By KACE KIESCHNICK, Tiger Rag Staff Reporter
LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey has been in the business of coaching college basketball for over 40 years. She has won five national titles as a head or assistant coach, won six national coach of the year awards and been inducted to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Mulkey began as an assistant at Louisiana Tech in 1985, worked her way to associate head coach in 1996 and became the head coach at Baylor in 2000, where she spent 22 seasons. She is the fifth-winningest active coach in Division I women’s basketball (783-130) and could become the third-fastest to 800 career wins with 17 more this season. She has been involved in the sport as a player or coach since before the NCAA tournament launched in 1982, watched dynasties rise and fall and helped usher in growth the sport has never seen.
But Mulkey said her generation of coaches is fading with the new era of college athletics defined by the transfer portal, roster turnover and money issues.
“They’re all getting out of the business, and a lot of them had a lot left in the tank,” Mulkey said on a Zoom call with local media on Tuesday. “You have to adapt, and you have to adjust. And you have to realize that we’re not going back to the way it used to be, whether that’s good or bad. You adapt, or you adjust, or you get out.”
Iowa State head coach Bill Fennelly announced this year would be his final season. Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer retired in 2024, so did Iowa’s Lisa Bluder. C. Vivian Stringer called it a career at Rutgers in 2022, and Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw retired in 2020. All of those coaches are older than Mulkey, but they were also pillars of women’s college basketball leading quality programs.
Mulkey, though, has chosen to adapt to the new approach to coaching and roster building. She has welcomed more than a dozen transfers to Baton Rouge since she arrived in 2021, including stars like Angel Reese, Aneesah Morrow and Hailey Van Lith. That type of annual recruitment and adjustment is necessary to stay afloat in the modern era of college athletics. It has helped the best talent in the nation rise to premier programs and become massive stars, but it brings its own new set of challenges.
“It used to be a process,” Mulkey said. “You bring freshmen in, and by the time that they’re seniors, you’ve watched them improve and grow. You don’t see that anymore. So basically, you go into the fall, and you really don’t know who you have other than what the returning players have given you in previous years. And so, part of that is exciting; part of that is scary, but at the same time, you’ve got to go coach.”
This offseason, Mulkey welcomed former All-Big 12 Iowa State guard Jada Williams, Florida guard Laila Reynolds and Tennessee Tech guard Chloe Larry in the portal. Williams slots in as the Tigers’ starting point guard and is poised to continue her all-conference level success. Reynolds and Larry bring proven collegiate experience, skill and athleticism to a team that Mulkey said will need to rely on young talents.
“It’s really hard now to have 15 players on a team,” she said. “It’s hard to have depth now because of money issues.”
In the age of name, image and likeness and revenue-sharing contracts, numerous athletes across dozens of sports get pay checks. Institutions are forced to balance their athletics spending across their sports, with major cash cows like football and men’s basketball receiving most of the funding while women’s and olympic sports are left behind.
That does not mean LSU will not continue to get top-end talent. Mulkey said that her program is always competitive. It will win some recruiting battles and lose some. But what it does mean is that Mulkey can no longer fill out the bottom of her roster with the quality depth she once enjoyed – a problem Lane Kiffin’s football team is also currently experiencing.
But like Mulkey said, she adapts. This season’s adaptations come in the form of freshmen Lola Lampley and Anna Minaeva, two talented newcomers Mulkey raved about and said will be forced to play significant minutes in the post. That will come with growing pains.
“It’s gonna be challenging in some ways, but in some ways it’s gonna be a team that probably has a few ups and downs,” Mulkey said. “At the end of the day, I think their mindset is very good, and I have not gone to practice yet where I’ve left upset.”
Mulkey said every team is different. She does not know what the 2026-2027 Lady Tigers have in store, but one thing is for certain.
“We work hard,” Mulkey said. “We’ve always had teams that work hard, but there’s something about this bunch that is just extremely cohesive.”
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