Fresno State Athletics
Raegan Pebley Press Conference Transcript
4/9/2012 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
April 9, 2012
FRESNO, Calif. - Transcription of the press conference where Fresno State Director of Atheltics Thomas Boeh introduced new head women's basketball coach Raegan Pebley.
Fresno State Director of Athletics Thomas Boeh Introduction
"Thank you Paul and again I just want to say this is a great, great day for us. It feels like we have been doing a few of these searches and hopefully we won't have to do them in the near future, but we could not be more pleased with the way this one has turned out."
"First of all I'd like to thank all the folks here including the media and other members of the community. We would like to thank President Welty for his continued support throughout the searches and in athletics in general. Deputy Director of Athletics Betsy Mosher, who has provided leadership in our program and her contacts within intercollegiate athletics continue to be very valuable to athletics at Fresno State. Associate Vice President, Jan Parton, who managed Human Resources for us and does an amazing job of leading us through the CSU procedures and policies and things that we have to do here in California to have a successful search. I would also like to thank the other members of the search committee, Dean of Students Carol Coon, as well as Professor Dawn Lewis who helped us sit through applicants as well. We also would like to thank a lot of the members of the athletic staff and Paul and his staff for putting this together today and supporting us throughout this process."
"As we told you about 25 days ago, what we were looking for in our new head coach. Obviously we have had a lot success already in the women's Basketball program and that changed our complexion of our search in a positive way. The person we were looking for demonstrated integrity and a total commitment to the well-being of our student-athletes, both academically, socially, personal growth as well as academically as we do with all our sport programs. We were looking for someone with a solid background in Division I specifically with a sense of competition at the highest level, including the highest level we hope to achieve in the coming years ahead. As well as enthusiasm and an engaging personality, that will allow this individual to connect to the community that is so important to the continued success of Fresno State Athletics."
"As I mentioned on several occasions we are fortunate that we had Adrian Wiggins did a wonderful job with this program. Some of the women that are here today did an amazing job getting us to the point where this was a very attractive opportunity for many coaches. So we had many with various backgrounds and many to select from because Fresno State women's basketball is now considered to be a very, very good job."
"Raegan Pebley was the complete package. She was an outstanding player in her own right at the University of Colorado including 1000 points and 700 rebounds during an extraordinary and prolific time in women's basketball. She went on to play in the WNBA, so she clearly has a personal sense of what it is to compete personally at the highest level, which is a terrific attribute. And following ten successful years as an assistant coach she moved onto Utah State to resurrect their program after a 16 year hiatus, basically from scratch to start over. You can ask Jeanne Fleck with our swimming and diving team how difficult that is to start a program from scratch. In over a period of time, she took a program from nonexistence to one of the most respected and top programs in the Western Athletic Conference and into post-season play, while her students excelled academically."
"Her efforts have been recognized specifically in the past couple of years as she was named the 2011 WAC Coach of the Year and in 2012 she was the WVCA Region 7 Coach of the Year which advanced her and made her a candidate for the National Coach of the Year."
"She also has a very interesting attribute for us as she shares recruiting areas. She has close recruiting ties in California and she also has close recruiting ties in Australia, and both of those places have been very good to women's basketball over the past few years and we want to continue those."
"I would say personally I think Raegan is one of the most aware coaches I have ever encountered. I say aware because during the interview process she repeatedly referred to her clear thought process, objectives and methodologies of how she improved her basketball team and how she improved as a coach. She thought about it a lot. She thinks deeply about coaching and then she thinks deeply about how she thinks about coaching, think about that? It's all towards the mission of improving her basketball team and her student-athletes continuously."
"So it is with her character, experience, success and her approach to her profession it is my distinct pleasure to introduce to you, Fresno State's ninth head women's basketball coach Raegan Pebley."
Fresno State Head Women's Basketball Coach Raegan Pebley
"I am very excited to be here and I thank you for all of the support I have received. The amount of people and the attention in this room not only shows support of where Fresno State basketball has been, but where it is headed. I want to start off by thanking President Welty, Thomas Boeh, Betsy Moser, Jane Parten and the entire search committee. I feel really good about our relationship and where it has gone thus far which was a huge factor in my decision to move."
"President Welty and Thomas Boeh impressed me so much with their concern and care for student-athletes here at Fresno State and also when it came to the ladies I left at Utah State. They put them first and wanted to make sure this transition was as smooth for the Bulldogs as it was for the Aggies. That message was heard and was a crucial piece in me shaking that hand to make this a done deal."
"I want to thank Utah State. When I started there I was as young as you could imagine. I was young, green, naïve and probably inexperienced but I was passionate and excited for the opportunity and I believed in what Utah State could do. I want to thank the President's and Athletic Directors I worked with at Utah State for letting me grow and letting me develop as a coach and providing me with mentorship. I also want to thank the young ladies at Utah State who I coached and who went through the growing pains with me."
"I plan on building and continuing to build this program and base that around building relationships and transforming lives. This program has my commitment and my investment along with my staff to help these women achieve their goals and to help them become the women they are already on their way to becoming."
"I know there is expectations here and that is part of why I took this job. I always set expectations in my life I want to be the best wife, mom and coach I can be and it doesn't matter whether you step into a program where the coach wasn't getting the job done or a program where the coach was, like Adrian Wiggins. There is always going to be those expectations and they are high and the expectations at Fresno State are championships. This is a great opportunity as we head into the Mountain West Conference."
"This team has had a lot of success doing the things I love to do and we will continue to do. Up-tempo basketball and we are going to get aggressive defensively and it is not my personality to be passive and to sit at half court and slow things down. We will be playing up-tempo and we are going to go and expose the strengths these ladies have and heading into the Mountain West that is what we are going to need. We will keep shooting the three. Fresno State is good at shooting three's and also smart about it. We are going to bruise up our knees and skin up our elbows and get aggressive while looking for our defense to fuel our offense. Behind all those statistics will be a team that cares about each other, the valley, the University, cares about being a role model in young people's lives and a team that will graduate and give back to the community."
On family connections in Fresno: "We've got `em here (in the room). My husband grew up in Redding, California so a lot of his family is close. So we have family here and we're excited to be closer to family. When I moved to Utah my parents lived in Utah at the time and six months later they moved out so we've been doing lot by ourselves. We're excited to be closer to family. "
On what areas need to be addressed the most to take the program to the next level: " Well again, I'm pretty relationship driven. So I'm going to work first and foremost to make sure I form relationships with all of them and make sure that they know I care about who they are as individuals, that I want to understand and know what motivates them, what makes them work, where they want to go with their lives on and off the court. You can't really take that next step in coaching unless that is genuine, that it's sincere. Recruiting is a big part of it as well. We want sustainable success here. Adrian has done a great job, 5 years, wow, that's big time. That blue print is here and the foundation is laid but we need to keep it going. We're on the phones, this is a big recruiting time in women's basketball. We have a big evaluation weekend coming up, making sure that Australia still knows to keep wearing that red and blue that we want them to keep coming up here to Fresno State. Continuing to build relationships with high school coaches, this Valley and the state has some of the best high school and club coaches that you could ask for. There's so much talent there and there's so much that I can learn from them and take from them so we're going to continue to build those relationships and hit that recruiting trail as well. "
On where she goes from here: "What the next month has in store? Well I obviously look to my family because in the next month we will be sort of transient. But I've gone through transitions before, when I was at Utah we started in the Big 12, then we moved to the WAC so I had to go through that transition. Obviously this is a transition, stepping into the program here and the university is going through a transition going into the Mountain West so I'm hoping that my experience will help us to shorten that learning curve as much as we possibly can. "
"I think where we go from here is to continue to work with these women here; they are our number one priority. They want to get better, we're going to get on the court and start working with them. They have weights on Wednesday. We're getting that plan together, we're going to make sure academically everyone is doing what they need to do. We look at the scheduling piece and continue to schedule that way. The dynamic of basketball is great in that we have a couple of months now to really build those relationships and also prepare for our season. There's not a lot of change happening in the Mountain West, there's not a lot of coaches leaving so there is no reason why we can't ourselves prepared now for the rest of the season."
"Keith is a teacher and Joe is in school in Utah so they are going to finish out the school year. You know it's painful to think about not being there to tuck them in at night, so we're still figure out how we'll work that out but that's what coaches, moms and dads do--figure it out. They'll be out here in June full time and that gives me time to get a good foundation here, transition and also set a good foundation for our program. "
On Restarting the Utah State Program: "It was an enormous challenge for everyone involved. I mean you're talking about looking at it from 30,000 feet above. The athletic department, a community that had no experience with women's basketball, so we had to catch up a lot of lost time. I felt that my first priority was to help make the impact on the community and help them figure out who we were, what women's basketball was, what the impact was going to be on the community and what it could do for the community and the women growing up there. That was a challenge but then you know, when didn't have locker rooms, we didn't have balls, we didn't have uniforms, we didn't have players, we didn't have traditions or leadership that grew up with the program.
At the time we didn't have a scheduling philosophy that had been handed down or administrators that were ready to lend a hand and help with what the philosophical and departmental scheduling philosophy was. So the department, the community, myself, and the program grew together. It was pretty collaborative. We had to take baby steps at first and within the last four years, doing it the right way helped us take big steps and go from nonexistent, to pretty good, to good and I hope the next coach will take it to great."
Biggest challenge moving to the MWC: "I think we've got to take the confidence that we are going to be the challenge for everyone else in the league and that they need to be ready for us. I know that we need to prepare ourselves but there's a lot of confidence that should be in these young women and we're going to take that confidence to the Mountain West. We know what it's like to play at Louisiana Tech and when we go to places like Wyoming we're going to be playing in front of, at minimum, 7,000 people especially we both are the top of the league. We can expect 5,000 from New Mexico who knows how to support women's basketball, UNLV and San Diego State have also both done a good job. So, I think we need to be ready to play not only the team, but the atmosphere of every single game when we go into the Mountain West and that wasn't always the case in the WAC."
What Others Are Saying About Pebley
Iowa State Head Women's Basketball Coach Bill Fennelly
"I think the Red Wave is going to love her," said Fennelly, who was an assistant coach at Fresno State from 1981-85. "[Fresno] is a great sports area and they love Fresno State and they're really going to enjoy her as a person and her as a coach. I think that it's a great hire and she is someone that has the perfect mix of being a former player, been a head coach building a program at another school and they found someone as they go to the Mountain West, someone that really understands the area that they are going to need to recruit. She's just as good of a person as I've ever been around and having been in Fresno, I know the people there like to connect to their coaches, and the people there are going to connect quickly to Raegan and her family."
University of Arkansas head women's basketball coach Tom Collen
"This is a great hire for Fresno State and Raegan," said Collen, who Pebley coached with at Colorado State. "I know Adrian well and now he's down here with us. I know that Fresno State wants to maintain the climb to the top of women's basketball. It was important to hire someone that will take them to another level and Raegan is the right choice. She is a great worker and upcoming coach that has been around the game for a while. She is a great X's and O's person and I have no doubt that she will do great with the Bulldogs."
University of Colorado Associate Athletics Director/SWA Ceal Barry
"I'm really thrilled for Raegan and Fresno State, said Barry, who Pebley played for at Colorado. "She is a worker, has a great basketball mind and led us in many ways at Colorado. Raegan's a player's coach. She is approachable and fun. I think it's a great fit and I couldn't be happier Raegan, Fresno State and the players."
University of Indiana head women's basketball coach Curt Miller
"Raegan is a fantastic coach and has an uncanny ability to form great relationships with her student-athletes and get the most out of her student-athletes. Not only was she a fantastic player, but has blossomed into one of the premier young coaches in the country. I think it was a fantastic hire for Fresno State. Raegan Pebley is one of the rising stars in the coaching profession and will do a fantastic job at Fresno State keeping the winning tradition going."
