At The Point with Greg Gamble : Head Coach Felisha Legette
Felisha Legette Makes History at The University of Buffalo!
Six seasons. 119 wins. 76 losses. 5 straight winning seasons. 2 Mid-American Conference Championships. 2 NCAA appearances. 1 National Invitational Tournament appearance. A Sweet 16 appearance. Named Western New York’s top 100 most influential women. Mother to George Washington University’s student-athlete David Maceo Jack. Wife of David Jack. Former Syracuse Women’s Basketball standout.
To truly put the accomplishments of Head Coach Felisha Legette-Jack into perspective, you have to consider the state of the Women’s program before she arrived.The Bulls were 9-22 the season before Legette-Jack began coaching in Buffalo. The program had only one post-season appearance in its school history and were consistently at the bottom of the conference standings and expectations.
Coach Legette-Jack has managed to infuse her blue collar, no excuse attitude into the program and has been extremely successful with welcoming the right staff and student-athletes that fit the mold of how she approaches the game of basketball, academics and life. A major reflection of this sentiment is her teams cumulative GPA. Coach Legette-Jack Women’s team has posted 9 straight semesters of a team GPA of 3.0 or higher. She’s also managed to coach at least one player from her team in all 6 seasons to an All-Conference honor.
To say that the University at Buffalo’s Women’s team trip to the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournaments Sweet 16 was a Cinderella story, is an insult. Coach Legette-Jack has led the charge with a steady, disciplined, and focused approach that would produce results at any level. For the first time in school history in both the Men’s and Women’s programs, the Women’s team received an at large bid as an 11th seed into the NCAA Tournament after falling to conference rival Central Michigan in the Mid-American Conference Championship game. The team traveled to Tallahassee, FL where they played the no. 6 seed, South Florida, and came out on top in a deciding victory of 102-79 for the Women’s program first ever NCAA Tournament victory.
The Bulls showed out in another definitive victory over no. 3 seed, Florida State, earning them the programs second NCAA Tournament victory and a trip to the Sweet Sixteen, something that had never been done between both the Men’s and Women’s programs. There they would lose to no. 2 seed South Carolina in a
valiant effort, but not without winning the spirit and support of all of Western New York.
As a community, let’s take this time to celebrate Head Coach Felisha Legette-Jack on her monumental accomplishments as both an exemplary example of what it means to be a professional through accountability and high standards, but also as an African American women representing much more than just our community. She represents the attitude of excellence, grit, stick-to-itness, and magic that women of color all across the globe exude but are under appreciated and unrecognized for. Felisha Legette-Jack, we salute you on your excellent tenure at The University at Buffalo and wish you much more success!
