After holding and losing one of the most prestigious jobs in college sports, Matt Doherty is learning the hard lessons of being a coach without a team. He’s also learning a lot about himself.
When he resigned under pressure last April after his third season at North Carolina, his first instinct was to grab whatever basketball job he could find. Any job. Anywhere.
It “scared” him, in Doherty’s words, to be out of work, without purpose. He was so upset that he considered an assistant’s position at Davidson, where his coaching career began with the same role 14 years ago.
“We all want to say what we’re doing with ourselves,” Doherty, 41, said last week. “Everybody has an answer ready for that question. I didn’t.”
Instead of going with his first instinct, he listened to those he trusted most and decided to take the year off.
He would use the time to better himself for future opportunities that he hopes occur as early as this off-season.
With regard to the St. John’s job from which Mike Jarvis was fired last month, Doherty said he’d “be crazy not to be interested.”
The “game plan,” as he calls it, began with actively pursuing prominent coaches to pick their brains. It’s only January, and already he has spent time with Larry Brown of the Detroit Pistons, Rick Carlisle of the Indiana Pacers, Don Nelson of the Dallas Mavericks, Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, Tom Izzo of Michigan State and Tommy Amaker of Michigan.
“I needed to do a better job of reaching out and meeting new people,” Doherty said. “People aren’t going to help you out if they don’t know you.”
Next he wanted to improve his management skills for his next coaching opportunity, which led him to enroll in courses at two of the best business schools in the country.
Doherty recently took classes at the Wharton School of Business at Pennsylvania and at Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration.
He’s also branching out, trying things he hasn’t done in a while, such as writing a college basketball column for the Sporting News and doing color commentary for ESPN and College Sports Television Network. He often surfs the Internet into the wee hours reading about the games.
On game nights at Davidson, which is a five-minute ride from his new home outside Charlotte, he can be found in the stands, a regular season ticket-holding fan, enjoying the games coached by his high school coach and mentor, Bob McKillop.
His wife, Kelly, calls him the “busiest unemployed man in America.”
His father, Walter Doherty, said, “He’s as busy as he’s ever been. It’s just a different kind of busy.”
But this kind of busy is all new to him. He’d accomplished so much so fast in his life, he’d never had a chance to practice being idle or introspective.
Doherty started on North Carolina’s national championship team in 1982 alongside Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins and James Worthy.
Then it was on to Wall Street for a few years before deciding to pursue coaching.
Ten years into his second career, he was the head coach at Notre Dame. One year later there he was in Dean Smith’s spot, replacing Bill Guthridge in Chapel Hill.
Doherty’s coaching career at his alma mater began on a high note with a 26-7 season in which he was named the Associated Press national coach of the year. But his second team was a program-worst 8-20, and his third season, in which he compiled a 19-16 record, ended with his forced resignation.
Players reportedly went over Doherty’s head to complain that he was overly tough in practice and that he’d get in their faces and berate them in front of their teammates.
Doherty doesn’t like to talk about details or dwell on what went wrong at North Carolina, but he has learned so much from it, “I could write a book on it.”
He’s even learning from the man who replaced him, who happens to be the same man who was an assistant at North Carolina when Doherty played there and later hired him as an assistant at Kansas.
“He’s ready to go on to what’s next. There’s no question about that,” Roy Williams said. “You can’t put things completely behind you because other people will keep bringing it up, but I think with time, the memories have become part of the past.”
Williams and McKillop told Doherty to be selective about where he goes next. Everybody fully expects to see him back on the sideline next season. Interested schools won’t have to look hard to get to him. Doherty has no agent and fields calls himself.
“Matt will undoubtedly coach again,” said Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White, who hired him in 1999. “He has already amassed an inordinate set of experiences that will serve him exceedingly well.”
Who knows? Maybe one day he’ll even learn to relax.
“I’m guilty of seeing an empty date on my calendar,” Doherty said, “and trying to fill it.”
Much of that free time in this year away from coaching has been spent with his wife and their 6-year-old son, Tucker, and 4-year-old daughter, Hattie. He has made a point of appreciating the opportunity.
“As a basketball coach, you never get to do that,” he said. “It’s one of the benefits of the forced sabbatical.”
Doherty also has realized why he shouldn’t respond publicly to those who attacked him, such as his former players who painted him as verbally abusive.
“The hardest thing was to sit back, read and listen to some of that stuff and keep my mouth shut,” he said.
“Anybody who has coached or played is a fighter. We compete. Your initial reaction is to respond or fight back … but in one of my classes, there was a saying, `Take the high road; there’s less traffic there.”‘
Thus the education of an unemployed coach continues.
