On Wednesday, SFU Athletics announced that Clan alumnus Virgil Hill will be the men’s basketball team’s seventh head coach.
“I was impressed with his experience, excited by his vision, and amazed at the level of support that poured in for him from the basketball community across the country,” athletics director Milt Richards said in a press release.
Hill, who played forward for the Clan from the 1989–90 to 1992–93 seasons and graduated with a BSc in kinesiology, replaces former head coach James Blake who resigned after going 38–90 over five seasons. Hill is the first SFU alumnus to take the job since former Toronto Raptors head coach and current Portland Trail Blazers assistant coach Jay Triano, who coached the team from 1989 to 1995, and under whom Hill started his coaching career as an assistant coach, a position he held for six years.
The Sarnia, ON native was previously the head coach of Laurentian University, a CIS school, from 2000 to 2007, and most recently served as the head coach at Collingwood School, a private high school where he also taught math, as well as strength and conditioning.
“What I want to bring to the team is a sense of togetherness and community. When I [played] there, that was the overarching message from the coaches [that] we were part of a bigger family, the SFU athletics community, the SFU community as a whole, and the community of Burnaby,” he said.
Part of that building a sense of community would include reaching out to local basketball communities and visiting schools with motivational talks, but a large part of it would come with an emphasis on recruiting locally.
“The first part of that is having an eye on local recruiting. Obviously, we want to win, so there has to be a balance between enough of the local BC kids, and you cautiously sprinkle that with recruits from other parts.
“When you have kids from the area — or close to the area — that gets people supporting you, because people want to support the local kids,” he noted. “I think when you get some of those kids playing for you [. . .] you’d be surprised at what other doors open in terms of other aspects of support.”
Hill indicated that he will not bring back the full throttle offence that Blake had adopted for the team last season. The style gave the Clan an exciting game, with the team leading the NCAA Division II in scoring offence with 104.2 points per game and never shooting below 75 points (the previous season’s lowest scoring game resulted in only 49 points for the Clan) — but it only resulted in three more Great Northwest Athletic Conference wins than the season before, and a 6–12 record in the conference.
“I’m just not sure that was the right way to go,” Hill said. “We will certainly slow down and have a little bit more deliberate offensive taste to us, and hopefully that turns into a stronger defensive stance at the other end, where we’re not giving up 100 points, or where we’re having to score 120 points to win a game.
“That type of offence just puts too much pressure on your offence because you’re forced to score a lot of points, and it’s tough to score 100 points a game. So I think that playing a little bit slower, a little bit more deliberate [. . .] makes more sense.”
Hill, who has been on the job officially since Monday but working “on this for two weeks or so,” noted that he only saw one game last season, and due to NCAA rules he is not allowed to watch the team play until September, which makes it difficult for him to evaluate the talent he has or who will even be playing come fall.
“I’ll get to see what players are going to leave, who is going to stay, what other players are interested, what recruits are in the mix, where those kids are at in their decision, because when a coach is announced or once a coach is fired, the kids could ask for a release,” he said.
“I have a few kids in mind [to recruit]. it’s balancing [recruiting] with what kids are staying. Do I want to turnover the entire roster, [or] do I want to turn over some of the roster?”
