Penn hires Philly native and former Iowa coach Fran McCaffery as men’s basketball coach
McCaffery, 65, the winningest coach in Iowa history, played for the Quakers from 1979-82 and served a season as assistant coach with the program.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated.
Fran McCaffery is coming home.
The former Iowa coach, who grew up in West Oak Lane and attended La Salle College High School, was officially announced as the next head coach for a Penn men’s basketball program on Thursday, where he played from 1979 to 1982.
McCaffery will be formally introduced during a press conference scheduled for April 7 at the Palestra.
Penn athletic director Alanna Wren clearly valued experience in the university’s national search for its next coach, and McCaffery, who coached Iowa for 15 years and became the school’s all-time winningest coach, fits the bill. Under his watch, Iowa had a 297-207 record and made the NCAA Tournament seven times, although the Hawkeyes never reached the Sweet 16.
McCaffery, 65, was dismissed from Iowa earlier this month after the Hawkeyes were eliminated in the second round of the Big Ten tournament. At Penn, he will replace Steve Donahue, who was fired on March 10 after nine seasons leading the Quakers.
After graduating from Penn’s Wharton School, McCaffery served as an assistant coach for the Quakers for one season. He then became an assistant at Lehigh before taking over as head coach in 1985 at the age of 26. He left Lehigh in 1988 to join the staff of Digger Phelps at Notre Dame, where McCaffery remained until 1999, when he took the head coaching job at UNC-Greensboro. He took the Spartans to the NCAA Tournament in his second season, then left Greensboro in 2005 after six seasons for Siena. He had a five-year stint there and led the Saints to three consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances before departing in 2010 for Iowa.
McCaffery’s hiring comes after Penn has plummeted to the bottom of the Ivy League. Over the last two seasons, Donahue’s Quakers won just seven games in conference play. This past season, Penn ranked seventh in the Ivy League in points per game and last in point differential.
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“Super excited for our future,” Penn’s Ethan Roberts said via text message Wednesday.
Roberts led the Quakers with nearly 17 points per game. Earlier in the week, Penn’s second-leading scorer, sophomore shooting guard Sam Brown, announced he would be entering the transfer portal due to the firing of Donahue. However, his statement did not rule out a return to Penn.
“I plan to utilize the transfer portal to see where I might be able to best grow as a student-athlete and continue to channel myself at the highest level,” Brown wrote. “That could very well still be here at Penn, a place I love and for which I am deeply grateful.”
Fellow Penn guard AJ Levine initially entered the transfer portal but posted on social media Wednesday morning that he was removing his name from the portal. “Excited for what the future holds,” he wrote.
McCaffery earned the nickname “White Magic” during his formative years in Philadelphia playing on the playgrounds, at La Salle, and in the Sonny Hill League. He’ll need to create a little magic back at Penn. Along with revitalizing and stabilizing a program that has fallen upon hard times, McCaffery will be tasked with retaining Brown, a key player for the Quakers.
Staff writer Jonathan Tannenwald contributed to this article.