Last weekend the UC Davis women’s team had a 19-PT win over UC Irvine in the Big West tourney title game to earn an automatic bid to this week’s NCAA tournament. The Aggies had to take 2 months off early in the season but won 8 of their past 9 games to get into the NCAA tourney for the 3rd time in program history. Earlier this week HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to speak with Coach Jennifer Gross about not playing for 2 months and making the NCAA tourney.
As a player at UC Davis you set school records with 448 career AST/300 career STL/163 3PM: what is the key to being a great PG? You need to have great relationships with everyone on the team. The PG is the leader on the floor and has to be a tremendous communicator. You need to take the time to get to know everybody and realize their strengths. It is your job to make everyone around you play better and be better. Sometimes this is done via urgent conversations in the middle of a possession and you need buy-in from everyone on the team to make sure they are all on the same page. It was important to me that my teammates trusted me to do everything in my power to help us be successful.
After graduation you played pro basketball overseas: what is the biggest difference between basketball in the US vs. basketball overseas? The game itself is different. I came from a program where we had “system basketball”, but when I went overseas it was a lot more position-less. As an American in Europe you are expected to do it all. The positives were living in a different country and experiencing a new culture. When I played in Denmark I made really good friends with people who still come to visit me in the US with their families. At UC Davis there was so much pride: I got so tingly when putting on my uniform because it meant so much to me, but in pro basketball players can bounce around from 1 team to the next. We work hard to build a really strong culture here but it was a little different overseas. It was a different role for me but I am really glad that I had the experience. It was life-changing to live in another country and meet new people so I am glad I did it.
In 2010 you married Joe Teramoto when you were both assistants on Coach Sandy Simpson’s staff: what is the best part of having your husband work for you as an associate head coach, and what is the not-so-best part? There are lots of great parts. Being a collegiate coach is not just a job but rather a life. It is a great life and we get to do it together. We try to build a family atmosphere and have been friends with the rest of our coaching staff for more than 2 decades. If I go on the road recruiting for 2 days and then come back and have to stay up late to watch film he will say, “Great: let’s do it together.” We have a really great balance between the job and our family so that both things get the attention they need. The only drawback is that it is hard to turn it off because we are constantly thinking about the team. That is where our kids come in: if we are watching too much film then our kids will come turn our computers off!
You implemented a Princeton-style offense that has allowed you to lead the league in FG% and 3P% during most of the past 7 seasons: how complicated is it, and what makes it so effective? When we 1st implemented the offense we were running a pure Princeton system and it was very complicated: everyone had to know how to do every skill and be great at playing every position on the court. Sometimes it could take half of the season just to figure out where to go. It is really effective because it is just action-to-action-to-action. You can pick off easy buckets on backdoor plays: it is like the dunk in men’s basketball. When we would make a backdoor play it would get our team hyped/fired up. We have tweaked the offense over the past 10 years. At 1st we felt that we needed it to create shots for our team, but over the years we have taken what we really like about the offense and just used certain actions. It lets freshmen come in and have an impact right away because they can just play basketball. We have a lot of freedom so if we do not get anything in transition we can get into a great half-court offense. It has been fun to tweak it every year: it has been an evolution.
You are the 1st coach in Big West history to win 4 straight COY awards and were a finalist for WBCA national COY in 2018: how have you been able to remain so successful over such a long period of time? A huge part of it is having a staff that has been together for so long. We have the longest-tenured staff in D-1 women’s basketball and are a family: we all have ties and really just enjoy being around each other. We have been coaching long enough that everything kind of flows: we do not need to have hour-long meetings about how to get things done and there is so much collaboration. Anytime you see a program with prolonged success it goes back to culture. Great players graduate and you have to be able to get through that with the next group. We have a culture of togetherness/selflessness that is built on great relationships that are built by all the coaches. The older players constantly talk to the younger players after hearing it from the players who came before them. There is not a lot of questioning about why we are doing something because of the trust/buy-in. We are hoping to play our best basketball in March due to the buy-in from the players to come in and improve. It is more organic now: Cierra Hall has become the master in the middle of the zone and distributing the ball. She will put her arm around a young player, explain what is supposed to happen, and help them get better. Sometimes a player might not see a lot of playing time and upperclassmen will just tell them to stay the course because they have been there before. We stay drama-free because we have great people who really care about each other.
You won your season opener back on November 25th and then had 2 months off due to COVID before returning to the court on January 22nd: how disruptive was it, and what on earth did you do for 2 months?! It was challenging to play 1 game after training/practicing and being so excited to compete…and then getting shut down by the county. If we did not have the group of veterans that we have I do not know if we could have done it, but those kids got the team together and were all on the same page. To their credit they showed up every day with a smile on their face and were ready to get better. We improved each week and it was exciting. We have great leadership on our team and our staff constantly checked in on the players both physically/emotionally. The 1st month we were doing strength/conditioning because we were completely shut out of our gym. We could not do a lot and the players decided to focus on their academics/fitness. Once we got back in the gym through daily antigen testing it was exciting so we just tried to keep it in perspective and do whatever we were allowed to do that day.
Last weekend you had a 19-PT win over UC Irvine in the Big West tourney title game: what did it mean to you to win a title, and what was the feeling like in your locker room afterward? Just pride and joy. We know that everyone has gone through so much this year and faced adversity in their own way. All we know is what we had to overcome. We tell our players to just focus on the details and how to build habits the right way and the process of what it will take to win. They really bought into that but came ready to improve every day and we said that good things will happen. To see them cutting down the nets made me so happy for the team.
SR F Cierra Hall was named tourney MVP: what makes her such a good player, and how was she able to play her best when it mattered the most? The layoff made us a little hungrier after being so tired of playing against ourselves and that feeling did not wear off. We were excited at getting the opportunity to play. Cierra is special because she does everything on the court: it has really been fun to be part of her growth. As a sophomore she faced people sagging off her and she got tired of that: now she is leading the league in 3P%! What a versatile player she is: she was a post player in high school and now she can play the PG or stretch-4 and guard the other’s team’s fastest player. She is a 2-way player and 1 of the smartest players that I have ever coached: we can have conversations during the game about switching up a coverage because we trust her completely.
You have only played 15 games this season: do you feel that your team is fresh or untested or something in between? I think that we have been tested. We had Stanford/Oregon State on the schedule that would have been great opportunities for us, but we were able to schedule Oregon and were tested a lot within our conference. Every team presents a different style of play. It was good for us to learn how to play back-to-back games, which is completely different than what we are used to. We have gained a lot of confidence through all of those tests. We have really tried to listen to our players about what they need. Sometimes it is a mental break and sometimes it is just, “How is your body?” We just played 5 games in 9 days but mentally I think that we are still excited/ready to keep the season going. The travel took a toll…but we were not thinking about that when we were cutting down the nets!
How do you feel about being a #12-seed, and what do you know about Missouri State? This is the 1st and probably only year where they will just seed everybody 1-64 without scheduling regionally. We are used to playing Pac-12 teams like Stanford so it is exciting to play someone completely different who does not know us very well. They are a very strong team and have a post-oriented system. They are really good on the offensive glass, which will be a huge key for us. We are hoping that we present some challenges for them as well. At this point we are grateful for the chance to play: there is a lot going on in the world and basketball is a way for our players to get an escape and be with their teammates/sisters. We look at this game as another opportunity to do what we love and will just have as much fun as we can and have the best experience. We will focus on playing hard and having fun.