 "Photo: Briana Murphy '11")
Basketball competed against Rhode Island College on Tuesday. The team finished the 2008-09 season with a 10-12 record overall. This season, the team has two new faces at the helm: coach Jennifer Kroll and assistant coach Amanda Leahy.Both are from St. Lawrence University and offer extensive coaching and playing experience. Assistant Coach Leahy coached at St. Lawrence after graduating from Bowdoin in 2008. At Bowdoin College, she was a four-year letter winner and competed in three National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Elite Eight tournaments.
For Coach Kroll, this marks her eleventh year as head basketball coach at the collegiate level. She served as an assistant coach for Cornell University before assuming the head coach position at Ithaca College, University of Chicago and St. Lawrence. In her five years at St. Lawrence, Coach Kroll led the Saints to a 101-35 overall record and, most recently, clinched three straight NCAA tournament spots as well as two consecutive conference championships. Before coaching, she competed in two NCAA Division I tournaments as a member of Northwestern’s University basketball team and earned a Big Ten Conference championship title with her team in 1990.
How has your first semester at Wellesley been so far?
It’s been good...We only have six returners from last year’s team, so it’s really a clean slate for everybody. We have four new players on the squad who are contributing significantly. The tough part for players right now is our progress for the team is a bit slower because we’re not trying to help just one [class year] assimilate to the system. We’re focusing on all four classes. So I think it’s been a big obstacle for us, but we’re dealing with it pretty well.
How has the team prepared for the upcoming basketball season?
I’ve been trying to use some of [my previous experience at the collegiate level]. I just came off of three NCAA tournaments at St. Lawrence and am trying to teach the team here the level of commitment that it takes to be successful at a national level. That’s a big shift. It’s going to take a while to understand that level of commitment. I think these are the type of students who’ve understood how to make that commitment academically, but I think they are still learning how to make that commitment athletically as well. The team comes up with their slogan for the season on their own, so we’ve asked them to think about that. Their slogan is “All in.” Whether or not we understand what it means, we’re still trying to prove it. I like that they came up with “All in” because we can come back to that during this season. That’s something they came up with; it’s not something we came up with as a coaching staff. We’re trying to help them understand that it’s easy to say that [all in], but it’s extremely hard to do. As a coaching staff, we have to help educate them on what it really means, because we want to back up what we say. What we do is much more important than what we say.
What are the key strengths of this team?
I think the fact that we have a lot of new faces. In a way, because there is a new coaching staff, it could be good that we graduated our strong contributors and leaders last year because it gives us a clean slate as a team. Our team is really young. We only have two seniors. Because we’re young, we’re warmer, more accepting of a new system and a new way of doing things. The system we’re implementing is significantly different than the way we’ve done things in the past, both offensively and defensively, so having a group that’s trying to absorb and is not being resistant to it, is a huge strength for us.
What are some of the significant changes being implemented?
We’re going to be more of an up-tempo team. We don’t have a lot of size physically or a lot of size in numbers. We only have ten players in the squad due to not only graduation, but also an exodus of people who weren’t willing to make that commitment we were asking them to make. That can be a good thing. Sometimes subtraction can be good. What we have left are the people willing to make that commitment, so though we have fewer players, their commitment level is truer. We want our numbers to grow as a team and we will do that with recruiting, but I think the athletes we have in the program right now understand what we are asking them to do and are committed, which is critical for their success.
Are there any areas you hope to especially improve?
Well, I think because we don’t have a lot of height and size, we have to focus on an up-tempo defense, so we have to be in a significantly better shape than our opponents. We have to try to create and capitalize on turnovers and try to fast break. Keeping ourselves healthy will be critical. We’re just getting Katie Martore ’10 from soccer, and I think that’s another critical thing. Katie Martore is the goalie for the soccer team, and I look at soccer and their year’s been inspiring for me and, I hope, for the team. Coach Tony Mohammed, seeing him turn program around in the years he’s been here and winning the number-one seed for NEWMAC [New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference] was a huge accomplishment. That should be inspiring. I hope Katie will bring that to the team, and it will rub off on the members of our team.
What has the chemistry between you and the team been like? Between you and the assistant basketball coach?
I think the chemistry is good—that’s actually a really good point. I think that will determine the success of our team, how soon we trust each other. I think building those relationships between one another is going to be paramount to our success. ..The new assistant basketball coach [Amanda Leahy] came with me from St. Lawrence, so she doesn’t have to get to know me and the system. She knows how to get there. She went to Bowdoin and has been to the NCAA’s before, so that’s been a real help. The only adjustment for Amanda’s been the adjustment to being at Wellesley. She knows my expectations and she’s got high expectations based on where she went to college and based on the level of success she’s had.
Did you face any challenges while adjusting to coaching in a new place?
I think Wellesley is certainly a great academic school, which is one of the reasons why I came here. Academics in my coaching philosophy have been a number-one priority. The only people who are going to limit us from reaching our goals are ourselves, and our success is determined by how much we want to commit to basketball in addition to our success in the classroom. I think these athletes can be successful in both. They are used to being successful in the classroom, and I think getting them to set athletic goals as high as their academic goals will be challenging for us, but I think it’s attainable. I think what [Director of Athletics] Bridget Belgiovine has done in the department has been amazing, as evidenced by the success of our teams this fall.
Are there any upcoming games this season that you especially look forward to? Any that you think will be challenging?
The furthest we’re looking ahead is the upcoming week, so if you ask me at a different time I’d say the next game we have is the big game. I think some of the great teams and coaches are successful because they do break it down and look at what’s immediate as opposed to getting too ahead of themselves.
What is your favorite part of coaching?
I think my favorite part is really not one thing. Mostly, it is just getting the team to get as close to reaching its potential as possible. That’s something that happens over the course of the whole journey of the year. It’s not something you realize until the end, but it’s helping the players accomplish something they never thought was within reach.
Besides coaching, you also teach the cardiovascular fitness gym class. How has that experience been so far?
It’s great. I’ve always enjoyed teaching. [The class] gives me the opportunity to work with students who aren’t athletes and gives me the chance to understand what it means to be a student at Wellesley. It gives me some perspective on what students are going through outside of athletic lives and also helps me to help them create a program with lifestyle fitness habits that they can carry with them beyond their college years.
Be the first to comment on this article!