Flip past the cover, and new Toledo women’s basketball coach Ginny Boggess is the page-turner you didn’t know you wanted to read.
Sure, my insta-reaction to her hire on Tuesday was probably the same as yours.
Who? What? Where?
Toledo — which won 86 games the past three seasons — just hired the coach who went 54-42 in her three years at … Monmouth?
NO WONDER SHE DOESN’T HAVE A WIKIPEDIA PAGE!!!
“This is the best hire Toledo can get?” “Underwhelming.” “Yikes.”
The takes from many Rockets fans on social media were fast and — though not quite furious — more than a little bewildered.
They were also … wrong.
OK, that’s not right.
There is no right or wrong when it comes to immediate verdicts of coaching hires, because no one knows. I certainly won’t pretend to.
But here’s what I do know: Once everyone had a minute to let the news sink in — and learn even the littlest bit about Boggess — the winds shifted dramatically.
My opinion definitely did.
Take a moment to open the book, and you can appreciate why it took Toledo athletic director Bryan Blair only four days to appoint a new coach after Tricia Cullop left for the University of Miami.
It’s because the 42-year-old Boggess became his priority target, and I get it.
Count me impressed.
We’ll learn more about her in the coming days — expect an introductory news conference early next week — but the bullet points that lend the necessary context will work for now.
Boggess proved her chops in seven seasons as a power-conference assistant — five at Marquette, where she was the lead recruiter for two Big East players of the year, and two at Penn State, where she was the top deputy — then as a head coach at Monmouth.
It’s hard to overstate the life and energy — a word you will hear a lot with Boggess — that she breathed into a dead-end job.
Before Boggess arrived at Monmouth, it had been 15 years since its women’s basketball program’s last winning season and 38 years since its last trip to the NCAA tournament. The year before, the Hawks won two games.
Boggess changed everything. She led Monmouth to 14 wins in her first year, the NCAA tourney in her second season, and kept it rolling in her third. Last season, the Hawks beat St. John’s from the Big East — not to mention future MAC opponents Buffalo and UMass — and went 14-4 in the Coastal Athletic Association, formerly the Colonial.
Blair called her the total package as a coach and program builder.
“She plays a high-scoring, fast style of offense, and they’re on you defensively,” Blair said. “Likes to use the bigs … [And] you look at where [Monmouth] was when she arrived. She goes into the portal and flips the roster just like that, because she’s such a great recruiter. You start thinking about the current landscape in college athletics and what it takes to be successful. She represents what it will take to make Toledo even more successful.”
That will be difficult, of course, because Cullop enjoyed a ton of success.
But why not aim high? If Cullop’s fine tenure at Toledo should teach us anything, it’s that you ought to dig a little deeper when searching for something special. Do the same people questioning the hire of Boggess remember that Cullop — before she came to town — was 123-110 without an NCAA tournament appearance in eight seasons at Evansville? I’m guessing not.
Point is, it’s best to keep an open mind.
Cullop was the perfect example, and so is Boggess.
I don’t know if she was Toledo’s number one target, like every school insists after a hire, because I suspect there was a reach candidate or two who declined to interview. But of the 15-plus coaches that Blair talked to at the Final Four in Cleveland — and the many more who were interested, including multiple successful coaches in the MAC — Boggess became his top recruit.
“Five minutes into our first conversation, it was like, ‘Wow, she's different,’” Blair said. “What you see on paper is one thing. When you meet her and talk to her, our community is going to fall in love with her, hands down. I have no doubt about that.”
I’m starting to think so, too.
First Published April 10, 2024, 1:52 a.m.
