During a coaching career that has spanned nearly four decades, Navy's Don DeVoe has seen college basketball grow and change in ways he never could have imagined.
In 1964, when he got his first taste of coaching as a graduate assistant at Ohio State, there was no billion-dollar television contract for the NCAA tournament, no rules or restrictions for recruiting and no high school phenoms dreaming of jumping straight to the NBA after attending the prom.
All that, for better or worse, is part of the college game now. Things have changed, and DeVoe, like any good coach, has changed with the times. But one thing has remained the same: DeVoe has been a winner.
In fact, only a handful of coaches have done it better than DeVoe, whose 499 career wins put him 17th on the list among active Division I coaches. If he can lead Navy to a win tomorrow in the Midshipmen's 7:30 p.m. home opener against Central Florida, he'll become just the 59th coach to win 500 games.
"Without a question, it's a milestone," said DeVoe, 62, who has coached more games (845) than all but 12 active coaches. "You feel really fortunate if you're able to stay in Division I coaching that many years, and obviously it means your teams wanted to win.
"I think after it happens, I'll reflect back on it a lot more. It's more important to me that this year's team develop, learn how to win and represent the academy in a positive way."
If DeVoe sounds old school, it's because he is. Former Navy athletic director Jack Lengyel hired him in 1992, hoping to turn around a basketball program that had gone 25-88 over the previous four seasons, and DeVoe seemed like the right guy for the job.
As an assistant at Army in the mid '60s, DeVoe coached under Bob Knight (a college teammate at Ohio State) and learned the fundamentals of defense while rubbing shoulders and sharing meals with men whose names would one day become linked with high-quality programs.
At the time, Army's athletic department included future NFL coaches Bill Parcells (Giants, Patriots, Jets) and Al Groh (Jets), future college football coaches Ken Hatfield (Rice) and John Mackovic (Arizona) and future college basketball coaches Dave Bliss (Baylor) and Mike Krzyzewski (Duke).
"Looking back, I feel really fortunate to have been a part of all that," DeVoe said. "I was mainly used as a recruiter, but I was a workaholic. It was a tough time to recruit at West Point because the Vietnam War didn't make the military all that popular."
Still, DeVoe succeeded enough that, after a return to Ohio State to earn his master's degree, he eventually got his first head-coaching job in 1971 at Virginia Tech. He earned a reputation as a coach who could turn around a struggling program and, after successful stints at Wyoming and Tennessee, Navy came calling.
The results were immediate, and the fit was perfect for DeVoe. After going 8-19 his first year, Navy emphasized defense in 1993-94 and went 17-13, earning a berth in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1987.
DeVoe became one of only 22 coaches in NCAA history to take three different schools to the NCAA tournament (he went once with Virginia Tech and seven times with Tennessee), and he realized how much he enjoyed the academy's structure and focus.
"I really enjoy the relationships with players and with players' parents," DeVoe said. "At Navy, the kids are very dedicated to graduating and the parents are really interested in seeing that they have a career after basketball, and that's really refreshing when you compare it to some other places.
"The players are serious about an education and they're not thinking about the pie-in-the-sky dream of playing professional basketball. That makes it easier to coach when you don't have those other distractions."
In DeVoe's first nine years at Navy, he won the Patriot League title five times and won at least 19 games six times. Five times the Mids finished in the Top 10 in the country in rebound margin, leading the nation in that category in 1994-95 and 1998-99.
All that success made last season all the more frustrating. Navy had been expected to contend for the league title again, but instead suffered through an injury-plagued 10-20 season.
Still, things are looking up again. DeVoe should contend again this season with five seniors on the squad, and the whole team would like nothing more than to get No. 500 for their coach.
"I know the kids might be sensitive to it, but that's not the issue for me," DeVoe said. "My hope is that we play together and have a good season. The milestone wins are just sidebars. If we can be, by the time the day ends, a little bit better than we were before the day started, then that's what it's all about for me."