With 1,000 games coached, Bob McKillop’s bond with Davidson is stronger than ever
It’s a five-minute walk from Bob McKillop’s home to his office in the athletic center at Davidson College.
Sometimes people driving past the campus will honk and wave, and McKillop will return the greeting.
It’s been going on for more than 30 years, since McKillop traded his life in the nation’s biggest metropolis for the quiet of a small North Carolina town.
“The Town of Davidson loves him, his former players and coaches love him,” says Ardrey Kell High head boys’ basketball coach Mike Craft, an assistant under McKillop in the 2005-06 season. “It’s a real brotherhood.”
Davidson’s game Saturday against Atlantic 10 opponent La Salle, which the Wildcats won 77-69, was McKillop’s 1,000th as a college coach. All of those have been with Davidson.
“This place has come to mean a lot to me and my family,” McKillop says. “The players, the coaches, all the others we’ve worked with over the years … all of that means a lot.”
Davidson is home to about 13,000 people. McKillop might be the best-known.
How he arrived at Davidson
McKillop was a Long Island guy, a standout baseball and basketball player at Chaminade High. He played a year at East Carolina before homesickness took him back to Hofstra to finish his college career.
He coached five years at Holy Trinity High on Long Island, then got adventurous again and spent the 1978-79 season as an assistant at Davidson, a school he had come to admire while playing at East Carolina. New York beckoned again, however, and McKillop became head coach at Long Island Lutheran for 10 seasons.
In 1989, Davidson found itself looking for a head coach and made an offer to McKillop, who had a growing national reputation for his work at Long Island Lutheran and his summer camp.
He and his wife Cathleen bought a house in Davidson — the same place where they still live — and took up a new way of life.
‘Keys’ to McKillop’s coaching style
He built a program based on three principles — Trust. Commitment. Care. He developed the “seven keys” to winning.
And his teams won … a lot. McKillop’s career record at Davidson is 624-376 in his 33 seasons. His teams won conference regular-season or tournament championships 16 times. The 2008-09 team, featuring NBA superstar Steph Curry, reached the NCAA regional finals.
Former players and those who coached with him say Bob McKillop is someone who has learned to balance solid principles with a willingness to adapt.
“He is always looking for ways to improve and he’s never satisfied with past successes or becoming complacent,” said Matt Williams, who played under McKillop from 2014-16 and is now an assistant coach at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. “Coach McKillop was recruiting international players much earlier than other college coaches, and it paid dividends for the program,”
But his basics are what make him so successful, say those who know him.
“I’ve worked for a lot of coaches in a lot of places,” said Mike Kelly, assistant athletic director at the Out of Door Academy in Sarasota, Fla., and a McKillop assistant from 1999-2001. “He’s as good as there is. What makes him great is he is relentless. Details … little things … he plans everything out. He wants to be great and continually works towards it.”
The true foundation
Under all of it is friendship — a lasting friendship.
Terrell Ivory, now the assistant dean of admissions at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., said Davidson actively recruited his older brother, Titus.
“Titus decided to attend Penn State, but when my father died, Coach McKillop came to the funeral,” Ivory recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘I want to play for a guy who would come to the funeral, even though the person they were recruiting chose a different school,’ ”
Ivory went to Davidson as a football player but eventually became a basketball walk-on for three seasons.
“Everything he taught us was bigger than basketball,” Ivory recalled. “He told us, ‘If you help somebody, you help yourself.’ That’s true about basketball, but it’s also true in life.”
Williams said that McKillop-ism has helped him in tough times.
“To this day, when I sense myself feeling stressed out or lacking in joy, I remind myself of Coach’s words and ask myself, ‘What can I do to for someone else?’ ”
Craft had spent 16 years in college coaching but found himself out of a job in 2005. His wife Crystal was from Cornelius, so the two decided to move there. Craft applied for a job at Davidson on the day after the director of basketball operations resigned. He spent a year in that job, then went to Ardrey Kell when the school opened in 2006.
But the bond with McKillop continued.
A few years ago, Ardrey Kell used a Davidson-style inbounds play to beat West Charlotte in a big tournament game.
“Coach McKillop texted me the next day and mentioned that play,” Craft said.
Top recruits
Signing Steph Curry out of Charlotte Christian School in 2006 meant a lot to McKillop, others said.
“The night he signed Steph, he called me,” Craft said. “It was the only time he ever called me after-hours. He was so excited.”
Kelly recalls McKillop telling him how much he regretted not signing Wally Szczerbiak out of high school.
“He knew Wally’s dad, and he wanted him to come to Davidson, but Coach needed a point guard, so he didn’t take him,” Kelly said.
Szczerbiak signed with Miami (Ohio), which he helped lead to the Sweet 16 in the 1999 NCAA Tournament. Miami’s program earned national attention under the title “Wally’s World.”
“He said to me, and I’ll never forget this,” Kelly said of McKillop, ‘We would have had ‘Wally’s World’ at Davidson. I could see that it really hurt.”
“That’s why I was so happy for him and Davidson when they went on that run with Steph in 2008,” Kelly said.
Davidson is home
McKillop’s son, Matt, who played at Davidson from 2004-08 and has been an assistant coach since 2016, said, “I think there are many reasons why dad enjoys life in Davidson as much as he does.
“He has friends here from his time as an assistant coach in the 70s and others he has known since his first year as head coach,” he said.
“He lives in the same house he moved into and raised his children in, from where he can walk to the gym for games,” Matt McKillop added.
And, he said, “He has built a program strong enough that he doesn’t have to take chances on recruits. He only brings in the type of kids that he wants to coach and believes he can develop.”
This story was originally published January 29, 2022 at 2:39 PM.