By Aaron M Smith
Patience is a virtue. It is a phrase we have all heard at one point in our lives. In modern day college sports, patience has about as much face time as the sun does in Western New York during the long winter months. Yet one school is proving that when patience is applied, it can reap enormous dividends. Case in point, the St. Bonaventure’s women basketball and more specifically, its head coach, Jim Crowley.
After a three-year coaching stint at his alma mater, Keuka College, the Windsor, New York native initially was brought to the Bonaventure campus as an assistant coach in 1996 and in 2000 , took over the helm as head coach.
The initial results were less than desirable for both Crowley and the Bona nation. Over the next six years, the Brown and White would total a 53-114 record and just 25 A-10 conference wins during the span.
With today’s beast that is college sports, 53 wins in just six years usually rewards a coach with a meeting with the Athletic Director that might start with something like, “Thanks, coach, for your service here, but the university has decided to go in a different direction.”
Was Crowley’s job ever in jeopardy? “There was a transition period between leadership in the department. When I came in, the decision was made to extend him for a year and let the new Athletic Director, the new guy being me, make the decision about whether to extend him,” Athletic Director Steve Watson explained.
For the Bonnies’ AD, one of his favorite stories surrounds the first opportunity he got to watch Crowley & Co. in action. “The first game I saw our women’s basketball team play was Andrea Doneth and Dana Mitchell’s freshman year. We played up at Michigan. We beat them on their home court, a Big Ten team. They weren’t the best team in the Big Ten, but at that point we weren’t the best team in the A-10 either. I saw the way the kids responded to each other, the way they played. They shared the ball; they genuinely wanted the other kid to do well. They wanted success for their teammates,” Watson reminisced. “We outworked them, we outcoached them, we had a better team, better chemistry. I remembered sitting in the stands thinking – people had talked about the biggest decision that I was going to face was what I was going to do about the women’s basketball program. I was sitting in the stands thinking that this was going to be an easy one (decision).”
The 2006-2007 campaign brought a 16-15 record and new sense of hope. So what changed? Something had to change, right? For Crowley the inspirations taken from reading Moneyball have been well documented. But how did it translate to basketball and ultimately, results?
For starters, there was a change in recruiting styles. Gone was the idea of recruiting the best athletes that were available. The approach became recruiting student athletes who fit the new Bonaventure style of play, players who may not have been a perfect fit for other schools, but fix exactly into the Bonnies’ program.
“I always wanted to have a group of kids that would be tough to guard because they could all play together, but I never really knew how to do that. You think when you are a young coach, you have everything figured out. I really evaluated how we could do that, and I really evaluated myself,” Crowley explained. “At the time, I had two assistants, who were really part of the program, Courtney Mattingly, who played for us, and Jessie Fleming, who was our manager. They were really truthful with me about a few things that we needed to correct and improve on, and they did a great job of going out and getting players.”
Also changed was the style of play. The focus became a half-court style of play that was predicated on an offense that is run with a purpose, a philosophy that not only leads to points on offense, but also aids in the transition of defensive position. Defensively, the Bonnies’ philosophy changed, focusing on eliminating opponents’ baskets through open transition, forcing teams to play in a half court game and ultimately reducing the number of opportunities opponents have to put points on the board.
“Our whole philosophy is we may not be able to wear you out because we are so good in the first ten, but we can wear you out because we are good in the last ten,” Crowley confirmed. “It became methodical at times, and I think we are still labeled as that. I don’t think that is overly fair, not with this group. But it’s really about making people work on both ends.”
Yes, the approach can be construed as methodical. The results, however, are undeniable. Starting with the 2006 season, the program has risen to new heights: 5 straight seasons with a record over .500, trips to the WNIT, and 4 straight seasons with at least 20 wins. The 2011-2012 season has already brought the program’s first national ranking, its first A-10 regular season title, and the story hasn’t even come close to finishing.
But was the change seamless? Coach Priscilla Edwards, who is in her third year as an assistant coach for the Brown and White and also played for Coach Crowley, remembers a transition. “My first couple of years when I played for him (Crowley), he was still developing how he wanted to play, still figuring things out. We would press, trap, play zone, do all kinds of things, and weren’t quite able to find what worked for us,” Edwards reminisced.
“Right around the summer of my junior year was right around the time the assistants at the time (Mattingly and Fleming) brought the idea of back line defense and playing a fiv- out style. Coach already had thoughts of doing that, so they kind of combined and said this is how we were going to play. The first year it was an adjustment of just learning rules and certain things, not shooting the ball at anytime, working the ball around and things like that. On the defensive end forcing easy scores, and not taking risks. I was so used to going for steals and here we were playing solid defense, making people take contested shots. The next year, we were comfortable and the success started to come with it.”
But with any basketball philosophy, it is only as good as the players. As Coach Crowley puts it, “It is all great in theory, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have players, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t have players who will buy into it.” Players like Doneth, Mitchell, Katelyn Murray, and current Bona players like Jessica Jenkins, Megan Van Tatenhove, Armelia Horton, Alaina Walker and others.
However, if you ask the players, they may respectively disagree. “He (Coach Crowley) does such a great job with us, not only focusing on what we need to do as a team, but even individually,” junior point guard Alaina Walker explains. “He really keys in and focuses on what we all do the best. He made this system of creating how one person can do this well, the next person does this well and meshing it together.”
“He (Crowley) cares about everything. He cares so much about when you are down or even when you are happy,” redshirt senior guard Armelia Horton confirmed. “He will come to the side and talk to you. I think that is what attracts me the most. He just cares.”
“He knows our strengths and our weaknesses. He keys on doing more of our strengths then reverting back to our weaknesses. If we do have weaknesses, he wants us to build on them and make them strengths,” Walker added.
Is there any chance the recent success goes to the players’ heads? “Not for one second,” Cece Dixon explains. “He (Coach Crowley) treats every game like it is the last game of our season. No matter who the opponent is, no matter what their rank is, no matter what their overall wins and losses are. He makes sure to remind us every game and every practice – once we relax that is when the unexpected can happen,” the sophomore guard explained.
Nobody knows that what the future will hold, but the denizens of the Reilly Center can rest assured that the Bonaventure program is in the right hands. For Bonaventure, patience truly is a virtue.
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