Part 1 of our Tony Bozzella interview

[Halldan1]

Here's our interview with Tony Bozzella.

Because of concerns noted here last week I reached out to Tony Bozzella to address those concerns. Below you will see part 1 of our long Q&A. As always Tony shoots from the hip with his passionate style. No one loves Seton Hall or women's basketball more than Tony Bozzella and that should be evident when reading the interview.

I ask all readers to reply to the Q&A respectfully and take special note Thursday on how our head coach completes the interview.

Part 2 will be posted on a separate thread tomorrow.



Zack: What are your realistic goals as head coach at Seton Hall?

Tony: To represent my Alma mater Seton Hall in a professional and positive way.

My realistic goals are to compete for a conference championship each year either through the regular season or the tournament and to make a post season tournament each year.

We’ve had four successful years and one year where we struggled a little bit. That’s going to happen now and then.

I think when I took over the program Seton Hall had 4 or 5 straight losing seasons and hadn’t made the postseason since 2007. In fact Seton Hall had only been invited to post season play 5 times overall.

Obviously the sense of tradition had evaporated. One of the things I was concerned about was if we didn’t try our best to win early, we might never achieve that goal. The program was suffering and the inroads needed recruiting New Jersey had to improve.

Being at Iona I knew what was there and what wasn’t there. It’s not a knock on the previous staff by any means but it just wasn’t working out right.

One of the things I noticed when I first came here was that Seton Hall did have some talented players on the roster. I clearly didn’t take over a program bereft of ability.

We just had to institute a system and get these kids to buy into that system to win right away.

When I started here we weren’t targeting a lot of freshman, instead we wanted players with both experience and ability to supplement what we already had. In short I guess you can all them quick fixes.

If we didn’t win right away, we were going to have a lot of trouble moving forward.

Right away we got really good and fans noticed. People thought....“Wow we got really good and we're going to be good from now on!”

I had said to Pat (Lyons) way back that this is a process and it’s going to be a process.

5 years and 99 wins later we had 2 NCAA at large appearances, 2 WNIT at large appearances, 7 Big East tournament wins and a Big East regular season Championship. along with a second place regular season finish. That was very good

Really, the success here was minimal prior. It was what it was.

We devised a plan which my staff and I put in that we were going to try and win as quickly as possible. In years 4 or 5 we’d take a step back.

That said our second step back was 16 wins and a WNIT appearance. Before we got here an WNIT appearance was rare. It wasn’t a regular occurrence.

What I can say about our program now and what I like a lot is in our fifth year we made the WNIT and some people were disappointed. Some have say have we leveled off, I’d say no it’s a cycle.

We return four starters on this team and we’re excited about next year.

To summarize...we had a lot of success early on, more than we’ve basically had in the history of the program. We knew in our fourth and fifth years everything had to go right for that to continue and it didn't.

With that being said, we wanted to take a step forward early. Did we? Absolutely. We won a Big East Tournament Championship, as well as winning in the WNIT and hosting a game in that tournament.

Zack: Touch on the 15 scholarships allowed. Does that make it more difficult for you? Especially with a smaller pool of top flight women coming out of HS as compared to the men.

Tony: I’ve been in the minority on this, but if we went back to 10 scholarships you’d have far less women transfer because you’d have girls going to the level where they belong. Now you’re having to gamble on kids that you hope can play at your level. In fact women's basketball had over 300 transfers last season and more than that number is expected this season.

This is my dream, 10 scholarships for 15 spots.

For instance, UConn says to these two girls, “Hey you can come here and play, but we can only give you a partial scholarship each.” And I can say, “Hey, come to Seton Hall and you can have a full scholarship.”

Now those young ladies have to make a decision.The problem with women’s basketball is we have way too many scholarship for the kids. And while we want to give women the opportunities for scholarships, start splitting them up with other sports. It’s easy to say only put 12 women on your team, but then you might as well gamble on 13, 14 and 15.

Sometimes you hit blackjack sometimes you bust. If you only had 10 scholarships you’re not gambling.

UConn had a girl leave in the middle of the year. The young lady knew what was happening. UConn had added three transfers on their team. If you think it’s bad now just wait, five years from now women’s basketball will have an incredibly high number of women leaving their initial programs.

With us in my time here we have brought in many transfers. Daisha Simmons, Shakena Richardson, Aleesha Powell, Lubirdia Gordon, Tiffany Jones, Jaquann Jackson, Inja Butina, Cole Jimenez names come to mind. Each acquitted themselves well at the Hall but when you bring in that kind of talent players already on the roster see potential minutes disappearing and they leave the program for that reason.

Like I said, reduce the scholarship limit and you solve a lot of issues now inherent in woman's basketball.

 

[Halldan1]

Zack: Why did you coin the phrase why not Seton Hall?

Tony: Why not Seton Hall was because I felt recruits had so many reasons not to come here. The team's not that good, bad location, the facilities are outdated. Pat Lyons has changed all that. Our facilities are great. We’re in Maplewood and South Orange, beautiful suburban areas.

There’s a lot of things to say. Let’s stress on the positive. The thing about Seton Hall....you know what we have is good people. We’ve got an athletic administration that cares mightily. We have a fan base that is supportive. For every negative there’s 100 positives. I understand the negative because that means people care and have an opinion. Otherwise you have apathy.

An example is Daisha Simmons. A huge reason she came here was because Dr. Joyce Strawser (Business School Dean) came in on a Sunday and met with her. Nobody does that but she did. That’s why we got Daisha, because someone went the extra mile.

That’s why I say why not Seton Hall.

Zack: Talk about the transfers from your program and do you think having 15 scholarships is a factor?

Tony: We don’t want anyone to transfer and when we recruit these ladies we want them to stay and embrace Seton Hall, academically, spiritually and athletically. That said it’s unrealistic to think transfers won’t happen.

Do we have a few more transfers come to our team than most in the league? Absolutely. With one you’re going to get the other. But the trade off has been working.

Only DePaul, St. John’s, Creighton and Marquette have been to the NCAAs as much as we’ve been through the new iteration of the Big East.

I don’t like to see any players leave. But they’re making decisions that they think are in the best interests for themselves athletically and academically and I would stress athletically first.

I would love to tell you to go back years past where you recruit freshmen and they become sophomores and eventually upperclassmen, but it’s just not that way anymore. Anyone who wants to question that can just search most any team's roster and see players are leaving everywhere at record rates. Even on the best teams.

Zack: You’ve mentioned a lot of the BCS schools are able to stack their rosters with higher rated girls who may not end up playing meaningful roles for those programs. Does that make it harder to evaluate girls from a smaller pool that can compete at a Big East level?

Tony: I think some of them are and some them aren’t (Big East talent). What we’re doing is recruiting a kid who’s not a top 100 kid because we don't get many here. One in fact so far, with the other teams in the conference getting three others. But we do get top 100 players coming back here as transfers.

With most players we recruit as freshmen we're evaluating potential and sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. That’s why if you only had 10 scholarships you’d be recruiting a different kid with skills that are more polished. Now we’re recruiting some high school girls that aren’t close to finished products yet.

You know there’s a certain amount of luck taken out of it when you're recruiting the top girls. Here you’re guessing a little more and that’s hard. We’re recruiting from all over the country, all over the world. Sometimes what we envision a young lady to be, she’s not.

It’s hard. You’re always evaluating and sometimes unfortunately you’re going to make mistakes.

Zack: Do transfers impact the school negatively regarding academic progress?

Tony: No. People forget that as long as transfers leave eligible and go from one school to the other you’re fine. And we’ve never had a kid leave ineligible. Our academic support is far too good for that.

Zack: What's your opinion regarding the NCAA possibly allowing players to transfer without sitting a year if they meet academic guidelines?

Tony: I strongly oppose it. I think it’s terrible and will lead to even more ladies transferring. It’ll be open season and very difficult on most all programs. I have a lot of experience with transfers so maybe it might potentially benefit us, but it’s still a disaster waiting to happen.

I have fought against it. I have been in communication with the NCAA and they are open to different ideas and models.

 

[Halldan1]

Concerns were posted on the board last week. That's why I reached out to Tony to do this Q&A. Are there any comments on the subjects addressed in the first part of our interview?

 

[hallgrad80]

As usual Tony is a great interview and his answers were very straightforward. There were a couple of follow up questions I would have liked to see asked to get Tony’s reaction.
1. Do you see your program continuing to rely on the transfer pool of talent to the same extent we’ve see in your five years here.
2 . How much support is there among your peers to reduce the number from 15 to a lesser amount .

 

[SHUHitman]

Thanks for posting this, Dan. I can't say I was one of the people concerned by the women's team previous to this, but I was curious what was up with all these transfers. The curiousness stemmed more from wanting to know whether these transfers were playing time oriented or something different altogether.

Not sure that has been addressed and not sure it would be anyway, but it sounds like it's just kids not being happy with playing time. It makes sense and unfortunately it's likely going to get worse before it gets better (for the NCAA, not just for us).

 

[Halldan1]

The second part of the interview will be posted tomorrow. Hopefully we'll get more responses then as everyone will have all the info presented.

I do want to say that you'll love the way Tony B ends the Q&A when the last question was basically address any issues you think need to be addressed.