bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie women's basketball head coach Darin Spence throughout the 2008/2009 season as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship. We spoke with Coach Spence about the 2008/2009 schedule which was released on Monday.
bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about your schedule. The biggest thing that jumps out is your stretch from the middle of December to the end of January you play 10 of 13 games on the road.
Darin Spence: I think we've got a good balance to the schedule but we're in such a strange situation, the better we get the harder it is to schedule. Just trying to get bigger name teams to come play us and it's just really a difficult situation for us. I think our location plays against us and I really wanted to try to get some more name teams on our schedule to help out with our RPI and strength of schedule. I didn't anticipate us playing on the road the first couple games of conference either. But we get to go to a tournament in San Diego and that'll be good for the California kids on our roster. I think we've got a good balance of some name teams, some strong teams and some teams that are trying to get better.
bc.net: One of the other big things that stood out is that you shifted from Thursday/Saturday games to Friday/Sunday games.
DS: For some reason the WAC has a lot of trouble putting the schedule together. I know the first thing is because we only have nine teams. If we had ten teams it would help everybody out, it would give us natural travel partners. But because we're at nine teams they struggle putting the schedule together. If you look again we're playing a team back to back. It was Fresno a year ago and now we've got Hawai'i. But I think what happened was they wanted some more flexibility to go to Friday/Sunday which would open a Sunday afternoon t.v. package window for us. And it would also give us our own day. What hurts some of us is we might play at home but the fans may want to stay at home and watch their men's team on the WAC.tv package or CSTV or ESPN if they're on t.v. or in our case AggieVision. So going to the other day, I was all for it. I know our fan base is growing here but it's got to get a whole lot better. We just went 23-9 and had the fifth best turnaround in basketball and I'll bet we didn't average 2,000 fans. That area has to get a lot better. Maybe changing the schedule up on different days, they're going to know we're going to be in a lot of Sunday evening games, maybe that'll help.
bc.net: What is the difference between the Maggie Dixon Classic that you're participating in San Diego versus the Maggie Dixon Classic that's being held in New York?
DS: The one we're in is actually run by the Basketball Travellers company. They're the ones that were in charge of the trip we took to Canada last fall. They do the Paradise Jam, the tournament in the Bahamas. It's just an add-on to that tournament and the coaches of San Diego and Illinois-Chicago were friends of Maggie Dixon so they got together and thought they'd put it together. It's actually called The Surfin' Slam tournament and they have one going on at the University of San Diego an another one at San Diego State at the same time. The one at San Diego they just shifted under her name.
bc.net: This season you go to UNM first before they come down here.
DS: We've tried to shift that every year. One year we'd be there first the next year we'd flip flop it. Going back to our fan base and I've said it thousands of times, a lot of people around here are missing out on a good deal by not coming out to see us play. But it's really difficult when we play a lot of games when we're not in school. It's tough after finals whatever students we would get, they're gone. And people might be gone for vacation and Christmas break. That's the unfortunate thing about playing them here on December 20th. But we're going to play an afternoon game I believe so that both teams can get back and head out for their next game.
bc.net: Talk about your overall satisfaction with the schedule.
DS: The best part about it is this is the earliest we've had it done in my five years. We've actually had the schedule done for two months but we just switched a couple days around and we had to wait for the WAC schedule to come out which took a long time. But I think it's good. We've got a good balance of teams that are improving. I think because we're back a bit on that young side that there are some competitive games for us at home and on the road. What I would like to see is us to get our local people to jump on board and get behind our Thanksgiving Classic. This is the second year for it and it comes at a good time. It's a good chance for people to come out and see two games a day for two days.
