Trying to build a business based on numbers, calculates Joaquin Wallace, SF State women’s basketball coach.

The Gators win games if they follow his strategic game plan and when the women’s basketball team loses, the players know exactly what to expect.

Wallace will pull out his game report. How many points the Gators should have scored. What player could have been shut down.

Wallace watches hours of game footage before practice, after practice, with the team and even watches videos of the games at home with his wife.

He studies the opposing team and creates a complex and concrete scouting report for every game, full of numbers and percentages that show the time spent constructing the perfect game plan. Every number and percent counts.

“It’s just as good if not better [than a Division I level scouting report],” Brio Rode said after playing D-I at UC Berkeley her freshman year.

Inside the scouting report are the strengths of the opposing team, the key subs and what they bring to the game, go-to players and how to stop them defensively and beat them offensively, if they press, what the team needs to do to stop them and all the opposing teams’ stats.

Forward Krystle Mays said the most important part of the scouting report is the key to victory.
Mays has walked side-by-side with Wallace from the beginning and said this is the first season of weekly scouting reports.

“My freshman year we didn’t have those things,” Mays said. “He’s doing the things to have a winning program. He’s learning and getting better.”

Wallace has a very strict vision when it comes to his players and program, Jessica Hout-Freeman said.

“He does everything he can for us,” Hout-Freeman said. “He’s working on basketball 99 percent of the time.”

The head coach is a goal-oriented businessman who sets to achieve his business plan for this growing women’s basketball program.

“I put so much pressure on myself to succeed,” the third year coach said.

He had the plan to go to regionals in three years. That didn’t happen. Yet he has improved the program significantly since his first season in Gatorville.

Wallace finished his first season 8-19 overall, his second season 6-21 overall and third season finishing 14-14, 11-9 in the California Collegiate Athletic Association.

His road to coaching college basketball was much faster than most. He started coaching his daughter’s teams when he said he could do a better job. That turned into coaching high school sports then transitioned to short-term coaching at the junior college level. Now he’s head coach of a D-II school.

“Dr. Simpson took a chance on me,” Wallace said. “San Francisco State believed in me.”

Wallace and Michael Simpson have known each other since Wallace played baseball at SF State when Simpson coached the team.

“[Wallace] is the type of person he was as a player,” Simpson said. “He has a real trust for knowledge, and has the same kind of passion for coaching as he did for baseball.”

“It was really overwhelming,” Wallace said about getting a college coaching job with no actual experience.

“You get what you ask for.”

It was a difficult challenge not having a mentor and learning everything about college sports all at once, Wallace said.

But after his third season as head coach he finally felt the pressure release, feeling like he didn’t have to prove himself anymore, he said.

In just three seasons, Wallace took his team to the playoffs, something that hasn’t been done since the 1998-99 season. His team finished sixth in conference, something never before done in Gator history.

“We go with the intent to win instead of hoping for a win,” he said.