Spokane, Wash. – In the morning after the LSU in the first round of the NCAA tournament in 2023, the Tigers entered into practice in their home court to prepare for the next round. There was a lot on the line: it was the second season of coach Kim Mulkey in Baton Rouge and the victory over Michigan provided LSU a sweet offer of 16, her first in almost ten years. The first stamps were for the rebuilding of the program, but Michigan’s defeat was necessary.
Mulkey stood on the side and watched her players as they entered PMAC. Something was gone and it was troubled by a veteran coach.
She heard two players who talked about their sore legs, how tired they were at this point of the season. With mere one day to prepare for Wolverina, she could not afford to give players off or short training for fear of unintentionally signaling that Michigan could easily take.
Mulkey had another plan. She began to control a way to light a fire under the players and still gives them some downtime.
When LSU started its passages, it was frustrated by a lack of energy and focusing on players. Surprise for anyone, she let her team know about it. When her irritation was mounted, the whole team threw out the practice. He told them to go home.
LSU had 30 hours in Michigan.
The next morning the players returned to the passage before playing. He still couldn’t see a fire in the Mulkey training side line, so she cooked another motivational trick.
She leaned and whispered to join the head coach Bob Starkey: “We have to go through Michigan’s incoming games, and then I think I’ll throw them again. Just check their pulse.”
Starky, who was in her second season and worked with Mulkey, stared at her to make sure it was seriously before the land. As LSU approached the end of the reviews with Starkey and started a new drill, the player made a mistake and Mulkey took the opportunity. She went to court.
“You’re still not with me. You’re still not here,” recalls Starkey Mulkey. “Get out!”
But the players refused. Alexis Morris and Angel Reese pushed back and their teammates stood behind them. Mulkey looked at her coaches. “Okay,” she said. “Then we leave.”
Some assistants protested, but Mulkey wouldn’t have any of this. When they gathered their belongings and went quietly to the east, the players stayed on the floor, amazed. That night was staring at the second game with a hard opponent, and now, the next day in a row, the players’ plan will not be planned. But Mulkey was.
“As a newcomer, your mind is a little mad as if the coach really went out?” Sa’myah Smith said. “What are we doing? We’re going to the second round. We just need you. But that helped us. We needed it.”
When the coaches left, Morris and Reese led LSU a typical passage before the playing. From the coaches of the coaches, where there is live camera feed from the floor, Mulkey and Starkey watched the team running the perfect passage.
Mulkey smiled. “We’re ready,” she told him.
LSU would continue that night to defeat Michigan 24 points Ao 14 days later Tigers won the National Championship, now iconic victory over Caitlin Clark and Iowa.
Mulkey, coach of the Hall of Fame with four National Championships, became one of the most respected figures in university basketball, won an almost unmatted rate and became the first female coach to win national titles in two programs. Some consider her methods and persona rare on university basketball, but only few people can argue with her success.
He is the first person in the history of NCAA for a man or a woman to win the National Championship as a player, assistant coach and head coach. Congratulations 3x National Champion coach Kim Mulkey. #20hopclass pic.twitter.com/0yucd11p7p
– Basketball Hof (@hoophall) April 4, 2020
Mulkey’s colleagues and players who competed with her and against her as a head coach have believed that her success was not just about hiring her (now expert on the transfer portal), developing or strategizing. She won 86 percent of her games and four national titles.
But like any coach, Mulkey’s achievements are the result of her ability to understand her teams and understand their needs – when to deliver hard truths to try them, when to relax when to back up. At a time when the players have more leverage than ever by the transmission portal, the NIL agreements and the general softening of the coach-player relationship surprisingly prosper and won while not changing their approach, because many coaches feel necessary to try to adapt.
Starkey remembered this final game Chicken Mulkey with the 2023 team, and said, “It’s just gambling if you don’t know your team. And she yes. … she knew the character of this team. She felt like they would react.”
Her fingerprints are also this season of the LSU team, which on Friday evening in Spokane is facing the second NC State in Sweet 16. The season after the end of the tireless Rees reflection grouped with a new transmission and met at the end of the season to try to run at Final Four. To do this, they will have to go through the NC state, which has created the last four last season, and potentially through UCLA, the total seed of tournament No. 1.
But since he is a mulkey team, it is not surprising that he is happy to welcome the challenge ahead of us.
“She gets quite quickly about what the team can do and what version of her can do,” said LSU assistant Daphne Mitchell, who also worked with Mulkey in Baylor. “He feels like,” Do you know what? I have to turn warm.
Mulkey is also one of the most polarizing coaches in higher education sports. She had a tense public relationship with her former star Baylor Brittney Griner, made insensitive comments on the investigation of a sexual attack on football Baylor, and at the top of the pandemic and testing brought.
However, the Legion of Players strongly defends and loves Mulkey. Morris, which Mulkey started her team in Baylor, returned to play for Mulkey for one season on LSU. When I asked about the return, Morris said, “When I went to find myself and was on this crazy road up and down, I began to realize all the things she had in place were the things I needed – as a structure, discipline, organization.”
When Reese met Mulkey after he decided to convert from Maryland, Reese expressed his hard coaching from Mulkey. She saw Mulkey as someone to make sure she had never taken himself and took too easily a drill. “I knew what it was when I got here,” Reese said. “I told her …” I don’t want you to feel like the best player, I want you to feel like I’m at the bottom. “”
Players are not surprised by this kind of coaching from Mulkey. Rather, this is why many specifically look for it.
“Kim is the best in the dressing room I have ever seen,” said former director of women’s basketball operations Johnny Derrick, who worked with Mulkey from 2000 to 2024. “
In the era of an uncontrollable player movement, where many coaches privately Bemoan feel as if they had to walk on the shells to keep the players content and off the portal, Mulkey seems to exist in the world without eggs.
In particular, LSU was the recipient of the transmission portal, but did not experience almost wear many programs across the country. In the last three seasons, LSU has lost only a few highly recognized players on the portal, but only one (Hailey van lith) was a consistent starter.
Many say it’s because players know what they get when they come to play for Mulkey. It could be intense and brutally honest, but she doesn’t give up who she is. No player is caught outside the guard when Mulkey … Mulkey.
“Whether you like it or not, he says what he meant. It will stand on it – I think it’s the highest thing,” said junior Flau’jae Johnson. “I think it just keeps real and such people. Whether it hates it at the moment, and either like,” I’m leaving, “… I’ll always come back because it’s simply, it’s real, it’s real.”
Angel Reese said she was looking for a coach of hard love like Mulkey. (Greg Fiume / NCAA Photos)
Senior Aneesah Morrow said that last season Mulkey did not dance around the reason that she took her from the start line. Morrow did not play Mulkey Standard. Play this standard, Mulkey explained and she would return to the lineup.
“I was glad, Dang, I really humiliated because I was insufficiently powerful,” Morrow said. “But she has a standard for me and she knows what I’m capable of. That’s why I enter the floor every night, I say to her,” I have you. I got my back; You have your back. “
Mulkey’s competitiveness and effort to push their players to higher heights reflect a large part of their own journey as an athlete. As a twelve-year-old in Louisiana, she was the first girl to play in the Little League until the officials were subject to the girls inappropriate for the All-Star game. She was the first girl in Louisiana, who earned 4,000 points in high school, and as a 5-Naha-4 point guard won four state titles before winning two national titles in Louisian Tech in the early 80s. The contestants under the firm and fiery coach Pat Summitt at the Olympic Games in 1984 and maintaining a lifelong friendship with the summit also shaped Mulkey.
“Being a player and knowing what motivated me this time of year and what you have to do in demanding young people and then love young people,” Mulkey said. “Maybe it’s just who I am and I feel good for the game.”
Whatever it is and anywhere it comes, coaches around Mulkey say it works only for her. Her enthusiasm is often exhibited – her flashy clothes, theater theater and explosions with officials – and pays her attention, but passion is not a product of being in national television games. It’s constant and expected. No player who selects LSU enters the first training and expects all rainbows and unicorn; No assistant who accepts work on his employees does not expect an environment without fire moments. If they wanted it, they wouldn’t go to LSU.
And just as they realize these moments, they also quickly mention other, less visible moments-how some players see her as a mother’s character, an annual practice during the conference season, which is confused for a trip from ice cream, as Mulkey shows her garden to players when she visits her house.
LSU has coach Mulkey makes a dancing flex line with a team 🔥 pic.twitter.com/xnxpaqhi37
– EsPNW (@PNW) March 24, 2025
At the beginning of this season, Mulkey captured Mulkey in outrage and set out a box from the hands of Seimone Augustus, the first year of LSU assistant coach and a women’s basketball legend playing for Tigers two decades ago. Later, when he asked about the incident, Augustus just smiled.
Reaction of assistant coach Seimone Augustus to head coach Kim Mulkey’s slap of the box! 🤣 pic.twitter.com/zte58j3ae5
– I’m talking about hoops 🏀 (@trendyhoopstars) 31 January 2025
“I’m glad it’s mulkey,” Augustus said. “Get to know her means love. Many people think they won’t understand who is like a man. He’s an amazing person once you get a chance to be inside and get to know her. But she’s emotional. You can probably assemble the reel of the different fiery moments she had.”
There is no lack of these moments, because Mulkey does not change its intensity in front of the cameras or behind the closed training doors. Players know, coaches know it and she knows.
“It is incredibly honest and forward. She, by no means, shape or form, hides the fact that she will train them hard and that she had great expectations,” Starkey said. “Nothing covers nothing in the recruitment process. And I think it’s huge. I saw it, I was around, and I know that the coaches who try to paint a picture of something they’re not.”
“It’s just not kim.”
– Athletic ‘With Brody Miller contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Will Tullos / Athletic;; Photos Kim Mulkey: Brandon Sumrall, Jacob Kupferman, Eakin Howard, Beau Brune / Getty Images)
