By ANDRE CHAMPAGNE, Tiger Rag Staff Reporter
LSU women’s basketball associate head coach Bob Starkey was recognized before the Tigers’
game with Texas-Arlington on Sunday for his 25 years of coaching at LSU – with both the men and women’s basketball programs.
“I wish I could give him more than a frame today,” LSU women’s head coach Kim Mulkey said. “The best thing I can do for him is keep preaching that the man deserves to be in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.”
Mulkey has been in that Hall in Knoxville, Tennessee, since 2000, and went into the Naismith Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 2020. So, she knows a Hall of Famer when she sees one, or coaches with one.
Starkey’s coaching career at LSU began in the 1989-90 season when he was an assistant under men’s coach Dale Brown and served that College Basketball Hall of Fame inductee (2014) through the last four of his 10 straight NCAA Tournaments from 1984-93 and through his retirement after the 1996-97 season.
Starkey became a women’s assistant in 1998 through 2011. He served as LSU’s interim head coach in the the 2007 NCAA Tournament when head coach Pokey Chatman was fired for inappropriate relationships with players. And Starkey took the Tigers to the Final Four.
After stints at Central Florida, Texas A&M and Auburn, Mulkey brought Starkey back to LSU before the 2022-23 season when the Tigers won LSU’s first national title in baskeball.
“The man should be in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame,” Mulkey said after the win over UT-Arlington. “We have Mickie DeMoss in there who was Pat Summit’s right hand. We have Chris Dailey, who is in there who is Geno (Auriemma’s) right hand. Bob Starkey is the only associate head coach who ever took a team to a Final Four when they had all the stuff take place here at LSU. He’s the only one in the
history of the game that I know of on the women’s side. What are we waiting on?”
Starkey had just over a week to get his team ready to play in that 2007 NCAA Tournament. And he led the Tigers to wins over UNC Asheville, West Virginia, Florida State and Connecticut to reach the Final Four.
Mulkey believes Starkey has also elevated her coaching abilities at LSU.
“He’s been just nothing but professional,” she said. “He fights battles for me that he knows I just don’t want to fight. And he will extend my career because he does the things that either I don’t want to anymore or he’s better at it than I am.”
Mulkey and Starkey have worked together for over three years now, and she wouldn’t want it any
other way.
“We love Bob Starkey’s intensity,” she said. “We love his old school mentality. I love what he brings to me as the head coach, but I love his stories that he tells. He’s the only one I allow to do a scouting report. We text, we email, before presenting things. If we don’t have a staff meeting, I trust him. I love that he has my intensity when needed, and he has my humor and wit.”
But it’s not only Mulkey and the coaching staff that appreciate what Starkey’s doing for the program. As he received his plaque of 25 years of service with LSU, the players surrounded Starkey and embraced him at half court.
“I think they respect him, his history, his knowledge,” Mulkey said. “But he also has a way. I mean, he can get hard with them and I’ll look down there, and then maybe 10 minutes later, I’ll look down there. And he doesn’t want anybody to see it, but he’s kind of laughing with them.”
Be the first to comment