Dave Gavitt

David Roy Gavitt (October 26, 1937 – September 16, 2011) was an American college basketball coach and athletic director at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He was also well known as the first commissioner of the Big East Conference and as part of the committee which created the 1992 Olympic basketball "Dream Team".

Coaching career Raised in Westerly, Rhode Island and Peterborough, New Hampshire, Gavitt graduated from Dartmouth College in 1959, where he was a member of the 1959–1960 varsity basketball team, the last Dartmouth basketball team to win the Ivy League championship. While an undergraduate at Dartmouth in 1958, Gavitt played summer collegiate baseball for the Orleans Cardinals of the Cape Cod Baseball League (CCBL). He later became player-manager of the CCBL's Harwich Mariners, then returned to Orleans as manager in 1963–64 and 1966–67.

Gavitt spent two years as an assistant basketball coach at Worcester Academy before becoming an assistant coach at Providence under the legendary Joe Mullaney in 1962. He left in 1966 to become assistant coach and then head coach at his alma mater before taking over for Mullaney at Providence in 1969.

Under his ten-year tenure, the Friars advanced to the postseason eight straight years (1971–78; five NCAA appearances, 1972–'74, '77–'78, and three NIT appearances, 1971, '75, 76). In 1973, Gavitt's team made it to the Final Four for the first time in school history. He also served as director of athletics at PC from 1971 to 1982, and was at that position when the school's women's athletics programs were started as a result of Title IX.

The Big East, USA Basketball and beyond In 1979, Gavitt, along with several other college athletics administrators, helped to form the Big East Conference as a means to better compete with the major schools in the country. He became the conference's first commissioner, from 1979 to 1990.

Death Gavitt died on September 16, 2011, from congestive heart failure in a hospital near his hometown of Rumford, Rhode Island. He was 73.

Head coaching record