Becoming a team

Before preseason practice started, as head women’s basketball coach Tamika Williams-Jeter looked forward to the coming season, the view was murky.

“This may be the most talented team I’ve coached,” she said then. “But they haven’t played together.”

She’s not the only basketball coach facing that uncertainty. Some rosters are entirely new. “Half ours is,” she said. “They’ve been here only three months.”

The flexibility student-athletes now have in transferring offers them freedom. But also, anxiety. They may like where they are, but an unknown place may have more money. And having players who don’t have much experience with each other changes a team’s dynamics.

“No longer are there experienced players raising the kids. They are just getting to know each other,” she said.

Williams-Jeter has been coping with the new transfer rules since her first year at UD. And each year since has brought something new. NIL. Lawsuits. Collectives. Revenue sharing. Moving from players receiving the cost of attendance to being paid by the school.

She also has seen changes over the years in how coaches relate to players. “I can’t coach them the wayI was coached,” she said, reflecting on her college playing days with coach Geno Auriemma at Connecticut, where she played on two national championship teams and set the NCAA record for career field goal percentage (70.3%).

“When Geno said, ‘Get over there and set a screen,’ you went over there and set a screen,” she said. “As kids, we didn’t question our parents and teachers. We were raised on fear.”

Young people today ask questions. They may want to know why they should set a screen. “Trust doesn’t come easy with this generation,” Williams-Jeter said.

Players being unfamiliar with each other has occasioned a lot of off-court relationship building: rope courses, games, book discussions, temperament assessments, going out to eat together.

"Education is important. It was for me."

“When I was young, I didn’t want my coach to know much about me,” Williams-Jeter said. “But I have them over to my house.”

They’ve even met the famous Dayton artist and educator Bing Davis, who himself had Williams-Jeter’s mother as a teacher.

“Education is important. It was for me.”

And it is for this year’s women’s basketball players whose majors include criminal justice, economics, education, entrepreneurship, health sciences and sociology. They follow a team that last spring had a 3.46 GPA. 

Photo courtesy UD Athletics.