Retirees Association

DDN: Wright State women’s basketball: First-year coach seeing progress

Kari Hoffman

Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News

New Wright State women’s basketball coach Kari Hoffman is an avid golfer — good enough that any foursome in a charity scramble would want her on their team.

Her assistants also dabble at the sport. And they could think of no better way to spend a sunny afternoon on Tuesday — after practice and before recruits arrived that evening — than teeing it up at the Country Club of the North.

But while hitting the links may have sounded like a good idea, the fun faded quickly.

“It was terrible,” Hoffman said with a laugh. “We were all hitting the ball into the woods. At the fifth hole, we just said, ‘Let’s go get some dinner.’”

Bonding with her hand-picked staff will be no problem for Hoffman, but she knows she’ll need to win over a locker room of mostly unfamiliar players to have some success this season.

Nine Raiders came to Wright State to play for the highly regarded Katrina Merriweather, who was as much a mentor as a coach. And some may be slow to warm to the new regime.

“We’ve had our growing pains,” said Hoffman, who had a 106-38 record with three conference titles in five years at Division-II Cedarville.