PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
The definitive source for all PirateCrew news.
Colin's Q&A is REALLY long. So I will break it up and post something today, Friday, Monday and Tuesday.
Tony is raw, passionate and not afraid to speak his mind.
Here you go.....
Trove: Lauren DeFalco had been with you as a player and coach for over a decade, what impact has her departure had on you and the program?
Bozzella: She was a tremendously talented basketball coach and obviously a fantastic person. I had the pleasure of coaching her for four years and you could not find a more competitive individual. She brought that to the sideline to practice and some people loved it and really thrived and some people didn't. It made her job very difficult. A lot of people that just went to the games and saw her competitiveness and her fire and I think a lot of times, if that was a guy, they'd be like, ‘Wow, that's awesome,’ but since she was a woman, they were like ‘Wow she's got to calm down’ and that's really not fair.
All our success in the past decade, which is unparalleled in the history of Seton Hall women's basketball, she was a huge part of it. She was the key to so many things. It was a thankless job. You know, she was the disciplinarian a lot of the time and that made it hard, it's not an easy job. She was also responsible for bringing in so many great players from Daisha Simmons to Shakena Richardson to Andra Espinoza-Hunter to even some of the great ones we have now. Lauren had a great eye for talent - Mya Jackson was great player, obviously Lauren Park-Lane turned out to be a pretty special player. She saw the talent in them and she did a great job developing players. People don't realize earlier in her career, she was very into player development and as time went on, she took on a lot of the compliance issues, a lot of the academic issues and really corrected those issues for us as well.
She was really a great friend of mine. At the end of the day, we can fight and we can argue, but she was never afraid to give me her opinion. It's hard to give your opinion to your boss, especially when it's not a popular one, but she always had only one thing in mind, what's the best thing for the program? It's never been about her personal accolades.
The last thing I'll say is she could have been the head coach in many other places and been very successful, but she chose to go into an administrative career and she's going to be great there. There is no doubt in my mind that she will be an AD one day.
