By Graceanne Gershner
Women’s Basketball Coach Bryan Harvey has been named USA South’s 2017 Coach of the Year (COY). This is his fifth time being honored with this award; he was also honored in 2007, 2012, 2013, 2014. Harvey said, “It is an honor to be recognized by your peers. It means a lot and makes you feel like the hard work that you, your assistant coaches, and the players are putting into what you do is showing up to those outside of the program. I am so proud of our program and the people in it. I want the rest of the world to see the good that I see in our players and the support staff that make us the program that we are.”
For each of the 5 COY titles, Harvey and his team also went on to earn regular season championship titles. Despite the award, Harvey said, “Winning COY is way more about our team success than it is ever about me. I just get recognized based on the success of the team. So to me it is a team award more so than an individual award.”
This season Harvey had a smaller team than he has had in the past few years, but this didn’t stop them from continuing to have success.
“We were a small group this year,” Harvey said. “That was not by design, we obviously would have liked to have a bigger roster. With that being said, it is important to me to find the right fit players to help move our culture forward. Culture is very big for me and I would rather have 9 players that buy in and do things the right way than to have a full roster with players that don’t buy in and suck the life out of a program. I think we were able to have success because we had a group that believed in what we were trying to do and worked together to help us accomplish the goals that we had set for ourselves.”
Harvey credits the team’s success to his former players, current players, and assistant coaches Adam Crawford and Karen Harvey. He believes the way they work together helped them achieve the success they enjoy do today. “The players that came before this current group have laid the foundation to what is expected and how we are going to work,” Harvey said. “The current players are working hard to carry on that tradition and to continue to move the program forward. I think the connection between the former players, the current players, and our future players is so very important to the success of our program.”
The team went 18-9 this year and all nine players will return next year; Harvey is looking for a good set of freshmen who will add to what the team has now. “A lot of what we do next year will depend on how hard our kids choose to work over the summer,” Harvey said. “I hope they will put in the work and that they come back to school in great shape and ready to go.”