Wells College is getting a new women's basketball program and a new face on campus to get it all started.

Mike O'Brien will be heading the new program, hoping to take off by the 2010-2011 season, and he is already beginning the difficult process of building the team from scratch.

“I will be getting out and recruiting all Winter,” O'Brien said. “Traveling to community colleges, junior colleges and high schools, I will be looking for some strong players who will be a good fit for this team.”

This is the first athletic program that O'Brien has set up himself from the beginning but he is excited to get the chance to put his mark on the women's basketball program.

“I have revitalized a couple of programs but never started one from scratch,” O'Brien said. “This is a challenge I relish, I get to put my footprint on it from the start with no one's footsteps to fill. This will be my program right from the beginning, I get to pick the players I want and create the team I want to have. I am hoping to find the player with a personality like mine, the right mix of academics, athletics and attitude. Someone who wants to be the one with their name in the beginning of the record books, who wants to put their imprint on the program by being a part of the beginning of its growth. I am looking for players who are headstrong with leadership qualities.”

There is already some interest in the team from the students already on campus, with a basketball club that O'Brien is hoping to be able to move a few players from. Otherwise, the rest of the team will be Wells College newcomers, forcing O'Brien to learn quite a bit about the school itself in a short time.

“The biggest challenge in recruiting is exposing players to Wells College,” O'Brien said. “A lot of my mission is to get out and educate people about the college as well as the basketball program. I have to expose them to all that Wells offers including the academics offered. I know a lot about being a part of a liberal arts school and Wells is very student focused and very focused on critical thinking.”

In learning about the college, O'Brien said that one of the main selling points and impressive facts about the school is that most of the classroom sizes are a nine to one ratio, that along with how much the college has grown over the years is what makes O'Brien think that Wells will be an easy college to sell on his recruits.

“In 2005, Wells went coed and that was a step in the right direction,” O'Brien said. “With the sport