‘He loves coaching and always has.’ ODU acting head coach Kieran Donohue has deep roots in basketball.

NORFOLK — One night in the mid-1980s, Kieran Donohue rode along in his father’s car and posed a pensive question.

Donohue’s dad, Kevin, had just officiated one of thousands of basketball games he called in the Northeast, from men’s summer leagues and high schools to junior colleges and Division I conferences. Donohue, 11 or 12 at the time, had noticed that the crowd had been particularly brutal toward his old man that night.

He thought for a while before blurting it out.

“Why do you do this?” he asked his dad. “No one likes the refs. They yell at you all the time. You’re never right in anyone’s mind.”

Kevin Donohue, a former junior varsity big man at Iona College, a fixture in New York City basketball circles and the son of Irish immigrants, answered quickly.

“I do this because I love basketball,” he said. “I do it for a lot of reasons. I’ve always loved the game of basketball. It’s a way for me to stay involved in the sport. Basketball’s been very good to our family.”

As Kieran Donohue finishes out an impossible season as Old Dominion’s acting head coach, he does so with 27 years of experience in the college game. Deeper still are his ancestral roots in the sport, which place him one relative away from the beginning of Dean Smith’s legendary career at North Carolina.

Donohue, a 48-year-old native of Bronxville, New York, sought neither the praise nor the blame that comes with being a Division I head coach. Happily a career assistant until this season, he often deflects questions about himself by saying, “This isn’t about me.” It took some convincing to get him to talk for this story.

Donohue had no great career as a college player; in fact, he had no college career at all. He entered the coaching profession from the bottom of basketball’s food chain, making a gradual transition from student manager to staffer.

But it’s important to note that the man handed the reins of ODU’s program after longtime head coach Jeff Jones suffered a heart attack on Dec. 20 while the team was in Hawaii for a tournament is no novice. His dues, a look into his background reveals, are paid in full.

The Monarchs (6-21, 2-12 Sun Belt Conference) enter Thursday’s game against first-place Appalachian State on a five-game losing streak. They’ve gone 3-15 since Donohue took over, adjusting their game plan for the loss of their leading scorer along the way.

Donohue is coaching a team that is almost always outsized yet finds a way to stay in most games. Nine of the 15 losses under Donohue have come by eight points or fewer, and five of those were within five points.

Smith himself might’ve struggled to be competitive with the pieces Donohue has left.

True to form, Donohue is quick to point out that he leans plenty on the team’s other staffers.

“This is a group effort, for sure,” he said. “Ultimately, I’m the one making decisions and taking the lead, for sure. I’m not shying away from that by any stretch. I’m just trying to stay in the moment, keep it very much in the focus, one practice at a time, one game at a time, and trying to put our team in the best position possible.”

Former ODU assistant and Boston University head coach Dennis Wolff, now a color analyst on the Monarchs’ radio broadcasts, was a key figure in Donohue’s organic development as a coach. Despite the results, Wolff — the Virginia Tech women’s coach from 2011-16 — has admired the way Donohue has gone about things.

“From where I’m sitting and watching this,” Wolff said, “I think Kieran’s to be complimented for gracefully handling a very, very difficult hand that he’s been dealt.”

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A sudden change

On Dec. 27, with the team just back from Hawaii, Donohue stood in Jones’ empty office and faced three TV cameras and two print reporters before the first news conference of his career. His mouth was dry.

“Where do I hold my hands?” he asked.

It was one part of coaching that was wholly unfamiliar to a behind-the-scenes guy with the job title “special assistant” to Jones, whose duties, according to his official ODU bio, were: “overseeing the coordination of all day-to-day operations such as team travel, equipment and scheduling for men’s basketball, interface with the Old Dominion Athletic Foundation as it relates to donors and fundraising events for men’s basketball and acts as the liaison with other campus and department areas.”

There was nothing in there about describing the scene at the hotel where Jones fell ill, nothing about laying out his coaching background and certainly nothing about convincing a fan base that the sky wasn’t falling.

But Donohue, perpetually rejecting praise and accepting blame, has taken ownership of the role. He learned weeks after Jones’ heart attack that Jones needed to resume treatment for prostate cancer, which put Donohue in charge for the rest of the season.

He remains an admitted project.

“I’m learning that I have to keep working at it,” Donohue said. “I’m learning that I have to keep improving. I’m learning that I have to listen to my staff at times. They need to continue to make suggestions, which they’re doing. I need to continue to make decisions. And some decisions have worked out very well. Other decisions maybe haven’t worked out as well, and that’s how it goes.”

Ultimately, it was Donohue’s decision to dismiss leading scorer Vasean Allette for disciplinary reasons last month. That came after Jones showed forward Dericko Williams the door for similar reasons in early December.

The remaining players understand Donohue’s position.

“We had some bumps and bruises,” sophomore guard Devin Ceaser said. “I feel like he’s just handled everything with the utmost class.”

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The transition

Donohue’s origin story as a coach involves no spider bite, no mugging gone awry and no crash landing from another planet.

Simply put, he’s a grinder, and he got it honestly.

For 42 years, Kevin Donohue rose every morning, put on a suit and tie and boarded the Metro North commuter train into Manhattan, where he was a textile salesman in the Garment District.

After taking the train home, he’d slip into his official’s garb and head out to do a game, sometimes at a local high school and often in the Ivy League, the Atlantic 10 or some other mid-major conference in the region.

When he was around 7 years old, Kieran Donohue and his older brother Tim began tagging along with their father to watch him call games.

“We grew up in a lot of gyms,” Donohue said.

“That was, I think for sure, where my love of the game was certainly born.”

But it wasn’t his first introduction. Donohue’s 6-foot-8 uncle Hugh Donohue, “a big ol’ banger” as his nephew describes him, was part of a pipeline of New York City guys who earned basketball scholarships to North Carolina. Hugh Donohue, playing alongside future Hall of Famer and fellow New Yorker Larry Brown, was a senior center on Smith’s first Tar Heels team in 1961-62.

Wolff, 68, grew up in Queens, playing in games officiated by both Hugh and Kevin Donohue. Wolff, who went on to play at LSU and Connecticut, called them “prominent basketball figures in New York when I was growing up.”

Kieran Donohue wasn’t quite as prominent. He played throughout his youth and became a self-described “average” player on an accomplished team in the New York City Catholic High School League.

Realizing his playing days were over after graduation, he enrolled at the University of Virginia. Wolff, then an assistant to Jones with the Cavaliers, helped Donohue get on board as a student manager.

Between his general grunt duties like rebounding for practicing players, pouring water, wiping the floor and running the clock, he found other ways to help. During his sophomore year of 1994-95, Donohue gravitated to a newly hired assistant coach.

Pete Herrmann, who had coached David Robinson at Navy and had most recently been an assistant at Kansas State, had been hired into a position that, under NCAA rules at the time, wasn’t allowed to recruit. That left Herrmann in charge of scouting, and Donohue, his curiosity about the coaching profession growing, was there to assist him in any way possible.

Donohue and Herrmann spent countless hours breaking down upcoming opponents’ game film in a quiet room Herrmann called “the dungeon,” just off the Cavaliers’ locker room at University Hall.

Donohue recorded games on VHS and catalogued them. After Herrmann watched a game, he’d hand Donohue a sheet of paper with counter numbers to mark where it should be spliced to create a scouting film.

Along the way, Herrmann began to explain to his protégé what he was looking for on film. Eventually, Herrmann would hand Donohue film of a game he’d already watched and say, “See if you see anything different.”

“He was extremely inclusive,” Donohue said. “He was an unbelievable mentor to me. He just included me and taught me so much.”

It’s not unusual for a student manager to consider coaching. Herrmann, though, remembers Donohue as being different.

“I think most of them think they want to be in it,” said Herrmann, now retired and living in Florida. “But I think the thing that set him apart from the managers that we had at Virginia is his dedication and his time that he spent with me on every phase of the job, every part of the job. That set him apart. He wanted to have the team be successful with what he had planned in regards to scouting and preparing a team.”

The problem with a job as a student manager is that it ends when “student” does. As graduation approached, Donohue was considering his options. In three seasons working on film with Herrmann, he had been given more responsibilities. The two would watch film separately, for example, and then commiserate.

But it was hardly actual coaching experience. Donohue had interviewed with a handful of Division III programs and sent letters to others, hoping to get a foot in the door somewhere.

Meanwhile, soon to be armed with a history degree, he thought he might teach high school and coach at that level.

“And then I kind of realized that I’m not sure that I really want to be a high school teacher,” Donohue said. “I had gotten the bug for coaching, and I wanted to see if I could try to get into college coaching.”

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Gratitude

In the spring of his senior year, after basketball season had ended, Donohue got a life-changing call from Jones, offering him a chance to stick around.

“Listen, I’m not exactly sure what we’ll call you,” Jones told him. “… But we’d like you to stay here and keep doing what you’re doing, except you don’t have to be a student manager anymore.”

Donohue continued to help Herrmann with film while also assisting with individual offseason workouts and a summer camp. He could dribble and pass well enough to help UVA’s players get better.

When Jones resigned after that season, Donohue again turned to an old friend. By then, Wolff was the head coach at BU, where he hired Donohue as his director of operations on a volunteer basis.

To make ends meet, Donohue waited tables at a waterfront restaurant in Boston. His entire first year there, he worked the door at a local bar, checking IDs.

If he had a day shift at the restaurant, he’d report to the basketball offices at night, and vice versa. Wolff bought him lunch every day.

After Donohue spent two seasons at BU, Jones was hired at American University in the spring of 2000. He filled out his staff with Donohue, who at 24 was finally a full-time assistant coach.

“That was the big step up for me in my career,” Donohue said.

Jones, who is walking regularly and eating sensibly as he recovers, had his reasons for turning his former student manager into a coach.

“First off, Kieran is very, very smart, and he has an incredible work ethic,” Jones said, adding that he is “feeling good.” “So I think whoever it is, if you start out with those two ingredients, you have a chance to be good at whatever it is that you do. And then the second part of it is: Do you have a passion for something the way he has a passion for basketball and for coaching?

“He loves basketball. He loves coaching and always has.”

Donohue spent 13 years at American with Jones, working his way up the pecking order of the coaching staff as the program reached the NCAA Tournament for the first two times and won more than 200 games.

Donahue followed Jones to ODU in 2013, continuing a relationship that has grown deep over many years.

The men were at each other’s weddings. Jones knew Donohue was getting engaged before Erika, now Donohue’s wife of nearly 19 years, did.

Basketball seasons keep teams tethered during major holidays, meaning they’ve eaten countless Thanksgiving meals together.

They know each other’s children.

“I think we have a great working relationship,” Donohue said. “We have a great personal relationship. We are friends. We’re coworkers. He’s my boss. And we have a personal relationship that extends outside of basketball, absolutely. For me, he’s someone I can talk to — and have over the years — about a lot of things, about life, about everything.”

Before the 2021-22 season, Jones told his staff during a meeting that should anything happen to him — for 10 minutes, two weeks or a month — Donohue would be in charge. That contingency plan was put to use in Hawaii, and no one could’ve known it would last this long.

Jones has had limited contact with Donohue and the staff since he was sidelined, and little of it has been specific to basketball. On the advice of doctors, Jones doesn’t watch or listen to games, and he only gets news of the team’s goings-on second-hand, if at all.

But he knows what Donohue is up against.

“He’s so focused on doing a great job and doing what he’s supposed to do, fulfilling his responsibilities,” Jones said. “And I think he’s doing exactly that now. It’s not the ideal situation. It’s not anything that anybody would’ve been able to dream up. But he and the rest of the guys are doing absolutely everything that they can within their power.”

Last spring or summer — he’s not sure exactly when — Donohue was in Connecticut visiting his wife’s family. He took his two daughters into New York City to see a show.

As they came to the intersection of 47th Street and 6th Avenue, Donohue realized he was walking past the building where his dad used to work, the destination for all those morning train rides.

He recalled that his dad’s boss was Bill Donovan Sr., the father of longtime college coach and current Chicago Bulls head man Billy Donovan.

It’s yet another connection between the Donohue family and basketball.

Kevin Donohue lives outside of Charlotte now, in a town called Belmont. Described by his son as a “gym rat,” he’s become friendly with the coach at Division II Belmont Abbey, where he attends home games and practices just to stay around the sport.

Even as he plows the short rows of a season unlike any other, Kieran Donohue looks back on that ride home years ago and understands now what his father meant then.

“Listen: I got lucky,” he said. “I was in the right place at the right time. I worked hard. I had people that gave me an opportunity, and I made the most of it.

“This game of basketball has been very, very good to me. It’s been very good to my family, and I appreciate that greatly.”

David Hall, david.hall@pilotonline.com.