Want to know how much recruiting matters to a basketball team? Ask Georgetown women’s Head Coach Terri Williams-Flournoy.
“Recruiting is 90 percent of your job,” she says. “You’ve gotta have the players. It doesn’t matter how great of a coach you are if you don’t have the players to back you up.”
Though she is entering her third season at the helm of the Georgetown program, it is the first time Williams-Flournoy has had the opportunity to build a team. Williams-Flournoy has brought in seven newcomers – five freshmen and two transfers, one of whom came from a junior college – to fill out the roster, giving the team 11 eligible players.
“This is really my team right here,” she says. “The first year was what was already here. The second year I didn’t have enough time to get the recruits in, and then this year I was actually able to get the kids in.”
For her first season, Williams-Flournoy inherited her predecessor’s four recruits, forward Kieraah Marlow, guards Kristin Heidloff and Jamie Mundy and center Christine Whitt, a junior college transfer. But starting the job at the end of August put Williams-Flournoy at a major disadvantage for recruiting the class of 2009.
Assembling a college basketball team requires intense planning. High school players are scouted two or even three years in advance. If the rhythm of the recruitment schedule is thrown out of sync, or if a couple of players unexpectedly leave, the effects are felt in the seasons to come.
“You do most of your recruiting the summer before, so we had to play catch up this year [2006] because we only signed one kid, Katrina Wheeler, my second year,” Williams-Flournoy says. “That’s ’cause we was so far behind on recruiting. Recruiting you almost have to be two years ahead of it to be able to really be on board and be able to do the things you wanna get done.”
Besides Wheeler, Williams-Flournoy brought in a transfer, Brina Pollack, but because she came from another four-year school, Purdue, she had to sit out a season. Georgetown was lucky enough to snare a third newcomer in guard Nikki Bozeman after she obtained a release from her commitment to Fordham.
Entering 2005-06, if the Hoyas’ only three losses had been the three seniors who had graduated, Georgetown would still have had a normal roster. But Mundy transferred to Delaware, and two sophomores quit the team, forward Amber Dorsey and guard Rhea Beal.
Suddenly, Georgetown’s team shrank from 12 players to eight.
The Hoyas did their best to keep a good attitude about it, but they could not hide the fact that their team was shorthanded.
The danger of having such a small roster became glaringly obvious in a Jan. 8 game against St. John’s. Georgetown could only suit up six players, and two fouled out in the final minutes, leaving only four players on the court – an embarrassing nightmare to any basketball team.
The Hoyas were lucky not to have any major injuries, but occasionally it was apparent that the deciding factors were fatigue and the shallow bench.
“Really, with Georgetown, it’s the fact that they’ve got eight players,” Cincinnati Head Coach Laurie Pirtle said after beating Georgetown 63-47 in February, “because they’ve got five players that can flat-out play. But they just get tired, I think, ’cause they don’t got enough players.”
Though Williams-Flournoy tried to be optimistic all year, often repeating that “you only need five on the floor” and that an eight-man rotation is “the norm,” once the season was over she admitted that it had been difficult.
“It was a true testament of everyone, because it was a tough year,” she said last week. “It’s tough going in everyday, playing with eight kids. You’re not getting the rest you need. It was tough. It was tough.”
This year, however, the Hoyas are feeling much more optimistic with their new team.
“There’s definitely a different attitude among everyone in the program, and that starts at the top with Coach Flournoy and comes down to us,” Heidloff, now a junior, says. “It’s going to be a different year. It’s a new program, it’s a new start for all of us and what happened last year is over and done with and we’re starting fresh.”
Just in practice, Williams-Flournoy has already felt the difference. Even though the Hoyas had Pollack in practice last year, nine was still not enough for a real scrimmage.
“We don’t have coaches practicing; we don’t have managers practicing. You’ve got players practicing,” Williams-Flournoy says. “That makes a big difference.”
Adding so many enthusiastic and athletic freshmen has raised the level of competition in the team’s usual practice.
“For us right now with so many new kids and young kids, I just tell my kids every day, `I want you to play hard and to compete,'” Williams-Flournoy says. “Right now I want them to play as hard as they can and just compete, just compete. We need to bring back a winning attitude and feel that’s what the program is all about.”
The other coaches in the competitive Big East have noticed.
“I commend their coaching staff and their players on how hard they competed and played. . That’s a testament to their staff and what Terri’s building here at Georgetown,” South Florida Head Coach Jose Fernandez said after defeating Georgetown 71-57 in the last game of the 2005-06 season. “She’s gonna get it done here. She’s got some great young talent, and she signed a very good recruiting class in the early signing period.”
Williams-Flournoy had letters of intent from four players – Zhondria Benn, Jaleesa Butler, Meredith Cox and Kenya Kirkland – by the middle of November.
In her recruiting, Williams-Flournoy emphasizes the importance of creating that winning attitude by bringing in players who are willing to work hard to rebuild the Georgetown program.
“I want the recruits to understand that you don’t always have to go to a winning program to be a great player,” she says. “You can come into a program that’s rebuilding and start that program and be the legacy that started that program: `Hey, I was on that freshman team that came in and we won – we had our first winning season.’
“The past is the past,” she continues. “I wasn’t here. The past is the past. Look at what we’re trying to do right now.”
Some big recruits have bought into the message: Williams-Flournoy has brought in two McDonald’s all-Americans in the past two years in Wheeler and Benn.
“A lot of times when you’re deciding which school you want to go to, you look to more than basketball and academics specifically. You also try to make a connection with the coaches,” Wheeler says. “It can be tough, coming into a big school like Georgetown. Big like the expectations are high. And Coach Flournoy, she’s really helped me a lot getting everything together. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Like other youth sports, women’s basketball has grown more competitive in recent years, which provides collegiate coaches a stronger talent pool than in the past.
“Women’s basketball, girls’ basketball, the number of players playing and the ones that are good has definitely increased over the years, so there’s a lot to choose from out there,” Williams-Flournoy says.
The Georgetown women’s basketball team has traditionally recruited nationwide, but some of its best players have come from the Washington metropolitan area. Forward Rebekkah Brunson (COL ’04) and guard Katie Smrcka-Duffy (COL ’01) are second and third on Georgetown’s all-time career scoring list, with 1,762 and 1,671 points, respectively.
Brunson, who also owns Georgetown’s record for total rebounds (1,093), is Georgetown’s only women’s basketball player to be named an AP all-American, making the honorable mention team her senior year. She has gone on to win a WNBA championship with the Sacramento Monarchs.
Williams-Flournoy’s two high school all-Americans, Wheeler and Benn, are also local products, hailing from Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, respectively.
“The quality here in D.C. – actually I really say the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area – it’s actually very good,” Williams-Flournoy says. “We could actually stay in this area and get a lot done, but because we recruit nationally, we like to do that as well.”
Assistant Coach Ty Evans, for example, brought in two players from the St. Louis area, Jaleesa Butler and Krystle Hatton, a transfer from SLU who played for Evans when he worked there in 2004-05.
The Northeastern corridor also provides a wealth of potential for Georgetown recruiters.
“New York isn’t far, Philly isn’t far, Delaware. Then you still have Maryland and Virginia here, so we’re in a great location as far as a recruiting base,” Williams-Flournoy says.
Several Georgetown women’s basketball players come from the Philly Belles AAU team out of Philadelphia, including freshman guard Meredith Cox. Senior swingman Kate Carlin and graduates Bethany LeSueur (MSB ’06) and Mary Lisicky (MSB ’05) also played for the Belles, which boasts two AAU championships and seven U.S. Junior Nationals championships since 1993 among its several age groups.
Williams-Flournoy may seem to have the ultimate recruiting connection in her brother, the legendary Boo Williams. Williams is one of the biggest names in AAU basketball, running a successful program out of Hampton, Va. In fact, Williams-Flournoy’s first job in coaching was helping out with her brother’s 16-and-under girls’ team after college, when she was primarily working in banking.
Several players from Williams’s boys’ and girls’ teams have come to the Hilltop, including Allen Iverson, Alonzo Mourning (COL ’92) and sophomore forward Vernon Macklin. But Williams-Flournoy says that her brother treats her like every other college coach, holding firm to his policy of staying out of his players’ college decisions.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have the hook-up that I need,” Williams-Flournoy says, laughing. “I was like, `You need to change your philosophy there, OK? You need to tell them to come to Georgetown!'”
Pretty soon though, if Williams-Flournoy’s plan falls into place, she will need no help from her brother to attract players to the Hilltop. A winning record would speak for itself.
Just don’t expect Williams-Flournoy to have too much time to discuss that plan.
She’ll be out on the recruiting trail.
