only the second squad in school history to appear in the final Top 25 polls (17th in the ESPN/USA Today Poll and 23rd in the Associated Press Poll).
The next season, 1999-2000, saw Donovan lead the Gators to their second Final Four appearance, defeating North Carolina in the national semi-finals before falling to Michigan State in the championship game.
The team has reached the NCAA Tournament in every season since its championship game appearance, currently making a streak of six straight appearances; in eight decades of Florida men's basketball prior to Donovan's arrival, the school had never reached the Tournament more than three years running. On 3 February 2003 the team achieved a No. 1 ranking in the ESPN/USA Today poll for the first time in school history, returning there the following season on 8 December 2003.
External links
Billy Donovan's website at the University of Florida athletics site (http://www.gatorzone.com/billydonovan/)
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