Long Beach State Athletics!: Re: More evidence...

Ancient history, CC. In the age of the transfer portal and NIL, I think it's better to find someone with experience putting teams together on the fly. That would be a good D2 coach. If you're a low-major, you're likely going to lose your 3 best players each year and maybe 3 or 4 more because they don't like the coach. Gotta regroup and find 6 or 7 guys who can come together quickly. Look at what Argenal is doing at UCR in his first year. Not earthshaking but I'd take that in a heartbeat over what Acker's done in 1.5 years...

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Lol. Where did my editor go? spell check time

meant Irvine hired Douglas the D2 we passed on

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as well we hired a D2 coach, he got fired lol

Go figure the one time we hired D2

Whole Irvine hires a more successful D3 coach that we passed on

Ucsb hired williams

Harrington was an assistant

Lol. Itvs hard to get a great coach

I do think it s really hard to assess D1 assistant reaching abilities

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You're the man to analyze...I just look at the bottom line. We have another good example of hiring a successful D2 WBB coach in the local area. CSUF has been awful in WBB for roughly the last decade. They fired their last coach and hired the coach at Dominguez Hills, who happened to win the D2 national championship last year. CSUF only had 3 players return from last year, so essentially starting over. Not only did he recruit a new team, he has them playing pretty well. So far this year, CSUF is 5-5, with 4 wins against D1 teams. They've won against UOP, Cal Poly, Hawaii, and Portland State. Not great competition but would most likely be losses for the Niners if they played them. In Coach Amy's third year, we're getting worse and the players don't look well coached at this point.

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I just do not know that there is a formula at all for this.

success has always depends on recruiting and teaching, still need a recruiter which could be a D1 assistant, a D2, just depends on their connections (& NIL budget lol)

teaching? could be a D1 assistant, or D2, I do suspect the D2 head coaches have 'honed' their craft better, so yeah. but if they can't get players, doesn't matter.

Cal Poly's MBB coach brought along D2 players, so that helped them last year. will he plateau at D1? who knows

Acker is learning on the job for teaching IMO, could he improve, he could, even if people have zero patience for that anymore. Amy looked like she could teach (the little I saw) but not also looks like she can't recruit.

the one thing that we may see is bottom D1 teams not that much better than some D2s, cause the D2 player 'stock' not affected as much, Montana Tech beat Montana last night

teaching does not change, and it's just a massive challenge to teach basically from October 1 to Feb 1 (4 months), that's really hard. Not sure even D2 coaches are necessarily better at that, just the good ones have come from programs they have built up and they probably have an easier time teaching due to likely having players that think they are not 'hot shit', so D2 coaches probably are more developed in knowing what works teaching-wise. The entire mentality and ability to listen verbally with students is an issue academically let alone for sports, just in the way they are wired. Generation so tuned in to way too much noise.

hard for an AD to really assess that quality.

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For low-major schools, you need an experienced coach who knows how to deal with changing rosters from year to year. You also have, not two or three years to develop players - you've got one. Hiring an assistant coach from a P4 or from a top school who doesn't have that experience will not be successful as LBSU. Those coaches think they can recruit raw talent and develop them into good players in 2 to 3 years. That isn't happening any more.

There are several really good and experienced D2 coaches around that fit this description. Look at the successful programs at Cal Poly Pomona, Point Loma, and Colorado Mesa. 2 of those coaches even have recent D1 experience. Will these kind of coaches bring back the glory days? No way, but there's no reason we can't compete in the Big West.

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I was a big supporter of Coach Wright when she was hired and thought things would be humming by her 3rd year. Big regression instead in this, her third year. The first 2 years were decent but those were all Cammons recruits. What's puzzling is they needed to add some experienced players (more than just Pepe) through the portal because they lost so many players through graduation or the portal but only added one. Losing Richards for the season due to injury was a big blow but you can't pin this bad season just on one piece. There's some interesting high school players committed for next season but not the type to change the fortunes of this program. I think Amy needs to recruit more D2 stars, JUCO players as well as hitting the portal harder. She has a bunch of younger players who don't look like they know what they're doing and lack confidence.

Amy has 2 years left on her deal, so we all know what that means here. Write this season off...hope she recognizes what went wrong and hit the recruiting trails even harder. That's about all that's left. For long time fans of the WBB program, sinking this low is hard to take. Maybe we need to hire Joan Bonvicini as GM over the program so she can hire a replacement when the time comes. Smitheran will just hire another SDSU lackey which will prolong the agony.

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Not a single win this season and no improvement whatsoever?! I’ve seen enough! This coach has to go! She’s horrible! Please don’t tell me we locked ourselves into a long contract in typical Beach fashion?! And the men’s coach for isn’t far behind. I see little improvement! Not sure he’s the right guy either!