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Walter Roese was hired in June 2005 as an assistant coach at BYU. A 1994 Cum Laude graduate in International Business Administration from BYU-Hawaii, Roese earned an MBA at BYU in 2003 before serving as BYU’s director of basketball operations under former Cougar coach Steve Cleveland the past two years.
Roese, 38, has served this summer as an assistant coach for the 2005 Brazilian National Team. He enters the full-time coaching ranks after a long career as a player. His prior experience as a coach came as a volunteer assistant at BYU-Hawaii under Ken Wagner after completing his professional playing career.
A native of Novo Hamburgo in southern Brazil, Roese played seven years professionally in Brazil and Italy after graduating from BYU-Hawaii. He still holds the Brazilian professional league record with 23 assists in a single game. He has represented the Brazilian National Team and professional clubs at four World Cup tournaments and several international championships in Europe, Asia and South and North America. In 1986, he was Brazil’s top-rated junior player. Roese has continued to excel as an athlete. In August of 2003, Roese hit a three-quarter-court shot at the buzzer to give Brazil a one-point victory in the semifinals of the Masters World Basketball Championships (ages 35-40) in Orlando, Fla., before leading Brazil to the title win over Russia.
Roese has experience at nearly every level of the college game. Roese attended the University of Houston, West Texas A&M and BYU-Hawaii while playing at the Division I, Division II and NAIA levels. He was the MVP of the Lone Star Conference in 1992 while playing at West Texas A&M and was a Scholar Athletic All-American at BYU-Hawaii. He served as a volunteer director of athletic marketing and assistant basketball coach at BYU-Hawaii from 2000-2001 before attending the Marriott School of Management at BYU to obtain his MBA degree.
Roese comes from an athletic family that has seen six members participate at the Olympic level in basketball, volleyball and tennis. Fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese, Roese and his wife Monique are the parents of two children: Leonardo and Agatha.
