Mark Downey enters into the fifth season of his second stint as head coach at Arkansas Tech and will be in his ninth season overall at Tech in 2024-25. Downey’s first stint saw him lead the Wonder Boys from 2006-07 to 2009-10.

After guiding the Wonder Boys to their first winning season in five years with a 16-15 record and an appearance in the GAC Tournament Championship game in 2022-23, Downey elevated the program to another level this past season in 2023-24 as he guided the team to a 25-7 overall record and an 18-4 mark in the Great American Conference.

Lauded as the GAC Coach of the Year for the body of work in the breakout season, Downey also led the Wonder Boys to a share of the GAC Regular Season Championship and later an automatic bid to the NCAA Central Region Tournament after winning the GAC Tournament Championship. The regular season title was the 22nd all-time for the Wonder Boys and the first since 2013-14 while the tournament crown was the fifth all-time and the first since 2014-15.

In regards to Downey’s first time patrolling the sidelines at Tech, those four years were certainly memorable as he guided the Wonder Boys to a 77-43 mark overall with 53 of those victories coming in the final two seasons. The final season of Downey’s first stint with the Wonder Boys in 2009-10 was among the finest in program history as they won a school-record 30 games. That year, Arkansas Tech won its first 25 games of the season, attained a No. 1 national ranking for the first time in program history, captured the GSC West Division regular season and GSC Tournament championships and earned the right to host the 2010 NCAA Division II Tournament South Regional.

Following that year, Downey returned home to his alma mater to become the head coach at the University of Charleston. He remained at Charleston for three seasons before moving on to become the head coach at the University of West Alabama for the 2013-14 season. At Charleston, Downey went 60-29 and advanced to the NCAA Atlantic Region Tournament in 2011-12. 

After his one-year stint at West Alabama, where he went 17-11 overall and advanced his team to the NCAA South Region Tournament, Downey became an assistant coach at the NCAA Division I level, serving as an assistant at Bowling Green State University (2014-15) and at Purdue University-Fort Wayne (2015-16 to 2017-18).

After those four seasons as an assistant coach at the DI level, Downey returned to NCAA Division II as head coach at Northeastern State University in 2017.

There, he orchestrated a turnaround similar to the one he had performed at Arkansas Tech where he inherited a Wonder Boys program that had accumulated a conference record of 9-39 the previous three years and within three years had them in the NCAA Division II Tournament after winning the 2009 GSC Tournament Championship. At Northeastern State, Downey inherited a RiverHawks program that had gone 28-81 the previous four seasons. By year two, Northeastern State was back in the postseason.

During the 2019-20 campaign, Downey's third and final season in Tahlequah, the RiverHawks finished 18-11 overall and appeared in the quarterfinals of the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association (MIAA) Tournament. It marked just the third 18-win season in the last 15 years at Northeastern State.