UVA Basketball alum Jenny Boucek would obviously be somebody whose agent you’d want to contact about the coaching vacancy in the UVA women’s hoops program.
I just don’t know, if I’m Boucek, that I’d have interest.
Boucek has been working diligently toward getting herself in position for a head coach job in the NBA, which I can foresee coming to fruition with her current employer, the Indiana Pacers, where her boss, another UVA Basketball alum, Rick Carlisle, has been advocating for her.
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Taking a college job would only complicate things for Boucek, whose coaching experience is entirely at the pro level – 18 years as an assistant and head coach in the WNBA, the last nine in the NBA.
Boucek would have to assemble a staff of experienced college coaches just to be able to recruit, and do so on the fly – with the transfer portal open as of this morning, and Boucek under contract with the Pacers through the end of the regular season, which concludes on Sunday.
Carlisle, being an advocate for Boucek, and an alum, would probably be willing to let her out of the last week of her deal.
The Pacers are tanking as it is.
They could move a guy from the video room to sit on the bench beside Carlisle for the last couple of games.
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I can see the argument that, hey, if she wants to get an NBA head coaching job, success at the college level could help her out there.
And then I see the flip side of that: Dawn Staley gets interviews for NBA jobs, but the first question always is, how does doing what you’ve been doing in college translate to the NBA?
NBA front offices hire people who have experience in the NBA environment, and Boucek has plenty of that.
There’s also the clear risk that things wouldn’t work out for Boucek at UVA, and it’s not hard to see how that could be the case.
Again, all of her time as a coach has been in the WNBA and NBA; she’d have no time to build a roster for her Year 1, meaning, the pressure would already be on to do exponentially better in Year 2 the moment she would take the job.
And then there’s this flip side for Carla Williams: do you really want to hire somebody whose dream job is another job?
If I’m Ms. Williams, I consider the UVA job to be the best one on the market this spring; I’m doing some seriously sped up speed-dating with the top candidates in the college game
She owes Jenny Boucek’s agent a call or email, but I wouldn’t expect it to get past that.
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Chris Graham
