Anne Donovan obit

Anne Donovan, Hall of Fame basketball player and coach, dies at 56

She was not on the list.

Anne Donovan, a Hall of Fame basketball star who won Olympic gold medals as both player and coach, and who was the first woman to lead a team to the WNBA championship, died June 13 at her home in Wilmington, N.C. She was 56.

The death was announced by WNBA president Lisa Borders, who said Ms. Donovan “played a seminal role in the growth of women’s basketball.” The cause was a heart ailment.

Ms. Donovan, who was 6 feet, 8 inches tall, was one of the most dominant players in women’s basketball history. At Old Dominion University in Virginia, she helped lead her team to a national championship and was a three-time all-American.

As an Olympian, she played on gold-medal-winning U.S. teams in 1984 and 1988. She won Olympic gold again as a head coach, guiding her team to a 92-65 victory over previously undefeated Australia in the championship game at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

In the professional ranks, Ms. Donovan had her greatest success coaching the Seattle Storm, winning the WNBA championship in 2004 with a roster including star players such as Sue Bird, Lauren Jackson and Betty Lennox.

“I am very happy that we finally have a woman coach win a WNBA championship, and obviously happy that it is me,” Ms. Donovan said in 2004. “Women need some credential to get the respect we deserve as coaches. This will give that credential. It shows there are great women coaches in the game. This will help us with the next barrier.”

Anne Donovan, with the ball, as a collegiate player at Virginia’s Old Dominion University. (AP/AP)

At the time, Ms. Donovan was one of five female head coaches — out of 13 — in the WNBA. Today, six of the league’s 12 teams are coached by women.

Earlier in life, Ms. Donovan overcame other barriers, including the social burden of being exceptionally tall. Her seven brothers and sisters ranged in height from 5-foot-11 to 7-foot-1. When she went out in public, she was often addressed as “Sir.”

“I saw four older sisters go through the trials of prom and dates and no dates and stares and jokes,” Ms. Donovan told USA Today in 2008. “It helped me through it. There are difficult days . . . and then there are days when they put a gold medal around your neck.”

She weighed only 165 pounds when she reached her full height as a high school student in Paramus, N.J. She gained confidence through basketball and was recruited by more than 200 colleges.

She chose Old Dominion in Norfolk, where her teammates included all-Americans Nancy Lieberman and Inge Nissen. In her first year, the Lady Monarchs, as they were then called, had a record of 37-1 and won the national tournament of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. (The National Collegiate Athletic Association did not oversee a tournament for women until 1982.)

Ms. Donovan averaged 20 points and 14.5 rebounds a game throughout her career. During her four years at Old Dominion, her team had a record of 116-20.

The full scope of Ms. Donovan’s achievements has been hard to gauge because her first two years at Old Dominion, when the AIAW governed women’s college sports, are not counted in the NCAA’s record books.

As a result, Brittney Griner of Baylor University is listed as the NCAA’s all-time leader in blocked shots with 736. In fact, Ms. Donovan had more blocks — 801 — in fewer games than Griner. The NCAA record for blocked shots by a male player is 564 by Mississippi State’s Jarvis Varnado.

Ms. Donovan’s career average of 5.9 blocks per game is the highest of any player in history, male or female.

Anne Theresa Donovan was born Nov. 1, 1961, in Ridgewood, N.J., the youngest of eight children. Her father died when she was 5, and her mother, who later remarried, worked as a secretary.

At Paramus Catholic High School, Ms. Donovan was the most recruited female player in the country. Opposing players were so overmatched that Ms. Donovan asked her coach to stop using a full-court press, saying, “You’re not the one looking into that poor girl’s eyes.”

Ms. Donovan was named to the first of three Olympic teams in 1980, but the United States boycotted the Summer Games that year in Moscow.

After graduating from Old Dominion in 1983, she was a member of the U.S. national team and played professionally in Japan and Italy. She began coaching in 1989, first as an assistant at Old Dominion and later as head coach at East Carolina University.

Ms. Donovan was the head coach of five WNBA teams and one in the old American Basketball League. She also spent three years as head coach at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., but she never matched the success she found with Seattle in 2004 or with her gold-medal-winning 2008 Olympic squad. She last coached in 2015 with the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun.

She was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995 and was in the inaugural class of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.

The weekend before her death, Ms. Donovan was in Knoxville, Tenn., where her high school coach, Rose Battaglia, was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.

Survivors include four sisters and two brothers.

Before the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow, Ms. Donovan visualized a moment of personal triumph by making a stick-figure drawing of herself blocking a shot by her Soviet counterpart, 7-foot-2 Uljana Semjonova.

“She’s been a nemesis of mine since I was a freshman at Old Dominion,” Ms. Donovan told the New York Times in 1987.

This time, Ms. Donovan prevailed, blocking a shot by Semjonova and helping her team to victory.

“After I blocked it, I put my fist in the air and said, ‘I did it,’ ” Ms. Donovan said. “I was thinking of that stick figure when I got a nice little shot in the chops from her. That brought me back to earth real quick.”