Hawks assistant coach Aidan Daly (from left), 1976 team member and Hawke's Bay basketball legend Craig Daly, former New Zealand women's basketball captain Jenny Mather, Ed Donohue III, former Tall Ferns captain Di Robertson, Hawks general manager Jarrod Kenny and Hawks assistant coach Kaine Hokianga. Photo / Doug Laing
Hawks assistant coach Aidan Daly (from left), 1976 team member and Hawke's Bay basketball legend Craig Daly, former New Zealand women's basketball captain Jenny Mather, Ed Donohue III, former Tall Ferns captain Di Robertson, Hawks general manager Jarrod Kenny and Hawks assistant coach Kaine Hokianga. Photo / Doug Laing
The trailblazer of American basketball imports in Hawke’s Bay shirted up for the Hawks while on holiday, 50 years after his first appearance in the region.
But there was no big game time for Ed Donohue III, whose fourth time back was more about catching up with old friends, andmanaging to fit in a Saturday morning Hawks session at the Rodney Green Arenas in Taradale.
They were heady times when Donohue arrived first time around as the Napier Basketball Association’s first import.
As a player who’d been trying to get recognised in Pennsylvania and had been injured, he was looking to get into more serious coaching.
No surprise. His dad, Ed Donohue II, was an established coach in the US and Ed III had “been around basketball courts and training all my life”.
Thus he arrived in little ole Napier to get a bit more experience, while teaching at Taradale Intermediate to help pay some of the bills.
Within days of his arrival in late 1975, he was playing in the Schick All-American All Stars, a gathering of the early American imports and playing international ball in Wellington.
“We were playing New Zealand, like THE national team,” he says, recalling walking into the “locker room” and seeing players like pioneering compatriots Billy Eldred and Steve McKean.
“They were just, like, hanging out and having a ball, just having fun,” he said.
History records the “All Stars” won 70-67.
But he was also starting as player-coach of the Hadleigh Homes Napier’s men’s side that would spring a boilover in winning the 1976 New Zealand club championship, and as coach putting some of the blocks in place that would see the Napier women’s team win seven national titles in a row.
Hawke's Bay's first imported American basketball coach, Ed Donohue (left) and fellow and former teammate and long-time American Napier resident John Sumner soak up the Napier CBD. Photo / Doug Laing
Donohue had known little of New Zealand basketball and found it to be just a “run-around” sport with meagre facilities and little public profile as New Zealand indulged its passion for rugby union.
The image is recreated also by American John Sumner, who, invalided out the Vietnam War and having met a “Kiwi lady” abroad, had moved to Napier and found no outlet at all for his interest in American football and lacrosse.
He’d “never really” played basketball but took the game on for social purposes, and found himself also becoming a national champion, as a member of that 1976 team.
“We’d never been coached before,” Sumner said.
For training, the sport used school halls rather than gymnasiums, and the parquet flooring of the Napier Centennial Hall, where most games were played, was not suitable for basketball – “dangerous,” even, according to Napier basketball legend Craig Daly, who recalls players breaking bones and suffering other injuries on the courts.
Nevertheless, the Napier representatives of 1976 played 52 games across a range of tournaments, winning 44.
At the national tournament, the team played about six games, losing to Eldred’s much more favoured Wellington team in pool play, but reversing the result in a semi-final.
They beat Coca-Cola Auckland in the final, and Donohue recalls: “They had four New Zealand team players.”
Donohue found New Zealand a relaxed lifestyle, into which his fellow American basketballers settled well.
He would soon return to the US for a mainly-social-based basketball career, playing and coaching with Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, before turning the focus to business.
He and wife Mary Donohue have since lived in Virginia for 31 years, mainly because that’s where the grandchildren are.
Donohue coached his sons at various levels, and “son number two″ coaches at Fort Union Military Academy, while his abiding association with basketball and the time Downunder comes from “the appreciation I feel from my ex-players in New Zealand”.
Each time he returns, he said he’s “gobsmacked” about how New Zealand has changed, somewhat removed now from somewhere one could get a bottle of milk for “four cents.”
The Hadleigh Homes Napier team who won the New Zealand men's basketball championship in 1976.
“The biggest thing I’ve noticed now is that basketball hoops and courts are everywhere,” he said. “There were none then, that I recall. There were netball courts, but no basketball courts.”
Once aspiring to be a journalist, he follows all sports enough to know the Hawks have had a rising teenage star in Jackson Ball, whom he now knows to keep an eye out for in the US college game, with Ball off to Wisconsin University later this year.
“I’m just a sports fan now,” he said. “I’m 72, got nine grandkids, I like to run around with them. I’ve got to get in shape.”
The first New Zealand national league was in 1982 and a Hawke’s Bay team first entered in the second year, but the only championship for the Bay was in 2006, despite being in eight finals.
Th 2026 season starts on April 9, and Hawks general manager Jarrod Kenny expects to start announcing new signings in the next few weeks.
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter based in Napier, with 53 years in the news industry since starting at the Central Hawke’s Bay Press in Waipukurau. He covers most aspects of local and regional news, including sports.
