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Penn lands FDU transfer Matt MacDonald

05/21/2015, 10:30am EDT
By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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It shouldn’t take too long for Matt MacDonald to adjust to playing at Penn.

After all, he’s already got one crucial point down--success against Princeton.

The former Fairleigh Dickinson guard became the first player to commit to new Quakers head coach Steve Donahue, picking the Ivy League institution on Wednesday night to finish out his final two years of eligibility over New Hampshire and Marist.

MacDonald set his career high against the Tigers, dropping 29 points in a win this season for FDU, the school he spent his first two seasons at before making the decision to transfer from a school he said simply just “wasn’t a fit,” either on or off the court.

Getting a chance to help build a once-proud program that won just 26 games over the last three years clearly played a role in bringing him to Philadelphia.

“There’s so many different things that just stood out, from obviously the school, being in the Ivy League to the basketball portion, getting a chance to play in the Palestra,” he said. “I had a great connection with...pretty much all of the coaches, and obviously Coach Donahue and the new direction that he’s going to lead Penn, that was really appealing to me in this process.”

A 6-foot-5 shooting guard out of Buffalo’s Canisius (N.Y.) High School, MacDonald started 59 out of 60 games in his two seasons at FDU, averaging 8.8 ppg and 3.8 rpg in 29.9 mpg, shooting 38.8 percent overall and 33.8 percent from 3-point range. His numbers didn’t change much from freshman to sophomore year, when he averaged 9.0 ppg and 4.0 rpg for a Knights squad that went 8-21 (3-15 Northeast Conference).

That Donahue’s first addition to the roster is a transfer is certainly a little surprising, given that Penn hasn’t added a transfer since Eric Osmundson transferred from Utah after the 2001-02 season, a year after Andy Toole came in from Elon.

However, he won’t be the only transfer in the program.

“Coach [Ira] Bowman, he was obviously a transfer, he transferred from Providence, so there’s some familiarity there with him being a transfer,” MacDonald said. “But they didn’t really talk about it being rare, they just talked about how I’d be a good fit with how they want to do things and with the school and just the whole basketbal aspect of it and it just really appealed to me.”

He’ll have to sit the next year out under NCAA transfer rules, but then will have two years of eligibility beginning in 2016-17, and the Quakers will certainly need some perimeter scoring help that year.

Tony Hicks, who’s scored over 1,000 points in his first three years, has been the team’s leading scorer in each of the last two seasons, a distinction he’s likely to earn for a final time as a senior. 

Though Donahue is adding a stellar point guard to the mix this year in Jake Silpe and rising sophomore Antonio Woods (8.4 ppg, 3.8 apg) looks like he’ll be a four-year starter as well, MacDonald brings something a little different to the perimeter than the two point/combo guards who like to get into the lane and break down defenses from there.

“Everyone kind of labels me as a shooter, but I think my game is much more than that,” he said. “I feel like I’ve always been a guy who just plays the right way and I’ll do whatever it takes as long as we win, whether that’s making a certain amount of extra passes, whether that’s shooting 3s, just doing whatever it takes to win.”

MacDonald said he’s already gotten a good outline from the Penn coaching staff of what he will do with his year on the sideline. He mentioned working on a shooting plan with the coaches to take a certain number of shots every day as well as working on learning the offense, but the first two things out of his mouth were hitting the weight room and working with a nutritionist.

“Strength and conditioning (and) athleticism has never been something that’s a strong point of my game, so I feel I can always improve in the weight room, no matter what it is,” he said. “I don’t think they want me to add a certain amount of pounds or anything, but I can always become a better athlete and I think that’s what the focus was.”

Most importantly, of course, the coaches made sure he knows which game stands above all the rest on Penn’s schedule, no matter the records or stage or meaning or anything else.

“We would be at dinner or something and something would be Princeton colors and they would say ‘we can’t have that at the table, that’s Princeton colors,’” MacDonald said.

“I didn’t realize how big a rivalry Princeton and Penn was--but now I do.”


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