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Bruce Hamburger on his new beginning at FDU

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The world of college basketball is about change.  Teams switch conferences, players transfer, uniform and sneaker styles are constantly being updated.  Every year is a new beginning, as what you did last year is history, and everyone starts with a clean slate.

Hamburger - Coaches also are a part of the changing landscape that makes up college basketball.  This past spring, I was one of many coaches who changed jobs.  After three years at Saint Peter’s University, I was offered the opportunity to be the associate head coach at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  I will be forever grateful to John Dunne at Saint Peter’s University, who gave me the chance to get back to the Division 1 level as his assistant coach.  I have many great memories of my years at Saint Peter’s, highlighted by winning the MAAC tournament & going to the NCAA tournament in 2010-11.

Now I am in a new situation, reunited with a long time friend and colleague in Greg Herenda.  We worked for a year together at Seton Hall under George Blaney.  After I left Seton Hall to become a head coach, Greg & I stayed in touch as we all do in this business with our friends.  Our paths would cross on occasion on the recruiting trails and we would see each other at the Final Four.

After he accepted the head coaching position here at FDU, we had several discussions about the possibility of joining his coaching staff. Once I accepted the position we went about the arduous task of rebuilding the Fairleigh Dickinson Basketball program.  Luckily, I did not have to move for this new job, so I was able to devote my time and energy to helping Greg in all aspects.  We inherited six returning players, so obviously recruiting was a top priority. In the next three months we were able to bring six new players into our program.  This is when you have to reach out to all of your contacts & connections in the recruiting world to find out about what available players are out there.  We had numerous recruits visit campus, and we were able to learn about what FDU has to offer a recruit for his future.  We were able to sign six players in the next three months, giving us a full roster to work with this year.

During our summer school workouts, we had 12 players on campus going to summer school and doing summer workouts as allowed by the NCAA. During these workouts we were able  to establish and build the culture that we want in our program.  We used these workouts to also find out about our players in terms of their skill level, their work ethic, their basketball intelligence and their level of academic achievement based on their summer school work.

At the same time, we were finding out about the day to day dynamics of Fairleigh Dickinson University, as we were busy meeting new people on a daily basis.  We went to many functions to meet alumni, played in several golf outings, had numerous meetings with people in our athletic department, academic advisement, housing, admissions, campus security to name a few.  At all of these meetings and events, we were able to articulate to people our vision for FDU basketball and how we were going to accomplish this vision.

In the midst of all of this, we were getting organized for the July recruiting period, figuring out who we wanted to evaluate and where we needed to be.  Needless to say there were a lot of organizational meetings in June and July making sure that we were all on the same page.  The month of July flew by as we recruited from Thursday to Sunday, then got back to campus to work with our players from Monday to Wednesday.

With the season ready to start shortly, it seems as if the last five months has gone by in the blink of an eye.  It has been an exciting time, but the reward for all of the hard work, meeting and  travels is the opportunity to coach our players and experience another year of college basketball.

Best of luck to everyone in the first few weeks of the season.

- Bruce

The post Bruce Hamburger on his new beginning at FDU appeared first on College Chalktalk.


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