Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
It has to be music to more than just the ears of Mom and Dad.
“She said, ‘I just love it here. The people are super nice. Everybody’s friendly. There’s a lot of energy. It’s been wonderful so far.’”
Chuck Nixon was recounting a recent conversation he and his wife Shelley had with their daughter Bryce, one of the newest Wright State women’s basketball players, but already a veteran of 105 college games, nearly half of them at a Power 5 school.
“She said, ‘It’s been just a fantastic experience,’” Nixon said from his Phoenix home. “As a parent, that’s the best thing you can hear.”
And that’s got to be an even sweeter tune for Raiders’ head coach Kari Hoffman, who heard too many sour notes after she took over the program last year.
The best players already had transferred out by then and most of the rest of the roster, none of which she had recruited, chafed at the coaching change and before long was teetering between malaise and mutiny.
The team staggered to a 4-23 record, the program’s worst mark in 30 years. It was a stark turn-around from the previous season – when the Raiders upset No. 4 Arkansas in the NCAA Tournament – and a shock for a program that had been in the NCAA Tournament or WNIT in seven of the previous eight years.
