Daniels Expands His Horizons in Search of Head Coaching Job

Donny Daniels was disappointed when he wasn’t offered the Cal State Fullerton basketball coaching job last spring.

Daniels, a former Titan player and assistant coach, remained as an assistant to Rick Majerus at Utah. He says he still wants to be a Division I head coach and hopes the right job will come along.

“I guess the big change in my thinking since things didn’t work out at Fullerton is that I need to give myself more options,” Daniels said recently in his office on the Utah campus in Salt Lake City.

“I had pretty much limited myself to thinking about California and the West Coast. I’m familiar with that area, and I feel comfortable there. But sometimes what you want is not necessarily what you can get.”

The Fullerton job, which went to interim coach Bob Hawking, was the only one Daniels applied for last spring. But he said he probably will widen his search considerably after this season.

“My wife is from the Midwest, and she has some interest in being back there, so I’m sure that we’ll consider that area now if anything develops there,” Daniels said. “From what I know, it’s a good place to raise a family.”

Daniels, 41, and his wife, Christine, have three children ages 11 to 4.

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Daniels has been encouraged by the move of his friend Phil Mathews to the head coaching job at San Francisco. Mathews, a former UC Irvine player who was an assistant at Fullerton with Daniels, had been Ventura College’s coach for 10 years before moving up to Division I.

“We’ve been friends for a long time now,” said Daniels, who shared an apartment with Mathews while they were at Fullerton. “Phil was the best man at my wedding. We go way back, and we’ve kept up the friendship through the years.”

That association was a factor in Daniels landing Brandon Jessie, a former Edison High star who played under Mathews at Ventura.

Daniels also was involved in recruiting junior forward Keith Van Horn of Diamond Bar, the first sophomore to lead the Western Athletic Conference in scoring and rebounding in conference play, and talented sophomore guard Andre Miller from Compton Verbum Dei, the high school from which Daniels graduated.

“I’ve been pretty much in charge of recruiting for Majerus, although it’s probably a lot easier recruiting for Majerus than it would be for some head coaches,” Daniels said. “I’m selling an established national program here at Utah.”

While Daniels hasn’t been a head coach on the major college level, he was in charge for two seasons at Los Angeles Harbor College. His teams there were 33-29.

Daniels believes he’s also learned some things about game coaching from Majerus.

“I’m pretty sure at least some of that has rubbed off,” he said. “But you never know what people are thinking when they look at you as a coaching candidate.”

Daniels hopes that a comment he made last spring won’t work against him. He hopes it can be forgiven and forgotten.

Daniels found himself in the middle of a controversy when he made a remark that a potential recruit from New York, Richie Parker, who pleaded guilty to first-degree sexual abuse involving a 15-year-old girl, had suffered more than the victim.

“I made the statement, but I regret it,” Daniels said. “But when you say something, you have to take responsibility for it, and I’ve done that. I guess I was trying to explain something that was unexplainable, and it was ill-advised. But what is done is done now.”

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Tough sell: Fullerton picked up $35,000, a lucrative guarantee in college basketball, for playing at Utah last week. But was it worth the price the Titans paid in an embarrassing 108-58 loss? It was the school’s most decisive loss in Division I men’s basketball.

“I can tell you one thing,” Hawking said. “I made the contract for the game when I thought we were going to have several players that we don’t have now.”

That was before David Frigout decided in late summer to turn pro in his native France, Chris St. Clair opted to sit out the remainder of the season because of a knee injury, and guard Brian Thomas went to the sideline for the second time this season with a broken bone in his right foot. A top freshman recruit, Brian Montonati, also returned to Michigan a week after arriving at Fullerton, saying he was homesick.

The Titans have only eight scholarship players and two freshmen, Mark Richardson and Kenroy Jarrett, on their team.

Last week’s game was the first of a new three-year contract between the schools. Utah will play at Fullerton next season, and the Titans will go to Salt Lake City a year later.

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Timing is everything: Majerus was thinking out loud the other night in Utah when he cast a stone or two at the Fullerton administration for not making a quicker decision on its selection of a basketball coach last spring.

“If they thought Hawking was the guy for the job, they should have done it a lot quicker than they did,” Majerus said. “It probably hurt him in recruiting because of that.

“We’re in Southern California a lot, and I can tell you he’s always around. He’s a very hard worker. But they put him behind the 8-ball. His problems are symptomatic to the problems at Fullerton. You’ve got to make a commitment to a coach and to the program.”