Bill Shaw knows what it takes to succeed as a basketball coach. But what he does not yet know is how to succeed as a college head coach.
He has experience as a head coach but never at the college level. He was hired at SUNY Niagara April 17 and is paddling his feet rapidly as he puts together a competitive roster in time for training camp opening up on Sept. 1. It is a challenging endeavor that is exemplified by the fact that he only had two players when he took over: Lockport natives Azriel Hall and Allison Milleville.
Bill Shaw knows what it is like to command a successful high school team and now he is learning what it takes to lead a successful college team. He is taking over a SUNY Niagara program that went 15-10 overall and 3-1 in conference play.
“(It is) very hectic, being hired in the middle of April and left with only two players from last year,” Shaw said. “We’re struggling to find players. We’re at about eight or nine players right now. I’d love to get to 12 by the time Sept. 1 rolls around. That’s the goal. Myself, Pete Dickinson and Ken Ricker have just been lifting up every rock that we can find and looking underneath everything and going after anybody that we can find right now.”
One of the biggest lessons that he has learned in his almost-five months on the job is the importance of staying patient. He knows it will take time to build the program that he wants to build at SUNY Niagara and that he can not just snap his fingers and turn the program into a national contender.
“I’m not a patient person so that’s been difficult but it’s an understanding that there’s not a darn thing I can do about it,” Shaw said. “… Right now I can’t control those things so I have no choice but to be patient and wait and see how things go and really wait for next year to really bring in a team that Pete and I and Ken really think we’re going to have.”
There are also challenges that are different from the ones he has been experiencing over the last two years as an assistant coach at Genesee Community College. However, that experience of being on Jeff Parizek’s staff did help prepare him for now being in the top role at SUNY Niagara.
During his time on Parizek’s staff, Shaw helped run practices, which is a responsibility that now Shaw will be sharing with assistant coach Pete Dickinson. The relationship between Shaw and Dickinson goes back to when the two coached together at Lockport, before Dickinson coached at Niagara University.
As a result of being from the area, Milleville and Hall have been working out with Shaw this summer at the SUNY Niagara gym. The two have been going through drills and learning what it’s like to play for Shaw and how he sees the game.
When the games start, Milleville is confident that Shaw will hold the team to a high standard and have the team playing good basketball.
“He’s a pretty good coach from what I know so far,” Milleville said. “He really takes the time to explain things while we’re going through it … make sure we understand it. So I’m also pretty excited to see how this year goes.”
While he is trying to put together this year’s roster, he is also recruiting players for the 2027-28 roster and making sure that team is in a better position at this point than this year’s squad. Many of the kids that he is finding for this year’s team are local kids that did not decide that they wanted to play basketball in college until late in the cycle. He has also gotten commitments from two kids from New York City who were not otherwise committed.
As he is recruiting for next year’s team, he is trying to get across to kids that the junior college presents an opportunity for kids to go to the NCAA Division I level and make money off of their name, image and likeness, that might not be there for the kids who go to the NCAA Division III level. He is helped in his recruiting efforts by the fact that he does have a lengthy resume of success at the high school level.
Shaw made his name during an over 40-year career coaching girls basketball at Lockport High School and Williamsville North High School. During his time with Lockport, Shaw helped guide the team to a state title in 1994 and 449 wins before moving on to Williamsville North where he also had success. As the head coach at Will North, Shaw won three ECIC championships and made it to the state semifinals in 2016.
That list of accomplishments is put on display under the shadow of the school’s region and national championship banners. It is in that gym that Shaw has been spending a lot of time in the gym working out with his local players. While it is a higher level of competition, the summers are not very different from his time as a high school coach, he is still giving his players workouts to do in order to get ready for the season.
However, the biggest difference is that when he was a high school coach he could keep track of his players more than he can now because some of them are not from the area and are working out on their own.
“The big difference is there’s going to be kids that are players that I’ll have that are from outside the area,” Shaw said. “… I’m not their mother, I’m not their father. I can’t control what they do when they’re not around me, so it’s going to be more of a trust thing that they’re going to work on the things that they need to work on for the next season.”
As he prepares for his first season as a head coach since 2023, Shaw is noticing that high school kids and college freshman and sophomores are not incredibly different from one another. It also helps that he is a father of two daughters who were in sports so he knows how to deal with young women in the sports landscape.
“I’ve been dealing with young people all my life,” Shaw said. “So when you’re doing that for 40 some years, you start to get pretty good at it.”