A Berks County native with college and AAU coaching experience was approved as the new Wilson girls basketball head coach on Monday.
Matt Raquet will take over the Bulldogs' program after Chris Gallo abruptly departed in May following a 24-5 season that saw Wilson reach the state playoffs for the first time in six years.
“It’s clearly a really talented group,” Raquet said Tuesday. “I'm really excited to get to work with this group of players. Pretty much the entire team is back. I’m walking into a really good situation and am just really grateful overall to work with the players and coach at Wilson, which is such a great high school.”
The Bulldogs will be without leading scorer and junior Laila Jones (16.1 points per game), who tore her ACL in her last AAU tournament of the summer, but return a talented group led by 2026s Violet Houck (9.8 ppg, 8.2 rpg) and Laura Crocona (5.5 ppg, 19 3’s) and 2027 Kailani Hardy (7.0 ppg).
Raquet is excited to work with the 2026 group of players, who have received significant varsity minutes since they were freshmen, and with Hardy, who he thinks could make a big jump into one of the best players in the county after a successful freshman year.
“It’s still a really talented group,” he said. “Obviously (Jones) is a tough loss. We had a lot of success last year so hopefully we can continue that. I think just looking at last year’s success, a county championship and state playoff run has to be the goal."
Raquet graduated from Holy Name in 2005 and then attended Pitt, where he was on the track and field team and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications and rhetoric.
He joined the staff of Tonya Cardoza, the winningest coach in Temple women’s basketball history and current assistant at UConn, as a graduate assistant in 2010 and worked his way to administrative coordinator where he handled video operations and organizing recruiting visits. Raquet earned a master’s degree in sport and fitness administration/management at Temple.
He coached at Holy Cross from 2013 to 2018 as an assistant with his main responsibilities being video operations, player development, scouting and recruiting.
Raquet returned to the Philadelphia area and stepped away from the college game due to family priorities, but became involved with the Comets AAU program, a high-level program on the Girls Under Armour Association circuit.
“I knew the (Comets) program really well from recruiting a lot of their players while I was at Holy Cross,” Raquet said. “I wanted to stay involved and loved the organization. I started coaching the youth with them with a fifth grade team and stayed with them through eighth grade until my family and I moved back to Berks County.”
Raquet moved into the Wilson School District about two years ago and coached his nephew’s CYO team locally to stay busy. He works full-time in quality assurance at Misco Products in Reading, but always finds his way back to coaching basketball in some capacity.
“I just really love coaching and teaching the game,” he said. “I seem to always find somewhere to coach each year even if I don’t think I will.”
This season it’ll be in West Lawn as the Bulldogs' head coach.
Raquet is the third Wilson girls basketball head coach since 2018, when longtime skipper Doug Myer departed the program, joining Kevin Calabria (2018-20) and Gallo (2020-24).
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