DePaul announced Friday morning that longtime head women’s basketball coach Doug Bruno is stepping down after 39 years leading the Blue Demons. He leaves his post with 786 wins, which is 11th-most all-time among all Division I women’s basketball coaches.
Bruno, 74, coached DePaul briefly in the mid-1970s before leaving to coach the Chicago Hustle in the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League. After the league dissolved, Bruno was an assistant for the Loyola Chicago men for several seasons before returning to DePaul in 1988 where he remained in that post through this season.
During his nearly four-decade tenure leading the Blue Demons, DePaul became a mid-major powerhouse and a regular in the NCAA Tournament, and then kept winning when it joined the Big East in 2005. They made 25 NCAA Tournaments and four Sweet 16s under Bruno’s watch and won the Big East Tournament five times.
The Blue Demons were ranked in the AP Top 25 Poll for 221 weeks while Bruno was coach, ranking as high as seventh in the 2010-11 season. Bruno also had 15 players drafted by WNBA teams, including All-Star Allie Quigley.
Bruno also won two gold medals as an assistant coach for Team USA in 2012 and 2016, and was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2022.
He missed the majority of this past season while on medical leave. He will remain at DePaul as the special assistant to the vice president/director of athletics for women’s basketball.
DePaul now has a coaching vacancy late in the carousel cycle, but many in the sport view it as a great job.
“DeWayne Peevy is a star as an athletic director,” one agent told SB Nation. “He will get a great coach and support them. DePaul is the best job remaining and I could argue it’s the best job that has opened this cycle — it may not even be close.”
One longtime assistant coach added: “The facilities are good and the pay is expected to be solid.”
Multiple sources told SB Nation that DePaul is also committed to putting revenue-sharing funds towards women’s basketball once the House settlement goes through. By not having FBS football, DePaul — and other Big East schools — may have an advantage in the House era. The settlement will pave the way for Division I programs to share revenue directly with athletes for the first time. While schools with FBS football teams will likely push most of those resources towards that sport, institutions without it are more likely to give men’s and women’s basketball the biggest pieces of the revenue sharing pie.
“I think that can be, and maybe will be, an advantage for us,” Big East commissioner Val Ackerman recently told Front Office Sports. “We don’t have football revenue, but we don’t have football expenses, either.”
Duke athletic director Nina King told Yahoo Sports: “In the Big East, their basketball revenue-share portion will be a lot more than what those of us can do who have Division I power football programs.”
The revenue-sharing era could make Big East jobs more attractive than they were, say, five years ago. The Big East only got two bids into the NCAA Tournament this season — and, let’s be honest, everyone else in the league is playing for second to UConn — but its image could change as teams invest more into the sport, which in turn could lead to landing more talented players and winning more games. Bruno knew how to get talented players, like Aneesah Morrow, but he couldn’t compete with what SEC programs like LSU were offering in NIL packages for her services. Revenue-sharing could level the playing field a bit.
“It’s a great opening,” another agent told SB Nation.
One source said they expect DePaul to hire a sitting head coach.
Here’s who might be in the mix to succeed Bruno.
Bart Brooks
Brooks was an assistant under Bruno for 11 seasons before taking the head job at Belmont, where he has amassed a coaching record of 197-67 in eight seasons — a winning percentage of 74.6. He’s taken Belmont to four NCAA Tournaments and has won 21 or more games in every season on the job. His success at Belmont coupled with his familiarity with DePaul and relationship with Bruno makes Brooks a strong fit.
Carly Thibault-DuDonis
Thibault-DuDonis is happy at Fairfield where she’s gone 74-22 in three seasons and taken the Stags to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments, but at some point it’s likely that she will move up a level and test herself in a tougher league. Several Power 4 athletic directors have called her over the past two years about openings and she has politely declined them. But because of the way DePaul is supporting and investing in women’s basketball, this job might be attractive to her.
Carrie Moore
Moore, who just led Harvard to its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2007, knows the midwest well, having played at Western Michigan — where she led the NCAA in scoring as a senior in 2007 — and then worked as an assistant coach at Creighton and Michigan. Moore also worked for several years under Courtney Banghart at Princeton and then at North Carolina. She’s been touted as a talented recruiter, and at the age of 39, one of the best young head coaches in the sport. Under her watch this year, Harvard had its best season in more than a decade.
Erin Dickerson-Davis
Dickerson-Davis is from Chicago, played at Northwestern and is a former Big East assistant coach, so she’s familiar with the landscape that DePaul is operating in. As a Georgetown assistant, she signed four players who would become All-Big East selections. But Dickerson-Davis is an attractive coaching candidate right now because of the success she had at William & Mary this season, where she led the Tribe to their first NCAA Tournament berth and first March Madness victory, topping High Point in the First Four. Simply put, Dickerson-Davis just won — in just her third season — in a place where no coach had before.
Kristen Gillespie
About three hours south of DePaul, Gillespie has piled up a lot of wins while leading the Redbirds. Gillespie — who played for Kay Yow at N.C. State — has gone 155-94 in eight seasons at Illinois State. In 2022, she led them to their first NCAA Tournament appearance in 14 years, and in 2023 won the regular season conference title and the Missouri Valley Coach of the Year award. Gillespie was linked to openings at Wisconsin and Missouri, but this could be the best fit for her. Also, her father Mike played at DePaul alongside Bruno in the early 1970s.
