Just three weeks after releasing men’s head basketball coach Matt Kilcullen, UNF Director of Athletics Lee Moon announced April 5 Baylor assistant coach Matthew Driscoll,44, will become the fourth head coach of UNF men’s basketball.
“We are extremely excited to welcome coach Driscoll to the UNF family,” Moon said in a press release. “He is a tremendous leader and somebody who is respected by both his peers and players. A new era has begun for UNF Athletics with all of our programs becoming full-fledged NCAA Division I members next season, and a new era has begun for UNF basketball as well.”
Driscoll comes to UNF after helping to lead Baylor to two consecutive post-season appearances the past two seasons after the school suffered a 19 year post-season drought. Before the 2008-2009 Driscoll was voted the ninth best assistant men’s college basketball coach in the nation by a survey of basketball professionals that was conducted and published by Fox Sports.
Driscoll also spent time as an assistant coach at Valparaiso, Clemson and Wyoming, where he was the assistant coach of Larry Shyatt. Shyatt, who is now an assistant at Florida, was Moon’s first choice for the position but turned the offer down.
Driscoll spent six years as the primary assistant head coach at Baylor and was a member of a staff that was brought in to revive the program from a tragic occurrence. In 2003 a member of Baylor’s basketball team was murdered by an ex-teammate, which cause several rifts in the program and at the University.
“The thing I liked about him [Driscoll] is he went into an unbelievable difficult situation at Baylor and they cleaned it up,” Moon told the Florida Times Union. “They did it the right way at a good, strong academic school and that told me he knew how to build a program. As I looked at the total package, that was a big part of [why UNF is hiring him].”
Driscoll inherits a UNF men’s basketball program which finished the 2008-2009 season with an 8-22 record and amassed a 98-186 record during the last ten years under Kilcullen.
“This was an opportunity for me to take a job at an institution that wants to see its basketball program rise to the greatest heights in both the Atlantic Sun Conference and in the Southeast Region,” Driscoll said in a press release. “With President Delaney and coach Moon’s vision, this job was a no-brainer for me. I am excited at the opportunity. It has always been my dream to be a Division I head coach and through the last 12 years as an assistant coach at this level, I feel I have put myself in this position.”
The UNF Athletics Departmen is expected to hold a press conference on April 7th in order to officially introduce Driscoll as UNF’s head coach.
