A new era in McAlester boys’ basketball is underway with the naming of Mike Dooney as the new
Buffaloes head coach. A veteran of 16 years of coaching experience, Dooney began his career coaching
boys but moved to the girls’ side after a couple of years when he had the opportunity to be an assistant
coach at Southeastern State. He continued coaching girls with additional stops at Idabel, Stilwell, and
Plainview over the next 10 years but then found a reason to switch back to coaching the guys.
“My son Alex asked me about switching back as he got into high school, so for the last two years I’ve
been coaching boys’ basketball at Rock Creek. I knew about McAlester because we were in-conference
with them when I was at Idabel, and I always thought it would be a really good job. I looked at some film
of them and it appears that they’ll have a lot of returning pieces, so I decided to go for it and here I am.”
Dooney’s coaching philosophy on offense is to play fast, get up and down the floor and limit turnovers
while on defense it’s pressure the opposition and force them to react to us.
