As the Houston Cougars men’s basketball team made their run to the national championship game in 2025, a Cullen College of Engineering graduate was on the sidelines and in the locker room as part of the coaching staff.
Matthew McDonald graduated from the Industrial Engineering program in 2019. With the Cougars, he served as student manager from 2017 to 2019, before earning a promotion to assistant video coordinator (2019 to 2021). After serving as Lamar University’s video coordinator for a year, he took that role on Houston’s staff starting with the 2022–23 season.
McDonald said it was a combination of an academic scholarship offered by UH and the results of an engineering survey he took in an AP Physics course at Friendswood High School that made him enroll.
“I wanted to pick a major that was versatile and could provide different opportunities after college, so I decided Industrial Engineering would be the best fit,” he said.
Basketball was always a passion for McDonald though — He grew up playing the game, and his first two years at UH, he was a constant presence at the campus rec center.
“I had a passion, I just didn’t know how to use it yet. I had been praying that God would lead me into something I truly loved and towards the end of my sophomore year, a student manager position was open with UH,” he said.
“I had a friend, Daniel Hixon, who was a manager at the time, and I knew the assistant video coordinator Charles Allen [now on the New York Knicks coaching staff] from playing at the rec center. So, those two helped get me connected to my eventual coaching mentor in K.C. Beard. Within the first two weeks I knew God had answered my prayer and that coaching basketball would be the route He wanted for me in life.”
When it came to balancing academics and the pursuit of his coaching career, McDonald identified Randal Sitton as someone who provided him with support and encouragement, pointing out that NFL Hall of Fame coach Tom Landry had an Industrial Engineering degree.
“The thing that IE taught me was to look at what I am currently doing and how can I improve things and allow for a more efficient process,” McDonald said. “This can be something as little as the drills we do, offensive and defensive tactics, or how we use our analytics team to support the things we emphasize and believe in.”
For the Cougars, McDonald tries to optimize his coaching area — video — as much as possible.
“The question for me is always how I can help Coach Kelvin Sampson maximize the team’s learning while being efficient in the clips I use,” he said. “There’s a balance. Some edits should be longer, while others are shorter depending on the teaching point at hand.”
Thanks to the preparation that Sampson has done over the past few years, McDonald said he didn’t notice anything especially different about the 2024–25 team. The emphasis was on “focusing us to be where our feet are and block out all external factors.” But there’s only so much you can prepare for the atmosphere of a frenetic crowd of 68,252 people.
“The first ‘wow’ factor for me was when we walked out to the floor in the Alamodome for the Duke game,” McDonald said. “It was a surreal experience to play in front of that many people. Looking back, it was such a fun and memorable run that I will cherish for a long time.”
Long-term, McDonald wants to be a head coach. In 2024, he served as an assistant coach for the Basketball Tournament (TBT), and he was the head coach of the Forever Coogs this year. TBT is an open-invitation, single-elimination contest each summer, with the winners splitting $1 million. McDonald coached the team to the Sweet Sixteen this year, losing by three to the Aftershocks — the eventual tournament winner.
“TBT was a really great experience for me. It was a chance for me to put into action all that I had learned from Coach Sampson and Coach Brooks, who I worked under at Lamar University,” McDonald said. “I loved every second of it and worked with some great coaches in Lawrence Paye and Leron Barnes. It was fun to coach some of the guys who were here when I was a manager and the assistant video coordinator.”
Maybe in a reflection of his analytical background and IE degree, McDonald said he’s focused on taking incremental steps forward in his career.
“My ultimate goal is to be a head coach, but my next goal is to become an assistant coach and to keep moving up the coaching ranks,” he said. “The thing I love about coaching is the relationships you make with each player, their families and the other coaches I have worked with. God has given me an incredible journey so far and I am grateful that He chose this path for me.”