Sport(s) | Basketball | ||||||||||||
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Biographical details | |||||||||||||
Born |
Vancouver, British Columbia |
August 31, 1915||||||||||||
Died | November 17, 2008 Rancho Santa Fe, California |
(aged 93)||||||||||||
Playing career | |||||||||||||
1939 | Loyola Marymount | ||||||||||||
Coaching career (HC unless noted) | |||||||||||||
1946–1950 | San Francisco | ||||||||||||
1950–1954 | Michigan State | ||||||||||||
1954–1960 | California | ||||||||||||
Head coaching record | |||||||||||||
Overall | 233–123 | ||||||||||||
Accomplishments and honors | |||||||||||||
Championships | |||||||||||||
NCAA (1959) 2× NCAA Regional—Final Four (1959, 1960) NIT (1949) |
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Awards | |||||||||||||
Henry Iba Coach of the Year Award (1960) | |||||||||||||
Basketball Hall of Fame Inducted in 1979 |
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College Basketball Hall of Fame Inducted in 2006 |
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Medal record
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Peter Francis Newell (August 31, 1915 – November 17, 2008) was an American college men's basketball coach and basketball instructional coach. He coached for 15 years at the University of San Francisco, Michigan State University and the University of California, Berkeley, compiling an overall record of 234 wins and 123 losses. He led the University of California to the 1959 NCAA men's basketball championship, and a year later coached the gold medal-winning U.S. team at the 1960 Summer Olympics, a team that would be inducted as a unit to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010. After his coaching career ended he ran a world-famous instructional basketball camp and served as a consultant and scout for several National Basketball Association (NBA) teams. He is often considered to be one of the most influential figures in the history of basketball.
He was born in Vancouver and grew up in Los Angeles. Encouraged by his mother, he had small roles in several movies before he turned ten. It is even said that Charlie Chaplin considered him for the title role in his film The Kid (1921), which was later played by Jackie Coogan. Newell attended both high school and college in Los Angeles, California, and was a classmate of Phil Woolpert at Loyola Marymount University (then called Loyola University). He played on the basketball team.