Behind the Bench: Jeff Speedy

Entering his fifth season as the Varsity Reds women’s basketball head coach, Jeff Speedy has brought the program to a high-level of play that is attributed both to his coaching ability and the high-level players he has on the roster.

Growing up in Florenceville, NB, Speedy went to University of Victoria to do his masters and be the assistant coach of the women’s basketball team there, where he learned a lot from the head coach there. He discusses the lessons learned out west as an assistant coach and how he ended up at UNB.

Brunswickan: What were some of the main skills you learned from here her [Kathy Shields, member of the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame] to help your coaching abilities?

Jeff Speedy: She’s just a technical genius, so I certainly learned a lot about the game. Things that I had no idea about, you know technical things to do on the court, and with individual players, and with the team and whatever. And she was the consummate professional, like she was just very, very classy, very humble, you know just a great person. So I learned a lot of the art of coaching from her as well in terms of how you deal with media officials, your peers, other coaches, those kinds of things.

B: What brought you to UNB to coach?

JS: Well I was at the University of Regina and we were one of the best women’s basketball programs in the country, we were ranked in the top five in Canada all the time, so it was a great job and a great place to work. But my wife is from Nova Scotia and I’m from here so we always wanted to come home, but we didn’t want to come home just to come home. For me I was thirty-four, thirty-five years old and coaching one of the best places in the country to coach. I didn’t want to give that up just to come home right. So there were only one or two jobs in Atlantic Canada that I would have wanted and would have left Regina for and UNB was one of them. So it happened to open up after my fourth year at Regina so we decided to impressively pursue it and it worked out.

B: What is one of your favourite things about coaching the Varsity Reds and university women’s basketball?

JS: Well, university women’s basketball in general. I think the relationship I develop with my student athletes. I have a daughter and a son, but it’s like having twelve or fourteen more daughters. I really consider them part of my family and you know if they fall down, bump their head, scrape their knee, have trouble with a boyfriend, have trouble in school, whatever it might be, I care and it bothers me and I want to help them. So I think getting close to those players and helping them realize their dreams as a student, as a person or as a basketball player is defiantly the best thing. I think UNB has a very rich tradition in women’s basketball, and in the last ten years we haven’t been as successful as we were in the eighties and nineties, so I think seeing the team improve and having a bit of a buzz about our program again is very exciting. So hopefully we will continue to get better and hopefully with the Currie Center that will create even more buzz and maybe people will be a bit more excited about then they have been in the last couple years, maybe as excited about it as they were in the late eighties and early nineties.

B: Where is the furthest in Canada you will recruit from?

JS: Each of the last two years, we’ve graduated a girl from B.C. Presently we have two girls from Calgary on our team, and had a girl from Regina on our team last year. So we recruit literally coast to coast. We’re recruiting you know B.C, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and Ontario and Maritime girls right now. So we’re recruiting from everywhere.

B: How do you think you will do this season?

JS: I think we’re one of the teams to beat. I don’t think we are the team to beat. But I think we are in the mix with a few other teams, and if we keep getting better like we have been so far this year I think come the end of the season we will have a chance to compete for the league title for sure.

B: How would you like to develop the team further in the years to come?

JS: Well we’re ranked in the top ten in the country right now, and I think it’s the first time we’ve been ranked in the top in the country all year this year. The rankings have been coming out since late October, but before that the last time we were ranked was January of 2006, 2007 so a long time ago, four years ago. I think I want our program to get at the level where it’s ranked at the top five, top ten in the country all the time; every week, every year, no dips, no bad years, no rebuilding years, just that we are on that level and we stay on that level.