BUFFALO, N.Y. — "She's coming home."
That is how the Syracuse women's basketball team announced Saturday that it had hired former University at Buffalo coach Felisha Legette-Jack as its new coach.
“I’m coming home! These words bring me great joy,” Legette-Jack, a Syracuse native, said in a statement Saturday.
Back in November, Legette-Jack became the first female athlete at Syracuse to have her jersey number retired.
"I was that young kid that looked up the hill that hoped one day that I get an opportunity to get up that hill," Legette-Jack told 2 On Your Side last summer when the school made the jersey announcement.
"I just said maybe one day if I could play the game at a high level, they would chose me, and I could represent the Legette family up that hill."
She became one of the top players in New York and attended Syracuse for four years. She left there ranked eighth in program history with 1,526 points and fourth in rebounds at 927. She played there from 1984 to 1989.
Legette-Jack has guided three Division I programs to a combined 13 winning seasons, nine postseason berths and six 20-win seasons and has a 343-279 career record. She spent the past 10 years at Buffalo building the women’s program into a contender in the Mid-American Conference.
The Bulls appeared in four NCAA Tournaments and in 2018 reached the Sweet 16. She also was head coach at Hofstra and Indiana and served as an assistant at Boston College, Michigan State, and Syracuse.
“My goal is simple — pursue championships in the classroom and on the basketball court," Legette-Jack said. “We will work tirelessly to help our team understand that character will always be first, academics will be a close second and we will find the best athletes in the world to make you all proud.”
She inherits a troubled program that finished the 2021-22 season at 11-18 overall and 4-14 in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Read was placed in a difficult position three months before the season began. He was tabbed to replace Quentin Hillsman after his former boss resigned amid allegations by several former members of the program of bullying, threats and unwelcome physical contact.
Associate head coach since 2013, Read took over a program that was pretty much stripped bare. Eleven players transferred after the 2020-21 season and Hillsman left last August during an investigation into his coaching practices after 15 years of building the Orange into a nationally ranked program that reached the national championship game in 2016.