Pat Kennedy Out as Pace Head Basketball Coach
The Pat Kennedy Era at Pace has come to an abrupt ending with the announcement Wednesday from the university’s athletic director, Mark Brown, that the veteran coach will no longer be in charge of the Setter basketball team. Matt Healing, an assistant under Kennedy the last two seasons, takes over and will be the head coach in 2015-16.
Under Kennedy this past season, the Setters won just one of their 20 games in the Northeast-10 Conference and finished with a 5-23 record overall. In two years at the Pace helm, Kennedy was 12-42. He won the 499th game of his long coaching career on Jan. 10, but the Setters dropped their final 13 games of the season and Kennedy leaves still one victory shy of the 500 milestone.
Kennedy guided three different Division I teams to the NCAA tournament in his 35 years as a head coach — Iona, Florida State and DePaul. But he hasn’t finished with a winning record in any season since 1999-2000 when his DePaul team wound up 21-12. He didn’t coach for two years after leaving Towson in 2010-11 and then resumed his career when Pace named him to replace longtime coach Jim Harter in May 2013.
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