Discipline and details: How Becky Burke is rebuilding Arizona women’s basketball

Becky Burke left an impression on Daniah Trammell that she couldn’t shake.

Trammell, a prep forward from Cincinnati, had multiple offers to play college ball. It took one visit to Buffalo, where Burke was the head coach, for Trammell to decide where she would go and for whom she would play.

“Before I walked into the gym, you could literally feel the energy just hit you — like, boom! And it was a good type of energy,” Trammell said. “Like, oh my gosh, I want to lace my shoes up right now and hop in a drill with them.”

Another one of Burke’s recruits at Buffalo, guard Molly Ladwig, said Burke is different from any coach she’s ever met. The standards that she insists upon, the intensity that she brings, the attention to detail that she demands — they all set Burke apart.

Trammell and Ladwig signed with Buffalo in November 2024. Less than a year later, they would become Arizona Wildcats, following Burke to Tucson to be part of her latest rebuilding project.

Before leaving Buffalo in April to succeed Adia Barnes as the 10th head coach in UA women’s basketball history, Burke led the Bulls to the WNIT championship. Two years earlier, with an almost entirely new roster, they won only 12 games.

That turnaround mirrored others before it.

At USC Upstate, Burke sparked the Spartans to their best season in the Big South — 22-8 — in just her second year on the job. They hadn’t won more than 11 games in any of the previous five seasons.

At the University of Charleston, Burke guided the Golden Eagles to a 48-14 record over two seasons after three straight years under .500.

At Embry-Riddle in Prescott, Burke started the women’s basketball program from scratch. In their second season of existence, the Eagles went 21-6.

None of those jobs was in a power conference. But all of those experiences made Burke the ideal candidate for Arizona.

As was the case at Buffalo, she would inherit a roster with only one returning player. That was part of Burke’s pitch to UA athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois during the hiring process: “I just did this three years ago.”

Although the stage is bigger this time, the process remains the same: Establish a culture. Accumulate daily victories. Eventually log more wins than losses on the court.

“Very similar in all the ways,” said Burke, who will make her official debut at McKale Center on Thursday vs. UC Riverside. “You leave practice, you're like, ‘Holy cow, I feel like a million bucks.’ And then the next day you're like, ‘Why did I sign up to do this again?’ And then the next day you're like, ‘Oh my god, we're gonna win the Big 12 championship.’

“It's so up and down. It's such a roller coaster. It's so emotional. But I'll look back next year, I'll look back the year after and be like, ‘That year, it was so hard; it was such a test. But that's why we're here now.’

“We built, we grinded and we just put one foot in front of the other. That's what we're going through right now. That's what Year One is. It's never been any different anywhere else that I've been.

“There's been challenging days, but that's what you sign up for when you do this. I've done it enough times to know.”

Laying the foundation

Burke grew up in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, a town of about 5,000 located near Scranton in the northeast part of the state. Prescott, with nearly 10 times as many residents, might have seemed like a metropolis by comparison.

But Embry-Riddle was no Louisville, where Burke starred for the Cardinals under Jeff Walz. It wasn’t even Cal State Fullerton, where Burke began her coaching journey as director of basketball operations in 2013.

Embry-Riddle was a true startup, about to launch women’s basketball at the NAIA level one year after launching a men’s program. A first-time head coach who hadn’t turned 30 yet, Burke had to recruit an entire roster, among other duties.

When you’re the coach at a school as small as Embry-Riddle, you have to “take on the role of everything,” said Eric Fundalewicz, the Eagles’ assistant athletic director and the first coach of their men’s basketball program. That includes booking travel and washing uniforms.

“It was her (and) our assistant coach,” said Jenna Knudson, a member of Burke’s first team who’s now an assistant on her staff. “If the floor needed (to be) swept, it was probably going to be one of them. We didn't have managers. We had a couple practice guys. But other than that ...”

Knudson believes there’s great value in having those responsibilities because you “learn what's really important to you ... that your time is the most precious currency.” Whatever is most important is “where your time is going to go to,” Knudson said. “You also get really good at it, because it's just you.”

Burke planned the practices, called the plays and created the structure for her program. It has evolved over the years, but the pillars remain the same: Discipline, attention to detail, accountability, effort, energy and enthusiasm.

The details are minute and essential. For example, Burke’s staff puts tape on the court when the team is working on backside defensive help. The players have to touch the tape “every single time,” Burke said. If they do so, they will build good habits and get to those spots during games, when there is no tape on the floor.

“Some coaches just don’t care about the stuff that I care about,” Burke said. “I care about the details. I care about the execution, the accountability.

“This is the culture that we're building here. You're in the gym without having to be asked. You're not walking over to the water cooler ... you're jogging. Every time we're in a huddle, we're touching.

“It's all these little things. There's a rhyme and a reason to why we do every single thing that we do.”

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‘Bear Down, Sleeves Up’

Burke is a demanding coach and a straight shooter, and she readily acknowledges her style isn’t for everyone. She has said multiple times that “not everybody is able to play for me.”

Guard Noelani Cornfield has done it before, and she’s about to do it again. She was a member of Buffalo’s WNIT title squad and followed Burke to Arizona.

As the only player who has toiled for Burke before, Cornfield was uniquely qualified to tell her new teammates what to expect.

“There's those coaches where you can kind of call their bluff. You can't call bluff on this coach,” Cornfield said. “She means everything that she says. You can do nothing but respect her because (of) how she lives her everyday life, how she loves her family, how she coaches her players, her standards, her expectations of her staff.”

While piecing together Arizona’s roster in a relatively short time, Burke was looking for two traits beyond talent.

“High character, high motor,” Knudson said.

If you’re not willing to scrap and fight for rebounds and loose balls, you’re not going to play for Becky Burke. She chose “Bear Down, Sleeves Up” as the team’s motto for 2025-26 not just because it’s clever but because it needs to be the Wildcats’ identity.

Arizona is undersized and will face a height disadvantage against most opponents, especially in the Big 12. The Wildcats were outrebounded in their exhibition opener against West Texas A&M, which didn’t start a single 6-footer.

“Those are toughness plays in the physical categories that we absolutely cannot lose,” Burke said. “It's not negotiable.”

Burke wants Arizona to be a blue-collar team.

“You can't give up 16 offensive rebounds. That's not blue-collar,” she said. “You gotta win the toughness categories. You gotta win the discipline categories. That's being blue-collar. Those don't take any talent.”

Cats are 'dogs'

Burke isn’t a fan of the go-to phrase in team building: “Trust the process.”

“I hate it,” she said. “I'm not a patient person.”

But she grudgingly accepts that rebuilding Arizona women’s basketball will be a process. And that the first season could be rough.

Burke is banking on her players buying into what she’s preaching and finding motivation in the slights they’ve faced on the way to Tucson.

Some of the new Wildcats have won championships. Some have earned all-league honors. None has proved herself in power-conference basketball.

“We all have that chip on our shoulder,” said guard Sumayah Sugapong, who transferred from UC San Diego. “Wanting to prove to ourselves and to everyone else that we belong here.”

“We have people that have come from schools (where) they didn't have good experiences or they wanted a better opportunity,” said guard Kamryn Kitchen, who transferred from Virginia. (She sat out her one and only season there.)

“There's no reason why Coach Burke can't make us a great team.”

The 2025-26 Wildcats are unquestionably underdogs. Both the coaches and the media picked them to finish 14th in the 16-team Big 12.

Those predictions are purely speculative because no one outside McKale Center has seen this team play together. Burke hasn’t made any public declarations about wins and losses. She just wants to see steady improvement.

“We're capable of achieving a lot if we just look past where we came from ... come together and trust in Coach Burke and what she wants from us,” said guard Tanyuel Welch, a transfer from Memphis. “She wants to win. We want to win, as well.

“We all know we're new and we have habits to break and a whole new system to learn. Once we get that down, do all the little things ... we're already competitive and work hard. We keep that drive, we can accomplish a lot.”

Fundalewicz saw it first-hand at Embry-Riddle.

“They are going to play very hard-nosed basketball,” he said. “They're going to be well-coached. She is very prepared.

“She doesn't expect anything from them that she wouldn't expect from herself.”

Burke doesn’t just talk the talk. Earlier this year, she participated in a practice race with the UA triathlon team — the defending national champions. Burke swam, biked and ran. She more than held her own.

“I like to describe her as crazy — but a good crazy,” Trammell said. “Like, I want to be crazy, too. It's so contagious.”