Donovan 'riding high'

BEIJING -- When she gets home to Charlotte, Anne Donovan is going to sleep better than she has in years.

As the coach of the U.S. women's basketball team, Donovan knew there were only two choices for these Olympics: first place or failure. That sentiment goes for the more highly publicized U.S. men's Olympic team, too, but Donovan felt the pressure just as intensely.

She doesn't feel it now. The U.S. women's team steamrolled through the Olympic tournament, winning its eight games by an average of 32 points. Saturday's gold-medal game turned into another rout, with the U.S. whipping Australia 92-65.

That was Donovan's swan song as the U.S. head coach. She had committed to coach the U.S. national team for three years. Now, suddenly, she no longer has a job.

"But I'm riding high," Donovan said. "I could not have scripted a better ending."

What Donovan obsessed about for much of these three years is that she could never get her full team together because of players' obligations to their other teams. She ended up coaching her actual Olympic roster only for the past four weeks. Coaches love to prepare. Donovan felt like she was taking a final exam after skimming the textbook and missing half the lectures.

It didn't matter. Her team played beautifully. And to Donovan, the final victory was both a relief and a cause for celebration.

"I feel spent," Donovan said. "I feel like everything has been left out there. In the last three years since I've taken this team over, there have been a lot of questions. Could this team pull it together? Could I pull it together? So for me, it's tremendous satisfaction -- not just to win a gold medal, but to really win it with an exclamation point."

Once the coach of the now-defunct WNBA franchise in Charlotte, Donovan fell in love with the city and never left after moving to Charlotte in 2001. She commuted cross country for months at a time to her next job, with the WNBA team in Seattle. She left that job in November and has focused exclusively on the Olympics since.

Donovan won't be unemployed for long, of course. At 6 feet 8, Donovan is both a literal and figurative giant in women's basketball. She will get a good college or other head-coaching job soon. Someone will want to hire a woman who has taken teams to both the Olympic and WNBA championships and is in the Basketball Hall of Fame as a player. Donovan has now been part of Olympic gold-medal teams as a player (1984 and 1988), assistant (2004) and head coach (2008).

Donovan's gift to this Olympic team was her steadiness. One of the people who knows Donovan best is Dawn Staley, who once served as Donovan's point guard for the Charlotte Sting.

Staley, an assistant coach on the 2008 U.S. Olympic team, is also the head coach at South Carolina and may one day be the Olympic head coach herself. Of Donovan, she said: "She brings a calm to chaotic situations. She helps stabilize things because she's so consistent."

Donovan tried to deflect all credit following the gold-medal game, saying it was the players who did everything right.

"When you get superstars together -- I don't care what sport it is -- the tendency is that ego at some point has to step in," Donovan said. "That's what makes great players great. They have healthy egos. But our players had ego for this team. That's what made it special. I've never had a team with 12 players that have been so selfless."