Head Coach - Ricky TylerJune 18, 2022"Upon getting the job one of my very first basketball related moves was the hiring of Scott Simmons to be our Strength and Conditioning Coach. Scott was highly recommended to me by the Strength and Conditioning Coach from the Alabama basketball team. To play the system I want my players need to be extremely well conditioned. Scott immediately went to putting together individual training routines for each player. I provided my fair share of input into the conditioning regiment as not only does it play a major role in getting the players in shape to play my system, but it is aligned with my player development philosophy. As a college coach I am a dream maker, players at this level have dreams of playing at the next level whether that is the NBA, G-League, or overseas. Each player has been given a weight and body fat goal which is based upon their heights as we're trying to give them a target for what they will have to physically be playing at the next level.
I decided to keep the assistants from the previous regime on board, they have a rapport with the returning players, and they know the Northeast area in terms of recruiting. So far, they have been very open to learning my system so they can better coach our players in it. We've been spending much of our time planning our recruiting strategy. We have two scholarships available, so we have to really lock in on the types of players who best fit our system.
In terms of the type of player I'm looking for the very first thing is shooting, whether that is in the midrange or from three-point land. We are going to try to space the court and the best way of doing so is having plenty of shooters. Second, I want high IQ players, offensively I'm not big on calling plays, it is more about flow which means players have to be able to read and react to what they are seeing on the court from a defense. Finally, we are going to look for players who can play multiple positions, that will give us a lot of lineup options to create mismatches that will benefit us. I call it the Mikel Bridges blueprint; he was the most versatile player I ever coached. Personality wise I don't need players to be choir boys, but I have no interest in recruiting bad apples no matter how talented they might be. Locker room killers have no room on my team. Academics are very important to me, if a recruit is lazy in the classroom than I'm not interested. If a recruit isn't willing to put the work in the classroom to be a decent student than they probably won't put in the work required on the basketball court.
Dynasty House RulesIt's been a while since I've played a DDSCB game so the difficulty recruiting wise has been set to hard, didn't think I'd be ready for the Hardest level of recruiting.
I won't cut low rated Scholarship players just for the sake of opening a Scholarship to sign a higher rated recruit or transfer.
In terms of the coach character, if he is successful at Buffalo, he won't leave to take a mid-major job, it will have to be a coaching job at a Power Five type university.
The transfer portal will be used but it won't be utilized as a quick fix, any transfers brought in will fall in line with the preferences of the coach.
In older DDSCB games I played the quickest fix I remember to build smaller programs was to recruit the JuCo pool hard, I will recruit JuCo players, but they will be targets realistic to where the school is located - what that means as an Atlantic East area school I won't recruit a random West Coast JuCo player.
The games I will actually coach are conference tournament games, postseason tournament games, ranked team vs ranked team regular season games, and non-conference rivalry games.
During the season my write-ups will be monthly ones until conference tournament time.
