Jen Weissbach aims to provide her athletes with support and valuable feedback.
Girls Basketball Head Coach Jen Weissbach spent countless hours shooting hoops on her driveway with her mother rebounding. An 1,000 point-scorer in high school, Weissbach went on to play Division I Field Hockey at Dartmouth University and served as one of the team’s two captains, while also playing on Dartmouth’s travel basketball team.
Weissbach’s love for coaching started in high school, where she would coach at camps and clinics. Later, she returned to coaching high schoolers because of their abilities to develop and mature rapidly. Previously, Weissbach served as the Head Coach of Field Hockey and Basketball at the Hill School in Pennsylvania.
Weissbach said, “I think that was a way for me to start to build my passion around coaching. I’ve learned to love coaching high schoolers because I find that it’s a time when we can see so much growth and we can help them grow. We can help them learn how to work harder than they’ve ever worked before and we can help them learn how to be a great teammate, how to be a great person.”
Weissbach instills three core values into her teams to create an environment based on teamwork. She helps players steer away from an “I” mindset and towards a “we” mindset as a way to promote collaboration and trust.
“I value hard work. I value passion. I value commitment, and something that I’ve been trying to instill in our team is that it’s never about you. It’s always about us… It’s always about how we can continue to grow and be better and push each other as a team, as a collective unit. And my goal as a coach is to try and instill that into everything that we do,” said Weissbach.
According to Akari Imai ’25, Weissbach has established a balance between being easygoing and challenging the players. Weissbach always makes herself available to help the players individually as well as a team.
Imai said, “Coach Dubs [Weissbach] is a really good coach because she is funny and she is very personable, but she’s also strict on us and hard on us and pushes us when we need to be pushed… Whenever I have a problem or I want to improve on something, she’ll always give the best feedback and she’ll be really supportive and encouraging about it.”
Weissbach values self-improvement when approaching competition. Although competition is expected in the sport, having a good experience as a team is equally as important.
Weissbach said, “My goal ultimately at the end of the day is to build a great experience for each kid. I want players to come through our program and say they learned how to work harder than they’ve ever worked before… Certainly, we are excited about any results that are in our favor on the scoreboard, but that’s never the end goal. That’s never the result. We define success by how hard we’re working, the progress we’re making, not by the scoreboard.”
Imai credited Weissbach for standing up for her players during unfavorable calls. Her outspoken nature makes the team feel supported and encourages them to continue to play with the same competitiveness.
“One of my favorite things about her as a coach is how she always stands up to us and fights for us. So, even if it is a bad call by the ref or someone does something mean in any scenario, she will always put us first and she’ll always push and fight for us, which I really like about her,” said Imai.
Weissbach celebrates the progress that each player and the program has made thus far.
Weissbach said, “I hope that they know how much I care about them. I hope they know how proud I am of them to be their coach and to be able to have the opportunity to work with them each day… We’ve grown a lot over the last couple of months together and I think individually all of us have grown and tried to be as best as we can be. I’m very proud to be the coach here.”
