Once a week I will be talking with athletes and sports figures that have a connection to Buffalo. This week's guest is Univeristy at Buffalo men's basketball coach, Reggie Witherspoon.

AR: You have been a part of the University at Buffalo since a young age, when you were a ball boy for the Bulls, how strongly do you feel connected to the school?

RW: When I first was a ball boy it was great just to come to the games and have access to the players, see how they carried themselves, it was just great being around that...It opened up me eyes, it basically ignited a vision, and allowed me to aspire to something because I was exposed to it.

AR: When did you first realize that you wanted to be a coach, or stay in basketball as a profession?

RW: I was really pretty young when I started for some reason thinking about coaching....I'm the youngest of four boys, so I looked at what my other brothers were doing and whatever they did, then I wanted to do it. I started drawing plays on a piece of paper when I was in first or second grade and I would take them to my older brother and he would keep them or he would say 'no you got to work that out again.' After that I started coming to UB games which really ignited things to another level....I was the kind of kid who balled up a sock and shot it between the curtain rod and the wall, that was my basket. I would always try to add two windows where I could go that would be one basket where one team shot and another basket where the other team shot at....I would imaginary coach and play at the same time...There was always some vision for coaching in me.

AR: Going back to the 2005 MAC championship game, in which Buffalo lost to Ohio by one point in overtime, when you think back on it do you ever think about what if you had done things differently?

RW: You always do that. I think about every coach does that. You always see certain plays develop, and sometimes that ignites an idea that may lead to something else that is good for your current team...Certainly that game was no different, that's the type of game where you always think through everything and there's always another way you could have done something.... There have been a lot of great players who have come through this conference that never played in a MAC championship game, and there have been some great teams that lost them. Miami (OH), which was led by Wally Sczerbiak, lost in the MAC championship game, they ended up in the Sweet 16 that year because they were able to get an at-large bid. That was a great team that we had....that game went down to the wire and there was a shot and a tip, it could have gone either way and it went in for them.

AR: With Turner Gill bringing national publicity to the football team, does that have a positive effect on the basketball program?

RW: We hope that it will affect it in a positive way in terms of the recognition, in terms of other parts of the country realizing that Buffalo is a member of the Mid-American Conference, because that isn't always the case. We aren't a university that has had 100 years of Division I competition, so any added positive exposure that is given to our athletics program helps us all.

AR: When you came to Buffalo, the basketball team was about to enter probation, and there were some years where the team had trouble winning any games, were there ever times that you felt unsure if you were the right guy to turn the program around?

RW: Most of my time was consumed by 'what do we need to do to get this thing going, what can we do?'.... 99 percent of my time was spent with those thoughts. But there's always those times when your by yourself when you wonder 'is this possible?' that's where I'm fortunate that I have family here....My wife (and) my brothers came to me and just reassured me during those times, that 'you're going to get this done, you've been successful coaching now for a while, and it's just going to take time.' I also remember we had a bus driver my interim year, he said to me 'coach, it's going to take you a while to get this to a point where it's a respectable program, because It didn't get to where it is overnight, and you're not going to get it to where you want it to be overnight.'

AR: How were you able to recruit the players that you were able to get, during the program's low point. Bringing in Turner Battle, a top 100 prospect, and Mark Bortz, and Calvin Cage, and several others that became the nucleus to the 2004-05 team?

RW: That was really just trying to explain opportunity to them, trying to convey the opportunity for them to leave a legacy....Most mature young men want to make history, want to leave a legacy, they want to come to a place where they will be remembered for years and years after their careers are over.

AR: When did you first see the light at the end of the tunnel for turning around this program?

RW: We went through a phase where we could get leads on people but we'd run out of gas. Not because we were physically tired but because mentally it was so much, because our opponents refused to believe that we were good enough to beat them. So we would go against good teams, and take reasonably large leads, and then we would succumb to our opponents anger that we were in a position to beat them. That's kind of where we had to cross a threshold of being determined and believing that we were better. Not that we could be better or that we could win, that we were better. We went from losing a lot of close games that we were ahead in, in many cases, to we get ahead, get reasonable leads, and then pound away on our opponents as though we were punishing them, as opposed to 'we're trying to get out of here with a win.