Matt McKillop, his legendary father and a new generation of Davidson basketball
It’s the evening of Dec. 7, 2022, and all feels right in the world. Matt McKillop hadn’t slept much the past few nights. Two-point losses in back-to-back games will do that. But a seven-point Davidson basketball win against Western Carolina has seemed to put him at peace for now. He’s leaning on the John M. Belk Arena scorer’s table for a postgame interview: loosening his tie, scanning a final box score, chomping on a piece of gum.
The discussion eventually leaps beyond the game. McKillop has the time. At one point, the first-year coach is asked why he and his assistants still wear suits on the sideline. It’s a tradition that was largely tabled during the pandemic and tossed out afterward, most college coaches preferring the comfortable pullover or polo to the jacket and slacks.
“I do it for a number of reasons,” McKillop croaks, his voice long gone. He then chuckles, “One, I think my father would disown me if I didn’t.”
Matt McKillop’s father is Bob McKillop. And Bob McKillop is the father of Davidson basketball. He’s the coach with 634 wins and 23 conference championships. The man who compelled Stephen Curry to the 16,000-person town of Davidson, North Carolina, before the undersized and overlooked guard shot his way through the 2008 NCAA tournament and into America’s heart. Bob McKillop is the architect who built Davidson basketball in his tough, blue-collar, New York-bred image — whose 33 years at the helm has rendered Davidson as one of the standard-bearers for mid-major college basketball.
Bob often wore a red tie and a dark suit and cuff-links when he coached. He was senatorial like that. The day Matt was born, 40 years ago this month, Bob was in the hospital. The elder McKillop held his son, made sure his wife was healthy and safe, and then scurried to coach his Long Island Lutheran high school boys in one of their biggest games of the year.
“I can’t remember,” Bob said, trying to recount what he was wearing when his son came into the world. “I suspect I was in a jacket and tie.”
Months have passed since that December night, that post-Western Carolina win. And the son of Bob McKillop/former Davidson player/assistant coach of 14 seasons/Davidson’s new patriarch has since weathered more close losses, more sleepless nights, more bounce-back wins.
The first season of a new generation of Davidson basketball comes to a head on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m., when the Wildcats play St. Bonaventure at Barclays Center in New York in their first game of the Atlantic 10 conference tournament. Davidson (15-15, 8-10 A10) sits eighth in the conference and needs to win the conference tournament to earn a second-straight trip to the NCAA tournament.
Through his first season, Matt McKillop has been navigating age-old expectations in a new position with aplomb, players and coaches and close friends say.
He’s been finding his own way, in other words.
And in a sense, so has Davidson basketball.
“I get a question about that a lot,” Matt said. “Like when I do all the pregame coverages, it’s like, ‘What’s the pressure of sitting in the office your father sat in, or coaching on Bob McKillop Court?’ And it sounds like coach-speak, but I never think of that.”
It’s old news to Matt McKillop, after all: He’s had his name to live up to all his life.
Bob McKillop saying goodbye
It was August 2021, a previously quiet day in the office of Davidson athletic director Chris Clunie, and everything was about to change. Or maybe not? Time blurs some details.
The way Clunie remembers it, Bob McKillop strolled into his office for a check-in meeting. Clunie was Bob McKillop’s AD since 2019, and he played for him from 2002-06 after walking on as a freshman. He knew his coach well. He knew his colleague well, too. The meeting wasn’t expected to be memorable.
But it was.
“He came down to my office, and sat down, and we have our catch-ups all the time,” Clunie recalled. “And he just said, ‘I think this will be my last year.’ And it was an emotional moment, for sure.”
There were no absolutes used in the meeting. No press releases were summoned. Returning in 2022-23 was always on the table. Davidson was going to be good, too, and nothing inspires sustenance like winning does. But perhaps with it being in the final year of McKillop’s contract, and with McKillop being 71 then, and with the college basketball landscape being littered with transfer portal moves and name, image and likeness deals and myriad challenges that weren’t even ideas when McKillop started his college coaching career — choosing to leave might’ve made sense.
Still, Bob McKillop’s departure would change everything.
“He’d become synonymous with Davidson,” Clunie said. Clunie was “one of about five people” who knew that Bob McKillop was contemplating making 2021-22 his last. It’s why Clunie paid special attention to his old coach on the sidelines, who was coaching “like it was his last season because he knew it was.”
Clunie noticed Bob’s deeper breaths. He noticed more weariness, “more hands on knees,” more emotion. There was a January game against Richmond, when Davidson’s Mike Jones went 8-for-9 from 3-point-range and hit the game-winner with three seconds left, and Clunie caught Bob McKillop’s tired eyes and head-shaking smirk after the game, as if to say, I don’t know how many more of these I got left in me.
Bob McKillop said he couldn’t recall “a bridge I crossed or a line I crossed” to make his retirement decision final, but he somehow knew that the walk off the floor after that 2022 NCAA tournament loss to Michigan State was his last.
Matt McKillop remembers it a bit differently, too: “We lose to Michigan State, and I’ve got my eyes on him, like, ‘What does he look like right now?’ And he didn’t look like a guy coaching his last game. And then I think we went to the hotel afterward, and we sat in the hotel suite with family, and I said to my wife, ‘All right. This isn’t over yet.’ Because we weren’t around someone who’d just coached their last game.”
But however it happened, it happened. Bob McKillop was moving on, and Davidson had the unenviable task of finding a new coach.
They had to find their next McKillop. A McKillop of a new era, perhaps.
And they didn’t have to look far.
Matt McKillop: A coach’s son
Matt McKillop was only 7 years old when his family moved from New York to North Carolina. Davidson quickly became a big part of his life. He attended Davidson basketball camps. Practically lived on Davidson’s campus. He was among the first generation of kids who “wanted to be Davidson basketball players.” Growing up he watched pretty much every home game with his mother, Cathy, and siblings, Kerrin and Brendan, in Section 15, facing the home bench.
The Wildcats’ players were the heroes he wanted to be, and his father was the gladiator-tough coach he’d have to woo to achieve that dream.
Matt gleaned discipline and toughness from his father, the same way his father gleaned discipline and toughness from the South Ozone Park courts in New York.
“Matt was always a hard-nosed player,” said Jim Fox, who coached Matt McKillop in AAU ball for a summer while he was still in high school. One game specifically stands out to Fox. It was when his squad was facing a team with future Syracuse star Jerry McNamara on its side.
“We put Matt on McNamara, and Matt was very physical and got into his head, and he shut him down,” said Fox, who’d later coach at Davidson as an assistant. “And the other coach thought we were being too physical. McNamara thought we were being too physical. And that didn’t bother Matt at all.”
McKillop took charges. Dove on floors. Brendan Winters, one of Matt’s closest friends and a Davidson teammate for four years, regularly teases Matt for picking fights with opponents who towered over him. The 6-foot-1 guard one time, Winters recalled, had to be chided by a referee for entangling with 6-foot-8 Arizona star Luke Walton.
“Matt actually had that New York toughness in him,” said Matt Berman, who’s known Matt McKillop since they were 10. Berman now lives in Huntersville, and every time he sees his best friend on television, he takes pride in how his young kids point and scream, “Uncle Matt!”
But while his children see a pristinely dressed, energetic coach, Berman sees his funny, charismatic, inventive childhood friend — the same one who’d use anything at his disposal to gain an edge.
“Matt would …” Berman paused, as if qualifying his answer, “within the laws of the game, and maybe stretching them a little bit, would do what he needed to do to be competitive. And as the statistics show, Matt had a successful career despite not being the fastest guy, not the tallest guy, not the highest jumper, etc.”
Matt McKillop never shot below 35.8% from 3-point range in a season in his career, and as a senior, he was an 81% free-throw shooter and averaged 6.3 points in 22.1 minutes a game. His teammates considered him a leader. Davidson’s all-time assist leader Jason Richards called him a “big brother.”
Clunie remembers a time when the two met in the parking lot after a “bad home loss” their senior year, amid a streak of bad luck during a season that eventually ended in a trip to the NCAA tournament: “He was like, ‘This is it. We have to figure this out. And everybody’s gotta be on board,’ ” Clunie recalled. “And it’s coming from Matt, who plays, you know, 30 minutes a game, to me who plays two minutes a game, and everybody in between, right? You could just tell: Davidson was it for him. You know what I mean?”
But Bob McKillop would test his son’s toughness. Matt understood why. Bob himself admitted that he “put tremendous pressure on him” because he was always aware that he was his son and therefore “could not show favoritism.”
That tone was set early.
“Freshman year, man, it was pretty brutal,” said Winters, Matt’s teammate. At times, Winters said, Bob McKillop’s playground bravado would slip out and challenge his son, cutting like only a New York native’s could: What does a kid from the suburbs know about this game?
“He would make comments and stuff like that, and you know, maybe call Matt ‘soft’ or something like that. And it’s like, ‘Bob, you raised him!’ ” Winters recounted with a laugh. He added, “But it never really got him down, as far as I could tell. Matt, like I said, was just tough. … And once he got through freshman and sophomore years, when he was a junior and senior, he was smart, he was tough — he was, I think, any coach’s dream.”
“Coach was very demanding of Matt,” said Matt Matheny, a longtime assistant coach at Davidson. “He knew if he held Matt to a very high standard, then he could hold his other players to that same standard.”
Matt McKillop graduated from Davidson in 2006 and returned in 2008. And as a coach, he blossomed, too. He was promoted to associate head coach in 2016-17, handling substitutions, handling halftime media interviews, offering his father so much input that Bob McKillop could lovingly call his son “a pain in the ass.”
As it turned out, by that fateful August 2021 meeting between Clunie and Bob McKillop, the younger McKillop had been ready for the job for years, players and coaches said. Clunie said that was part of what made Bob McKillop comfortable with stepping down when he did.
After an “internal review that included external candidates,” Clunie said, the announcement was formalized on June 17, 2022 — the same day Bob McKillop announced his retirement.
The job facing Matt McKillop would be difficult, no doubt. Succeeding a legend is one thing. Succeeding your legendary father is another. Davidson has lost six games by one possession this season — something that is at least in part attributed to it only returning four contributors. It’s worth noting, too, that sustaining success as a mid-major program is more difficult in today’s world of college basketball, some say.
“In some ways, you could say, ‘Well, he stepped into a program that was established and had an identity,’ which is great. It has a certain tradition,” Jay Bilas, ESPN’s lead college basketball analyst, said of Matt McKillop’s first year. Bilas has long been an admirer of Bob McKillop. “But yeah, of course it’s going to be harder. Because the game’s harder. Everything about basketball is harder than it was 20-30 years ago. Everything. And so, yeah, it’s absolutely going to be more difficult.
“But Matt’s an outstanding young coach, is really smart, and principled, and technically sound. And I don’t have any doubts he’s going to do a great job.”
Despite the season struggles, upperclassmen guards Grant Huffman and Foster Loyer said Matt McKillop has done an admirable job. Bob McKillop agrees. He frequently watches games in Section 15, sitting where his son did all those years ago, watching his son in wonder.
“He’s far more advanced than I was in my eighth year here, or my ninth year here,” Bob McKillop said of Matt. “And yet he’s only in his first year. I could not keep the poise and uplifted spirit that he has currently as a first-year coach. I didn’t learn to do that until quite a few seasons passed.”
Where’d he get that from?
Bob McKillop laughed: “Seeing what not to do.”
‘A shot I didn’t take’
It’s a day in late-December, and all seems right with the world once more. Matt McKillop spent most of the morning with his wife, Kelsey Linville, while his children, Hazel and Rosie and Charles, restlessly waited for Santa. Around noon, a reporter called and stole him for a few minutes, and now he’s talking KenPom analytics — defensive rebounding percentages and 2- and 3-point field goal defense and more — something his coach-with-your-gut predecessor probably wouldn’t do.
The discussion eventually leaps beyond basketball. McKillop has the time. At one point, the first-year coach is asked if there was a moment he regretted as a player, any shot he’d take back.
There was.
“It’s actually a shot I didn’t take,” McKillop begins. He then sets the scene. It’s his senior year. March 2006. An NCAA tournament game against Ohio State — 15 seed vs. a 2 seed in Dayton, Ohio. The Wildcats were up at halftime. “I had an early look in the second half. I can’t remember the time, but I shot-faked and drove to the rim, and I tried to draw contact, and I missed a layup.
“And I think if I would’ve just shot a 3 ... I don’t know. What would my life have turned into?”
Those kinds of questions have kept him up at night. They’re the most compelling questions in sports. In life, really. What if that shot went in? What if momentum arrived and didn’t relent and the Wildcats won that game? Where would Matt McKillop be? What about Matt McKillop would’ve changed?
Would he have looked back on those tough freshman practices differently? Would they have had a different worth? Would he still come back to coach as an assistant here? Would he eventually get his chance at the ultimate job, in the town he grew up in, among his childhood heroes, and then take the sacred mantle from his demanding father to become the face of Davidson basketball?
Where would Matt McKillop have ended up? Where else would he rather be?
“I don’t know,” Matt McKillop said. He then paused and chuckled, as if he’d just realized something profound. “I’d probably be in the same exact spot I am now.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
