This post was written by Hatchet reporter Josh Solomon.
The women’s basketball coaching staff added a former Hofstra assistant Monday with a track record of invigorating offenses and recruiting top talent.
Brooklyn, N.Y. native Bill Ferrara, who coached at Hofstra for three years, will recruit, work with the post players and develop the Colonials’ roster with conditioning and on-floor coaching. Ferrara served as both the recruiting coordinator at Hofstra and oversaw its offense.
“With Bill we hired one of the most up-and-coming young assistants who has experience with some of the top basketball minds in the nation,” head coach Jonathan Tsipis said in a press release.
As a coach, Ferrara has led teams to great improvements in their average scoring. Hofstra raised their average scoring from 62.2 to 75 points per game when Ferrara arrived, and Central Michigan also bolstered its offense performance by specializing in perimeter play.
Hofstra head coach Krista Kilburn-Steveskey said in an interview that she was not worried that Ferrara would be switching over to a post presence instead of his usual perimeter focus. The offense that Ferrara helped implement both at CMU and later at Hofstra was similar to a dribble-drive style Kilburn-Steveskey explained. She said he brought a focus on “movement off the dribble instead of off the pass.”
Ferrara will succeed in coaching the post “because you got to be high-energy, you got to be the person that’s getting [the players] motivated by fast-paced drills and getting them moving,” Kilburn-Steveskey said. “I know he will do a great job of coaching the post because again, his personality is going to get him moving and going and he’ll adjust to whatever Jonathan [Tsipis] is running.”
His recruiting efforts are also lauded. At Hofstra Ferrara put together the sixth-best recruiting class among mid-majors in 2012 according to ESPN Hoopgurlz and the 50th-ranked class in the nation by All-Star Girls Report.
The Colonials will hope Ferrara can bring a charge to an offense that carried the team to a 14-16, 7-7 record last year. GW scored over 70 points in three of their 14 conference games. The team were bounced from the A-10 championship in the quarterfinals 74-49 against top-seeded Dayton.
