Allison Guth is entering her second season as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for the women's basketball team, and she's already taken major strides to bring some of the country's best high school players to Evanston. This year's freshman class includes espnW Top 100 recruits Nia Coffey and Christen Inman. North by Northwestern caught up with her and discussed what has led to her quick success on the recruiting trail.
How is your relationship with the players different from Coach McKeown's or some of the other assistants'?
I think I really have a passion for what I do, and I love it, so getting to work with these young women is really more of an honor. I love being a mentor to them. We have a really good time, but I have high expectations for them when they're on the court. I think we have a really authentic and real relationship. I love these guys. I think they're like an extended family for me. I don't know if it's different for the other assistants and Coach [Joe] McKeown, though. We all love them.
Does it help to have prior relationships with the players since you recruited so many of them?
It does. It really does, because in the recruiting process, you get to know what makes that kid tick. You get to see them in their high school environment as well as their AAU environment. You get to talk and build relationships with a lot of their coaches and their family members. You really get an insight on really how to coach them when they get here. It's a huge advantage with getting to know them through the recruiting process.
In looking at your roster, I noticed that you have a lot more players from out-of-state rather than in-state. Has that been an emphasis to go out far and wide to find players?
We would love to keep home talent in Chicago, in the suburbs, everywhere in Illinois at home. We would love the opportunity. We are "Chicago's Big Ten Team," so we're always going to recruit Chicagoland kids, but we're also going to recruit the best kids in the country. If we have to go outside of Illinois, outside of the country itself to find players internationally and nationally, that's what we're going to do, and we've found a lot of success. Right now, our team is really diverse in going from the west coast, east coast, south, north, everywhere, Israel, Canada. We've found a lot of success in different places.
When you're building relationships with recruits, what kind of relationship do you tend to build? Is it more like a friend-friend relationship or a mother-daughter relationship?
I think it is more of a mentor-type relationship, more of a coach-player-type relationship right away. When you're building these relationships, so much of the conversations have nothing to do with basketball when you're initially getting to know someone. I think it's that type of trust you're building in order to open up about basketball wants and needs, and you find that more players are willing to shed a little bit of a layer and get rid of a wall if you know them on a different level. Especially with women athletes, relationships are so key to the recruiting process. If they feel that that trust and that bond is there, then you're going to get to know each other a whole lot quicker.
You're talking to these kids sometimes more than you are your own family members, so you're talking about prom dresses and homecoming and boyfriends and all those types of things. You could consider friendship to be a part of the quality in the coach-player relationship.
With that bond that you build, are there some things that they come to you for instead of maybe the other coaches?
You'd have to ask them that. My door is always open, and I love when they come up and sit down with me and talk about whatever's going on in their day. We do meet on academics, but I love when our student-athletes come up and just want to talk about something crazy that happened in class or a hilarious story that happened over the weekend or something that they're dealing with or going through with their family. What we do as coaches is so far beyond just coaching the game. It's life lessons, and it's things way beyond, so I absolutely love it when they stop by for randomness.
As the recruiting coordinator, does that put pressure on you to get those players that will take this program to the next level?
Absolutely. I'm really competitive with it, and I take it seriously, because you want to find the right fits that [the current players] click with and feel like they're part of the family. And then from a standpoint of working for Coach McKeown, I want to make sure these are top-ranked kids that when they come here, they fit our system, they fit our style of play. We're very specific about what defense we run and how we run it, so finding the right players that could fit into that as well as what they do offensively. I take it very personally. We've lost a couple kids over the past couple weeks, and then we've gotten a couple kids that we're really excited about, so there's definitely a little added pressure to that.
Every coach on our staff does recruit, and I'm surrounded with such great people. Coach [McKeown] is the closer, and then we've got our assistant coaches, and [assistant coach Carrie] Banks is a new addition here and brought nine players to South Florida in her last season there. She loves to hit the recruiting trail hard with phone calls and all that type of stuff. We're all doing the work, it's just I'm the organizer of all that.