Faulkner University

Jacob Roark enters his second season as head coach for the Lady Eagles after having previously served the program as an assistant coach for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 campaigns.
 
Roark coached the Florida College women's basketball program beginning in the 2019 season, just after finishing his own playing career with the Falcons. He compiled a record of 24-32 while helming the program in Temple Terrace, leading the Lady Falcons to the SSAC Tournament in both seasons. After the school shuttered the program in 2021, Roark made his way to Faulkner.

With Roark on the Faulkner bench, the Lady Eagles went 41-20 overall and 23-11 in SSAC play and earned their first SSAC Tournament championship. In that time, he coached eight All-SSAC honorees, two SSAC Scholar-Athletes of the Year in Ashlyn Adkins and Morgan Holland and two 2022-23 NAIA All-American Honorable Mention winners in Holland and Nequoia Adams, while being named to the Women's Basketball Coaches Association Thirty Under 30 List. From there, he took the job as the top assistant at NCAA Division II Pittsburg State. Roark helped the Gorillas to a 24-8 mark and a Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association championship before returning to take over the Faulkner program after Reed Sutton stepped aside to focus on other administrative and coaching needs within the department.

Roark was named head coach of the Lady Falcons ahead of the 2019-20 season after his graduation from the university. He coached the Bricklayers, the Arkansas state 16U women’s AAU team, for two seasons prior to that, in which they finished first or second in over 13 tournaments and reached the national tournament each year.
 
During his playing career at Florida College from 2017-19, he led the Falcons in points, averaging 13.5 per game. He totaled 799 points, including 181 three-pointers, 234 rebounds and 230 assists while playing in all 59 games. He earned a school record 86.9 percent career free-throw percentage, including starting his junior season with a 32-for-32 start, and tied another with eight three-pointers in a game. He had a career season in his senior year, tallying 414 points and 126 rebounds and receiving Second Team All-SSAC honors. 
 
Roark was part of a historic roster that played for the program in its first two years at the NAIA level. The Falcons had their first year as a member of the SSAC in his senior season, and he registered a season-best and second-best career outing with 27 points in a loss at Faulkner. In his first season in Temple Terrace, he helped lead the program to a 22-7 record and a berth in the USCAA Men’s Division I National Tournament. 
 
He began his college career at Harding, where he played from 2014-16 as a reserve and scored 72 points and 36 rebounds. In his sophomore year, he was on a Bisons team that won a Regular Season Conference Championship and reached the NCAA Division II National Tournament.  
 
Roark earned his bachelor’s degree in information systems in 2019 from Florida College and is currently pursuing a master’s in business administration from Faulkner. 
 
A native of Concord, Ark., he married the former Taylor Varnell, a volunteer assistant alongside him at both Faulkner and Florida College, in 2017. They have a daughter named Dylan, born in December 2021, and a terrier named Ella.