By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
NEW ORLEANS – LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey can remember an LSU-Louisiana Tech game in which her emotions threatened to get the best of her.
She doesn’t plan on that happening tonight when No. 5 LSU (10-0) plays her alma mater Louisiana Tech (5-3) at 5 p.m. (ESPNU) in New Orleans at the 17,791-seat Smoothie King Center.
The LSU men (8-1) play SMU (9-1) at 7:30 p.m. (SEC Network) in the nightcap of the Compete 4 Cause Classic produced by U.S. Sports & Entertainment that provides benefits and programs for underrepresented youth in New Orleans.
At least the game is not at Louisiana Tech, where Mulkey won two national championships as a player from 1980-84 and another as an assistant coach from 1985-2000 before becoming a head coach and winning four nationals titles – three at Baylor (2005, ’12 and ’19) and one at LSU (2023).
She does not want to schedule an LSU-Tech game in Ruston, where she became America’s sweetheart point guard as a Lady Techster after an iconic prep career and growing up in Tickfaw just 49 miles from LSU. Wearing long pigtails, she led Hammond High to four state championships from 1977-80 while compiling a 4.0 grade point average to become valedictorian.
It was much the same at Tech as she epitomized the true student-athlete, graduating summa cum laude in business administration and as an academic All-American. On the court, she won an AIAW national title in 1981 under coach Sonja Hogg and an NCAA national title in 1982 under Hogg and co-head coach Leon Barmore and reached another Final Four under those two in 1984. As a Louisiana Tech assistant coach under Barmore from 1985-2000, she was part of five more Final Fours and the national championship in 1988.
“You have little flashbacks of all the things that we did at Louisiana Tech for a long period of time.”
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) December 12, 2025
-LSU coach Kim Mulkey on her 2 decades as a Lady Techster. She faces her former school Saturday. @andrechampagnee https://t.co/7AtLSFE4s6
She could have replaced Barmore as head coach, but Tech would not give her the five-year contract she wanted and virtually all women’s coaches were getting at the time. Baylor gave her the contract Tech would not.
“There’s too many emotions there,” Mulkey said at a press conference on Thursday. “There’s too many. I couldn’t walk in that gym and be a good coach.”
In Mulkey’s senior season at Tech, the No. 1 Lady Techsters (28-2) hosted No. 8 LSU (23-6) and coach Sue Gunter in an NCAA Tournament game for the first time on Friday, March 23, 1984. It was LSU’s first game against Tech since the 1979-80 season and Mulkey’s first time against LSU.
“I didn’t want this to be my last game. It was such an emotional lift for me, playing against LSU. They’re so close to my hometown,” Mulkey said after scoring 10 points on 5-of-9 shooting with a game-high eight assists in a 92-67 win that night on her way to another Final Four. LSU All-American guard Joyce Walker scored 21.
The game was over at halftime as Mulkey directed her team to a 50-29 lead with eight points and six assists. But in a rarity for this consensus All-American, she got winded in the second half.
“I got tired tonight,” she said. “Maybe my adrenaline was pumping too much because it was LSU.”
Tonight its Louisiana Tech, and this time Mulkey, 63, will likely be better at handling that adrenaline in just her second-ever game against Tech as a head coach. Baylor beat Louisiana Tech, 77-67, at Baylor in Waco, Texas, on Dec. 5, 2009, in the previous pairing.
“I work at LSU. That’s who signs my paycheck,” Mulkey, who makes $3.3 million a year as the highest paid women’s college basketball coach in the country, said.
“It’s not emotion, where you’re not going to coach hard, or you’re going to feel torn,” she said. “No, no, no, no, no. I was at Baylor 21 years. I’ve been here five years now, but your memories last forever. And the memories I have of my 19 years at Louisiana Tech will never dissolve – life long friends from north Louisiana. I talk to coach Barmore and Miss Hogg a lot. And so, you just have little flashbacks of all the things that we did at Louisiana Tech for a long period of time.”
LSU leads the series with Louisiana Tech, 17-12. But from 1975-76 when Tech started to become a national dynasty that would reach and through its last Elite Eight appearance in 2000-01, the Lady Techsters were 11-6 against the Tigers with a second Sweet 16 win on March 20, 1999, in Los Angeles.
After Tech’s largest win in the series – 91-50 on March 7, 1980, in the AIAW Regional at LSU for Tech’s fourth straight win over the Tigers – the two programs did not schedule another game until the 1988-89 season. Gunter, who took over at LSU before the 1982-83 season, said during the 1983-84 season that LSU was not ready to play Louisiana Tech. But the NCAA scheduled that Sweet 16 pairing that Mulkey dominated.
As a Tech player and assistant coach, Mulkey was 4-2 against LSU.
LSU and Tech have not played since LSU won 77-73 on Nov. 11, 2016.
Current coach Brooke Stoehr is Tech’s fifth coach since 2002. It had only Hogg and Barmore from 1974 when the program began through 2002. Louisiana Tech has not reached an NCAA Tournament since 2011 under Teresa Weatherspoon and has not advanced in one since 2004 under Kurt Budke, who passed away in 2011.
But Mulkey remembers what Tech was. When she won her first national championship at Baylor in 2005, she wore a pantsuit in Tech’s baby blue colors for the title game win over Michigan State in Indianapolis. A reminder that Tech should have given her that five-year contract? Or a nostalgic nod to Tech’s time in her life?
To reach that game, Mulkey beat LSU coach Pokey Chatman and a much more talented team, led by superstar Seimone Augustus, in a Final Four opener.
“The history of women’s basketball in this state doesn’t belong to LSU. It belongs to Louisiana Tech (11 Final Fours, 3 national titles),” she said with conviction. “The Seimone Augustus era (2002-06, 3 Final Fours) was outstanding at LSU (7 Final Fours in all, 1 national title). Our little five-year era here is outstanding (1 national title, 2 Elite Eights). But when you take the cumulative history of women’s basketball in this state, go look at what Louisiana Tech was able to accomplish.”
If she sounds a little torn, that’s just emotion.
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