The Donahue Show : Santa Paula Coach Fine-Tunes, Programs Teams Into Winners

There is a motivational memo posted in Tom Donahue’s classroom and it speaks volumes about the second-year basketball coach of Santa Paula High.

“ Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I’ll show you a failure. “

Donahue changes addresses as often as Clipper Coach Larry Brown. He has been head coach at three high schools, a junior college and a junior high. He spent a year as a basketball missionary in New Zealand. And he is only 35.

“Growing up, we had these encyclopedias, red Britannicas,” Donahue said. “I used to look at pictures of the states. I always wanted to experience something different, experience different cultures and ideas.”

He has done just that, weaving his way from his hometown of Hazleton, Pa., a small mining community 2 1/2 hours from Philadelphia and New York, to the farming community of Santa Paula where he lives with his wife Nadine.

Since arriving at Santa Paula in 1990, Donahue has led the Cardinals to consecutive second-place finishes in the Frontier League. It is an impressive achievement considering Santa Clara has not lost a Frontier game since 1984.

It also is impressive in that Santa Paula was 3-38 in the two seasons before Donahue’s arrival. Santa Paula was 3-41 in league play from 1986-90.

The Cardinals (17-5) will play host to Duarte on Friday in the first round of the Southern Section Division III-A playoffs.

“Certainly, last year and this year, those have been the best Santa Paula teams since I’ve been here,” said Dick Sebek, Nordhoff’s 17-year coach.

Donahue is driven by a conviction that he hopes will lead to the college ranks. The ultimate job, he said, would require nothing but basketball duties. He moved to California in hopes of getting a step closer to that dream.

He is, however, one giant step farther from the town that the Donahue family has called home since the mid-1800s.

Donahue grew up in a nine-room home in Hazleton that housed not only his parents and eight siblings but a grandmother and an aunt. The Donahues utilized every inch of the house, from attic to basement.

While professional ambition has driven Donahue from home, his brother is bound to the place. Michael Donahue, 33, developed schizophrenia during the early 1980s. In recounting the story of his brother’s illness, Tom gropes for a description, calling it “the worst defeat of any I’ve ever had.”

But, occasionally, one of Donahue’s players benefits from hearing the story.

“When players feel they have a problem,” Donahue said, “I sometimes relate to my brother. They might realize they have more difficult things than guarding someone on the basketball court.”

Donahue said his brother was a talented athlete who played tight end at Villanova and had hoped to become a doctor.

“When he came home from Villanova, he kind of wasn’t doing much, but he had no sign of mental illness,” Donahue said. “We thought he was just going to relax, have a few beers, take it easy after college.”

Such was not the case, and the cause of Michael’s illness remains a mystery, forever gnawing at Donahue.

“Why him, not me? There are only two boys in the family,” he said. “Why not me?”

Rather than inspire Donahue to make the most of his ability and climb the coaching ladder, his brother’s illness made it more difficult for him to leave Pennsylvania.

“It actually de- motivated me,” he said.

But when he was offered the coaching job at Santa Paula, he could not refuse. Southern California seemed to offer many more opportunities than eastern Pennsylvania.

Joe Riccio, athletic director of Santa Paula, liked Donahue’s credentials. In Donahue’s first head coaching job, he led Grebey Junior High in Hazleton to back-to-back district titles. In three years at Hazleton High, a program mired in mediocrity, Donahue led his alma mater to two regional championships. And he turned around the program at Northampton (Pa.) High, also a perennial loser.

Along the way, he earned a reputation as a hard worker.

“There were many times I had to drag him out of the gym,” said Joe Scitney, an assistant at Hazleton during Donahue’s coaching years there. “Whenever we lost, he felt it was his fault. He’d sit there for hours, saying, ‘What did I do wrong?’ That first team just didn’t have much talent. There wasn’t much anyone could do.”

It was difficult to convince Donahue. He preaches the any-team-on-any-given-day theory and will not concede anything to a more talented team. A satisfied man, remember, is a failure.

The concept was stamped into the psyches of Donahue’s players at Hazleton in 1985. In the eastern Pennsylvania semifinals, Hazleton was a heavy underdog to a Carlisle team that featured Billy Owens, now a Golden State Warrior rookie, and Jeff Lebo, who would become a North Carolina standout.

“People asked me, ‘What am I going to do different?’ ” Donahue said. “Nothing. We’re going to play our game and we’re going to have our chance.”

Hazelton led late in the game but lost by four points to the eventual eastern Pennsylvania champion. It was Carlisle’s narrowest margin of victory in the playoffs.

Another example of Donahue’s confidence came when he spoke to the school board shortly after accepting the job at Northampton. The program was in tatters, and Donahue conceded that the first season would be rough. But he guaranteed a winning season the second year, making headlines the next day. And, like Joe Namath, his prophecy came true.

The odds were even longer at Santa Paula. So long that Joey Ramirez, then a sophomore who had seen the varsity win three games under two coaches in two seasons, considered transferring.

“Then I met him,” said Ramirez, a senior point guard and two-year starter. “He seemed to care a lot.

“His confidence--he talks a lot about that. Basically that’s what he did for the Santa Clara game, and we scared them to death (losing by three points after an 18-0 second-half run by the Saints). He says, ‘Just have confidence in yourself and don’t be shy.’ ”

Never be satisfied.

During Donahue’s stint at Hazleton, he sat with Scitney in the playground where he often worked out with players. He had lived in the eastern Pennsylvania mining town most of his life, but this was no basketball haven.

Scitney, wiser with age, said, “Tommy, if you ever want to make it in this world, you’re going to have to pack your bags and leave.”

It was a point well-taken.