Deacon Sports Xtra: Five Questions with Megan Gebbia
11/29/2022 12:44:00 PM | Women's Basketball, Les Johns
“I hope that what you see is team basketball, sharing the ball, a lot of movement on offense, more open shots.” - Megan Gebbia
Megan Gebbia was hired as the new Wake Forest Women's Basketball coach in late May, coming over from American University, where she led the Eagles the last nine seasons.
Gebbia inherits a talented and experienced group of Demon Deacons who are looking to improve on their 16-17 record last season that ended in a second-round loss in the WNIT. Deacon Sports Xtra spoke with Gebbia as the 2022-23 season was about to get started for this Five Questions feature.
Where does leadership come from for this team?
Gebbia: "I haven't named captains yet. I feel like I don't have a big enough sample size for that. We had this meeting over the summer with an expert from outside the program, and he came in and asked them to identify certain traits that they see in leaders. It was a really good meeting that lasted about an hour and a half. And they listed a bunch of things that they thought were really important. And he sent me those slides that he wrote everything down, and sent them to me. So I got to hear what they wanted.
"I don't know what's going to happen when bad stuff happens in games. Who's going to step up? But I don't know yet. So, I'm going to probably hold off on that until either right before the season starts, or maybe name one. And then one that we all can agree on, and then go and say it's kind of opened up, we're going to open it up to those that want to because I asked them to nominate themselves that they felt like they would want to be a captain and I had a couple a couple different kids nominate themselves, which is good, because that's step one, if they want to do it. I'm not there yet. It may be going into conference that I will name two or three people."
Did you watch much of last year's team on film?
Gebbia: "I've watched like four or five games. And this was actually earlier in the summer. I've watched kind of what the focus was, what they ran and how they defended. Watch some of the closer games like what went wrong and what went wrong throughout the game, but could help us.
"But I did watch some of those games. And you could see if we work on transition defense more, like if we just get back and stop the ball. And you know, take six extra points away from a team that they were scoring, because we just didn't get back — that's going to keep us in games. I really am coming from the defensive end this year, I'm really thinking we gave up 70 points a game last year, that needs to be in the low 60s. And that's hard to do against the ACC opponents, but we'll be able to shave some of that down and hopefully be in some closer games. But yeah, that's one of the big focuses. I saw. I know, Christina Morra was a big focal point for them last year. So that's a hole that we have to fill. I do believe we have some people that are ready to fill that. Yeah, we have some talent. We have some talent. So it's exciting to see where that talent stacks up."
What level of buy-in have you received from the players and how hard is it to balance the feeling out process while also establishing standards?
Gebbia: "We talked about accountability, integrity, and respect our standards this year, we have to follow that in every aspect of our lives. And accountability was the big one for them. So we've been holding them accountable when things don't go well. And they actually have no problem with it. Because if you establish a relationship with them, and you have a good bond, then you can yell at them. It's hard to do it the other way around. They don't know who you are. Who is this person? Why is she here? Why are the staff members here?
"We've been on their cases a little bit, but for the most part they want to win. At the end of the day, anything that we say to them is stemming from that. They have to recognize that where it's coming from is just that piece. And if you can understand that we still care about you off the court, no matter what I say to you on the floor, nothing changes off the floor. So we're going to help you out and take care of you and all that kind of stuff. So they understand that. There's going to be trying times this year, it's not so great all the time. But it's how we communicate through that. And that's going to be our biggest job is to communicate through the difficult times."
What has it been generally like on the recruiting landscape for you and your staff?
Gebbia: "It's been pretty good. People are excited about helping build a place. That's because you know, you're going to play. There's always a lot to learn as a freshman, but I feel like it's been digested well, and when you walk around this place, and you see everything that's offered, how do you not really like it? And then you've got the academic piece on top of that, which is a plus not a minus, for the type of player that we try to look for anyway, so it kind of falls in line with our philosophy. That's been going well, hopefully we can get into some of these top players and then get them on campus since ideally we want to put a decent product out there this year."
What will Wake Forest fans see this year from your team?
Gebbia: "I hope that what you see is team basketball, sharing the ball, a lot of movement on offense, more open shots than they're used to getting and a real tactical style of defense in the sense of like taking certain things away forcing teams to take the shots we want them to take. Little bit of pace, little uptempo little transition game because with Kaia (Harrison) out there we're going to get some transition looks automatically just because of her quickness.
"So you'll see some fast pace but we may end up slowing the game down a little bit too based on what we run when we run takes time. So it's not something that like I mean, you could shoot quickly in the offense doesn't mean that you always will but typically typically the teams I've had the past the good ones even like our pace is one of the worst in the country. And I don't really care if you're winning it doesn't matter. The fans need to be patient too. But yeah, there's going to be games, it's going to look great, there's going to be games where it's going to look awful."
