First-time basketball Hall nominee Bob McKillop turned Davidson into his Camelot
When Davidson publicist Joey Beeler stepped into basketball practice Thursday with the good news, coach Bob McKillop was baffled.
“I said, ‘What Hall of Fame?’ I thought he meant some other Hall,” McKillop recalled.
That Hall: The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. McKillop is one of six college coaches on the initial nomination list for the 2020 class, to be announced at the Final Four.
It’s been an amazing 30-year ride for McKillop, from a 4-24 first season to the Final Eight with Stephen Curry and to eight other NCAA tournament appearances. The 69-year-old coach, whose name is on Davidson’s court, has won 62% of his games (583-355) with the Wildcats.
All this winning — 17 post-season appearances — never would have happened, McKillop said, had then-Davidson athletic director Terry Holland not been resolute in his support.
“Terry Holland allowed me to survive through a very difficult first couple of years,” McKillop said of the former Virginia coach, a Davidson grad. “His leadership, his guidance, his coaching of me was just extraordinary.”
Along the way, McKillop recruited an undersized guard from Christian Christian: Curry became an All-American player, a lottery pick by the Golden State Warriors and a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player. The Wildcats went 85-20 from 2006 through 2009, with Curry pushing them to a regional final, where they lost to Kansas.
“He’s always been a Hall of Famer in my eyes — both a Hall-of-Fame person and a Hall-of-Fame coach,” Curry said via the Warriors. “I’ll anxiously await the results in April, but this is certainly much-deserved recognition for a man who has enjoyed an incredible career with tremendous dignity and class.”
McKillop had opportunities to move on to bigger, more prominent programs, but after attending enough weddings and christenings for former players, he lost any wanderlust.
“There is such a temptation today to look for the next rung up the ladder. Davidson gave me an opportunity to see that the rung that I was on was where I fit,” McKillop told the Observer.
“A part of that is the sense of intimacy this campus represents. The intimacy our program represents. That’s no better embodied than by the fact we live right across the street and all three of our children were Davidson alums.
“This is Camelot.”
A first-time nominee, McKillop is in group of college coaches that includes Gene Keady, Rollie Massimino, Eddie Sutton, Bo Ryan and Jay Wright. McKillop is the only coach in that group who didn’t spend time with a national power.
While Lefty Driesell coached Davidson to a national ranking in the 1960s, McKillop dramatically rekindled the basketball program. Fifty-seven of McKillop’s players went on to play professionally.
In addition to recruiting and developing Curry, he oversaw a move up in conference from the Southern to the Atlantic 10 in 2014.
The shift to the Atlantic 10 provided a conference that regularly gets at-large bids to the NCAA tournament. However, it challenged a Davidson program at a small (about 2,000 students), academically elite college.
Davidson won the A-10 tournament and the automatic bid in 2018, four seasons into joining the league.
“The A-10 allowed us to get on a national stage,” McKillop said. “I have such treasured memories of the Southern Conference, but that was not a national stage, it was a regional stage.
“There were some questions why we would leave the comfort of the Southern Conference to go into the unknown, but it was just the environment we needed.”
McKillop also saw facility improvements, including a practice facility. Much of McKillop’s success has been in recruiting internationally, leaning on relationships he first established as a high school coach in metropolitan New York City.
Finalists for the 2020 Hall of Fame class will be announced during the NBA All-Star Weekend in Chicago in February. The selections for 2020 will be announced during the Final Four in Atlanta in early April.
This story was originally published December 19, 2019 at 5:55 PM.
