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Gavin Doty was supposed to be in Texas with his Nike Elite Youth Basketball League squad, the Albany City Rocks, facing off against Cooper Flagg. Instead, the 16-year-old Doty carried his cousin’s casket.

The past two weeks had been a blur. On April 30, 2023, a car accident left Brady Niver in critical condition. Doty learned of the news the same night. By morning, he boarded a plane back to Syracuse to visit his cousin in the hospital.

“I was five hours away from my family, sitting in my dorm room, just a young kid,” Doty said. “I didn’t know what to think. I was just like, ‘Wow, I need to get home to my family right now.’”

Niver survived the next week but died from his injuries on May 8, 2023. The subsequent weekend, Doty served as a pallbearer at the funeral in New York.

Doty’s dream was to play Division I basketball. Niver used to say it wasn’t a question of if his cousin would make it, but where. Doty’s search led him away from his family to the Phelps School in Pennsylvania, where he was solely focused on going D-I.

But Niver’s death reminded Doty that time with his family was finite. After spending a year away, his heart was at home. Doty moved back to central New York, closing out his high school career at G. Ray Bodley High School in Fulton, though he didn’t know if it’d affect his dream.

It’s fair to say Doty’s made it now. After breaking Siena’s 16-year NCAA Tournament drought by leading the Saints to their seventh Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference title last Tuesday, the First Team All-MAAC sophomore was named the tournament’s most valuable player. Back in his senior year of high school, when Doty decided to stay in central New York, he was unsure if that decision would affect his dream. Now, he’s finally realized it.

Gavin Doty celebrates the MAAC Tournament title March 10. Doty was named MAAC Tournament most valuable player and led the saints with 17.9 points per game this year. Courtesy of Siena Athletics

Doty is Siena’s engine. He’s played the fourth-most total minutes of any D-I player this season and ranks 18th in the nation with 36.4 minutes per game. He leads the Saints with 17.9 points and seven rebounds per game, and when Siena faces No. 1 Duke Thursday in the Round of 64, he’ll again lead the charge.

“Gavin Doty is probably as close to me as anybody I’ve ever (met),” Siena head coach Gerry McNamara said after the MAAC Championship. “In terms of like, he’s a psycho. He’s an absolute maniac competitor.”

Doty predicted this. At a preseason meet and greet for members of the Loudonville community in September, Doty pointed up to the MVP Arena rafters and said he was “just excited to have a banner up there: 2025-26 MAAC champs.”

He’s always been confident and energetic. Just ask his mom, Nicole Doty. She spent the first 13 years of his life coaching him in basketball, soccer and lacrosse. As a toddler, she recalls Doty had a penchant for leaping from one piece of furniture to another.

“He was kind of a daredevil and had no fear from the minute he could walk,” Nicole said. “We joked that he had nine lives.”

The indoor parkour phase waned, but Doty’s dynamism didn’t. During the COVID-19 lockdown, he and his brothers went to an abandoned lot near their house, cleaned off some bricks and set up a basketball hoop. When snow blanketed the makeshift court in the winter, Doty shoveled it to keep playing.

Doty’s desire to progress didn’t fade, either. He started playing Amateur Athletic Union in his 14U season with BBA Team Amazing and moved to the Adidas 3Stripes Select Basketball for his 15U season. For his final two years of youth eligibility, Doty joined City Rocks in the Nike EYBL.

But when Niver died, and Doty decided to stay home, his college search stressed him out. The same energy that once drove him physically seemed to work against his college decision. He debated doing a college preparatory postgraduate season, but with visits already scheduled to Siena, Buffalo, Binghamton and Colgate toward the end of his senior year of high school, it increasingly seemed he’d head straight to the NCAA.

At the time, Doty was exploring Christianity further, so he asked his Team Amazing coach, Justin Fatica, for guidance. Fatica has traveled the world as a motivational speaker. He handed out Bibles at practice, and he frequently took Doty and his team to Mass.

“God has given you a gift,” Fatica recalled telling him. “And he wants you to have freedom.”

“I was having anxiety and worrying a lot,” Doty added. “I feel like God picked me up at my lowest points, and it’s changed my life for the better.”

Once Doty eventually met McNamara during his visit to Siena, he did a complete 180.

Perhaps it was that aforementioned similarity the former SU player alluded to, or the feeling that God had led him there, but Doty and McNamara clicked instantly. Before the meeting was over, Doty had mentally crossed off the next three visits.

To this day, Fatica still prays with Doty before his games, and he feels religion has reinvigorated Doty’s confidence and energy.

“He’s worked hard. He’s got the special sauce,” Fatica said. “He’s always been competitive, but it turned to a whole ‘nother level when he started playing for Jesus.”

He officially signed in the summer of 2024 and earned a starting spot midway through his freshman year. He began his sophomore year by receiving Siena all-time scorer Marc Brown’s blessing to wear the previously retired No. 4 and prophesying that the Saints would bring a MAAC championship back to Loudonville.

Five months later, he made good on that promise with a game-high 23 points against Merrimack in the MAAC Championship. After the meet and greet where Doty made his bold prediction, Nicole and Doty’s father, Travis, joked that, given Doty’s mindset, it could come true.

“We weren’t shocked (when they won),” Nicole said. “Anything he puts his mind to, usually, it comes true.”

Now, Doty’s mind turns to Duke’s Cameron Boozer.

They last played 14 months after Niver’s death, in Doty’s final game with City Rocks. The Boozer twins’ Nightrydas Elite won that game by 20. Ten days later, Doty officially joined Siena.

He’s found his place with the Saints. And this time, the stage is college basketball’s largest. But don’t tell Doty how daunting the task ahead of him is. He has his own take on it.

“I am a little delusional with that stuff, but they’re lacing up the same way we are,” Doty said. “They gotta put an orange ball into a hoop the same way I do. So, we’re gonna go out there, defend hard and hope to come up with a win.”

Published on March 19, 2026 at 12:32 am
Contact Peter: peterhradosh@gmail.com