Jazmine Young saw all the changes in the University at Buffalo women’s basketball program unfolding around her in a matter of days. The head coach had left. Players were entering the transfer portal. Uncertainty surrounded the future of the program.
But once she saw how Becky Burke planned to stabilize the program as the Bulls’ new head coach, Young took initiative.
Young, a guard who will be a fifth-year senior this fall, helped organize the ranks to help Burke establish her initial goals as head coach. That cooperation became a valuable component in Burke’s blueprint for her first team at UB.
“Doing that was so important, because I am a competitor, and I do want to win,” Young said. “When I first met Coach Burke, that was the first thing that came out of her mouth. ‘I want to win.’ The fact we have that in common, it’s let’s get this thing going. I want to win. You want to win. Let’s figure this out.”
People are also reading…
It wasn’t a halfhearted effort, either. Young’s contributions are part of a reconstruct for the Bulls and for Burke, who replaced Felisha Legette-Jack as the program’s head coach, and a significant roster turnover. Burke and her staff had to build a roster, then they had to start setting expectations for the upcoming season.
UB’s 2022-23 roster has come together in the 10 weeks after UB announced Burke’s hire April 6. The new-look Bulls began their second week of offseason workouts Monday, with 11 new players who have joined the program as transfers, including Ronni Nwora (Park School) from Saint Louis and Kiara Johnson (Cardinal O’Hara) from Towson. Summer workouts will help erase some of the mystery that surrounds an entirely new team.
“We knew we could recruit our butts off,” Burke said. “We knew we could get the talent in here. But I think we’re still in the midst of the challenge of, now we have all the talent on paper … everybody’s really good and everybody can contribute and everybody has great strengths, but how do we get those to come together and play as a unit, now?
“That’s why the summer is so important, because with all the times they’re playing in an open gym at night, all the times they’re getting in here on their own to shoot together, that’s creating the cohesiveness and the camaraderie. Yeah, on paper, you can be as good as you want, individually, but bringing everyone together and starting to form a team unit, that’s the tricky part.”
Constructing a roster
One of Burke’s first tasks was to rebuild UB’s roster after at least nine players from the team that won the 2021-22 Mid-American Conference Tournament championship and earned a berth in the NCAA Tournament transferred to another program or graduated.
Roster turnover after a coaching change in a women's basketball program isn't isolated to UB. According to ESPN, 37 programs have had coaching changes either during or following the 2021-22 season. Of those programs, 12 have had at least seven players enter the transfer portal, and 20 have had at least five enter the transfer portal.
Burke’s goal in creating her first roster nearly from scratch was to find players who would fit the style of play she projects for UB: Build a brand on defense, exercise depth and skill at each position, and play fast offensively.
Guards Re’Shawna Stone and Zakiyah Winfield joined the program as transfers from Glenville State, the Division II national champion, and Chellia Watson transferred from USC Upstate – Burke’s previous coaching stop – where she was an all-Big South guard. The Bulls added inside size with transfer forwards Nwora (6-foot-2), Johnson (6-2) and Kayla Salmons (6-3).
Burke and her staff also recruited a pair of incoming freshmen to join the program, including 6-2 forward/guard Hattie Ogden and 5-7 guard Caelan Ellis.
“To an extent, you go get the best available, no matter what,” Burke said. “But if they’re the total opposite of what you’re looking for, from an athleticism standpoint or a skill set, you’re not going to take them. I thought we did a really, really good job of bringing people in here who are going to be able to play the style we want to play.”
While the Bulls are only a few days into offseason workouts, Burke sees the athleticism, the quickness and the physical components of each player.
A near-wholesale roster turnover, though, produces an element of the unknown for UB’s returnees and for its new players. They’re not just learning new names and faces. They’re learning each teammate’s personalities and tendencies, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and which roles they’ll fit into.
The initial adjustment to a new program was nerve-wracking for Nwora, but she quickly reminded herself that she was surrounded by new teammates and had to work together for a common goal of success.
“It’s buying into everything that’s going on,” said Nwora, who was at Georgia Tech in 2019-20 and transferred to Saint Louis midway through the 2021-22 season. “I was with two other programs and they weren’t a fit for me, so I know what I want now. Being here, having those experiences and being able to fully commit, and throwing myself into it and not be scared about it. It’s fully committing to everything that Coach Burke is giving us."
Burke and UB's coaching staff – also completely new – will lean on the knowledge of Young and forward Ramatoulaye Keita, UB’s two returning players. Dominique Camp, a guard, announced Friday that she will enter the transfer portal after one season with the Bulls.
“It’s going to be one of their biggest benefits, to be a returning player, but it’s also going to be one of their biggest challenges, to be a returning player,” Burke said of having returnees. “They know the MAC and they know opponents; they know the way things are here, at this university, from a lot of different aspects, socially, academically. They’re a little more comfortable than the newcomers.
“But I also think the challenge is going to be, they also know how things have been done the last three or four years. Getting them to, out with the old and in with the new, respectfully, because those are habits they have formed. It’s hard to break any habit in life, and I’m not saying (those) habits are right or wrong, but we do it different now. They’ve got a major, major upside to being a returner, but probably have more challenges than an incoming freshman, in terms of changing their mindset.”
Setting a foundation
First, the Bulls have to maximize the summer and pace themselves in that process.
They're starting small. The Bulls have yet to install plays or determine lineups. Part of Burke defining a bedrock for her program means metaphorically building from the ground up.
“We’re learning from level zero,” Burke said. “We’re teaching basic stuff that I could spend two weeks on, and in some places, skip through this stuff in two days. But we really take pride in details and execution, and doing things the exact way they need to be done, and doing them right every time.”
Burke is in no rush to assemble the details first. It’s like building a house. You don’t construct it in one fell swoop. You raise it over the course of days and weeks, first laying the foundation. In UB’s case, it’s building habits in players. It’s learning the spacing, the steps and what breaks need to be run in an offense.
“It needs to be right,” Burke said. “It needs to be good. And you need to be confident in it before we walk through to the next thing.”
Only a few days into coming together as a group, UB players are learning about their new teammates’ habits on the court and their personalities away from the court.
Refining team chemistry, Nwora said, will help.
“Everyone on the team is so strong, individually, even when we play pickup, you can see that everyone is so competitive,” Nwora said. “But when we get it to where we’re playing as one, and we know what’s going on at the same time, that will really help define us, too.”
Young already sees an identity for the new era of the program, less than three months into Burke’s term at UB.
“Competitiveness and character, along with defense,” Young said. “We all have a deep competitive nature, and that’s going to define us.”