John Donovan shared the Olympic Gold medal awarded to his younger sister, Anne Donovan, who passed away in 2018.
Here is a brief biography of Anne's legendary achievements in women's basketball.
Anne Donovan, a 6-foot-8 center who was one of the most dominating players of the early 1980s in women’s college basketball and who later won championships as a coach in the W.N.B.A. and the Summer Olympics.
A lanky star at Paramus Catholic High School in New Jersey, Donovan was recruited by more than 100 colleges in 1979. Her size, her soft shooting touch and her strong rebounding made her nearly impossible to guard — and a coup for any college that she chose attend.
She selected Old Dominion, in Norfolk, Va., then a powerhouse in women’s basketball.
In her first year, playing alongside the All-Americans Nancy Lieberman and Inge Nissen, Donovan led the Lady Monarchs in scoring, rebounding and blocked shots. The team won the 1980 national championship, which was then overseen by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (two years before the N.C.A.A. started its women’s tournament).
“She’s improved 200 times since she first came here,” Marianne Stanley, the Old Dominion coach, told The New York Times in 1980. “I expected her to develop, but not this quickly.”
Her improvement continued. Over four seasons, she averaged 20 points, 14.5 rebounds and 5.9 blocks a game.
Anne Donovan was born in Ridgewood, N.J., on Nov. 1, 1961. She seemed fated to be tall. Her father, Joseph Sr., was an engineer who stood 6-foot-6. Her mother, Anna Mae (Mann) Donovan, was close to 6 feet tall.
Anne was the youngest of eight children, who were separated by 15 years and whose height ranged from 5-foot-10 (her sister Michele) to 7-foot-1 (her brother John).
