Initial thoughts on Coach Burke

Judging by the general tone of the UB twitterverse I’m about to put out a somewhat hot take.

I’m not thrilled with the hire.

We hired a pretty inexperienced candidate given that the program has won multiple MAC championships over the past half dozen years and had some real success in the NCAA tournament.

The program is decently funded and we’ve known (more or less) for a year that Coach Jack was heading to her Alma Mater.

And the person we hired has never one a single game in a division one NCAA conference tournament. The Spartans had a good season, sure, but if the top accomplishment one have is a single winning season in the Big South I would think some more development time would be in order.

Aside from the time at SCU she coached a handfull seasons at the DII level and had real success there. Getting ranked and dancing in just two seasons of work is solid work.

Maybe the most compelling part of her resume is starting a program, literally, from the ground up. Embry Riddle Aeronautical University didn’t have a womens hoops team before she set foot on campus.

And those are the highlights...

Am I saying that Coach Burke is a bad hire?

No, she might be amazing, I truly don’t have enough to form an opinion. My disappointment is not with the candidate but with the resume.

Buffalo looks right now to be a launching pad for coaches. If we cannot hire people who will stay here because they are tied to the area or school in some way, then we should be looking for big names that want to resume building and move up.

Instead of bringing in an assistant coach from a top tier or big-name school we’ve brought in a young coach from the Big South. It just seems to me like a “meh” hire.

But I could be dead wrong, Alnutt may see something in her that proves to be true and Coach Burke could maintain the success we’ve seen. Only time will tell.