‘It just felt right’: LSU’s Kim Mulkey doesn’t plan on changing much as she tries to build a winner (2024)

BATON ROUGE, La. — Kim Mulkey’s new home is a new construction, a $1.6 million house in Baton Rouge’s Southdowns neighborhood with vaulted ceilings and 150-year-old wooden beams and built with Texas limestone, just like her place in Waco. It’s 4,400 square feet with four bedrooms and five bathrooms, built by former HGTV host Kenneth Brown and his husband as a COVID-19 project to try some new things. Home is important to Mulkey. She’s a homebody, somebody who needs a place to decompress and sit out back watching some sort of sporting event on one of the TVs. She needs a yard to work in, certainly her favorite hobby. She loves her neighbors, but she likes privacy so a fence went up, too. It was the first house she looked at in town, and after multiple trips to Baton Rouge she settled on this one.

“I just saw it and I thought, I can add some things to it,” Mulkey says.

She laughs because, yes, she sees the analogy here. She’s the legendary basketball coach with three national titles to her name who did the unprecedented: She left her dynasty at Baylor for a struggling LSU program that hasn’t made a Final Four or even an Elite Eight in 13 years. One can say she saw LSU and thought she could “add some things to it.” But, of course, this also was about home for the Tickfaw, La., native who lamented missing Ponchatoula strawberries and Hi-Ho BBQ in Hammond.

She’s trying to build a new home, emphasis on the build. She jokes about still needing to figure out her routes to work as she arrives marginally late for an interview because of Baton Rouge construction and traffic, walking into her temporary office inside Tiger Stadium while the new offices are built. Her desk sits between one full-size cutout of her with braided pigtails in her 1980s Louisiana Tech playing days when she won her first national title and another cutout of her with her son Kramer Robertson during his LSU baseball career. Both cutouts are her past. Both are her present. Her longest-tenured assistant Johnny Derrick will tell you, “Kim doesn’t change.”

After the whirlwind first few months of bringing her Baylor staff over and buying and selling houses and trying to actually find time to work with the team, the Kim Mulkey era is about to begin for LSU women’s basketball. The Tigers tip off Tuesday morning against Nicholls at Maravich Center. It’s been a fall of building trust with her team and setting standards, of proving to them she’s for real and them proving to her they will put the work in.

Suddenly, the Hall of Fame coach with an 86 percent winning clip is likely going to have to deal with some losing. She’s adamant she’s prepared for it. That’s part of the appeal, in some ways.

So why did Mulkey do it? The why is also a large part of the how.

“I don’t know, you just feel something that’s tugging at you to go this last third of your coaching career and go do what you did 21 years ago at Baylor, basically under the same circ*mstances,” she says.

“And it just felt right.”

Mulkey cried as she stood in front of her Baylor players, but she also told them the news in true Mulkey fashion: bluntly and to the point.

“I’m going home,” she said she told them, “and nothing I tell you will make you feel any different toward me right now. I just hope 20 or 30 years from now you will say, ‘Coach, it’s OK.’”

She knew they were angry. They had every right to be. They all came to Baylor for different reasons, but most of them came because of a relationship with Mulkey or her staff. Mulkey and those assistants were all leaving. The players didn’t say much back. Some teared up. Some walked out right after she finished. Mulkey was leaving a potential Final Four team at the height of her powers, but she takes solace in not being a coach who leaves when the cupboard is bare. She believes she’s leaving Baylor in a good position.

She’s spoken about the why many times this year — and those reasons are an accumulation of things — but the most common theme is this: “I knew that I could stay right there and we would have good teams. Keep doing what you’re doing. But there was a part of me that, I don’t know, when I spoke to LSU there was a part of me that felt like, ‘Kim, we need you more than just basketball. We need you to come and be impactful on our university, on our state. This is home to you. We know you better than anybody.’”

She also says she made this decision without even looking at the roster or the facilities. It was less about the job than it was this sort of calling she speaks of. And when you get her to go into the specifics of what she’s inheriting from former coach Nikki Fargas, she doesn’t say much.

The reality? LSU went 9-13 last season. It ranked dead last in the SEC in points per game. And field goal percentage. And rebounding. And so on. A program with so much history under Sue Gunter and four straight Final Fours under Pokey Chatman and Van Chancellor had regressed to the bottom of the SEC.

Step one was building trust and buy-in. So much of that trust and buy-in stems from three returning veterans: first-team All-SEC guard Khayla Pointer, center Faustine Aifuwa and guard Jailin Cherry. But for so long Mulkey couldn’t work with them because of the transition and fluid schedules, and she refused to sporadically get workouts in with no stability. “I’m real regimented,” she says. “I’m real disciplined. I want everyone to know what they’re supposed to do each day. I couldn’t get that going this summer.”

Once it got going, though, it took off, she says. Any interview with Mulkey will involve her saying this team will need to be defined by defense and rebounding. She knows there will be weaknesses and areas other SEC foes have the advantage, but the Tigers can control how well they rebound and defend. She built Baylor on that same foundation.

She made clear to the players she will judge them on what they do under her, not what happened before. And this rebuild is also taking place in a different era from when she took over at Baylor in 2000. There’s the transfer portal, which she entered to pick up her own former five-star center Hannah Gusters from Baylor, plus Alexis Morris from Texas A&M and Autumn Newby from Vanderbilt. She could patch some holes while still focusing on the long-term infrastructure.

Mulkey knows rebuilds. Baylor won seven games the season before she arrived. She can accept some lesser results in Year 1. But Mulkey also understands something about the work and the building blocks required to win down the line. They need to happen right now.

“I think she’s more passionate than normal,” longtime assistant Sytia Messer says. “She knows, when you’re doing a rebuild, there’s a small window you have to hit and you can’t waste that window.”

The conventional wisdom of Mulkey is that of the fiery drill sergeant coach who says outlandish things, yells at refs and makes headlines. That’s all true, by the way. But there’s something in where that comes from that might be misunderstood. Mulkey is confident, make no mistake, but there’s a humility in the approach. It’s an approach of a girl from Tickfaw and the daughter of a Marine who believes in earning things.

“A lot of coaches have it backwards,” Mulkey says, leaning back in her office chair. “They come in demanding these high salaries. Kim Mulkey didn’t do that. When I was hired at Baylor, my salary was $125,000. We went to the first NCAA Tournament, they wanted to redo my contract, and I said, ‘Why? If you want to, that’s fine. But I signed a contract with you.’ They said, ‘Because you’re moving us up, Coach.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you. Let me build this thing, and when I build it then I’m gonna come to you and you can’t turn me down.’ I think that’s fair.”

She built it. And then she says she operated with that deal: “Don’t turn me down.” She won a national title in 2005 and earned a 10-year deal in 2007 for her efforts. She then went 40-0 in 2012 for another championship. Then she won another in 2019. By the time she left, she was earning north of $2 million a year while building an elite staff.

She’s won enough that she starts at LSU making $2.5 million this season. She’s won enough that she could bring essentially her entire large Baylor staff with her to Baton Rouge (and they all followed, because as Derrick says, “She is very loyal to us, and we’re very loyal to her”). She’s won enough that LSU is renovating its offices and the training room and giving players things like laptops they weren’t given before.

But Mulkey also understands she needs to prove it to people again. That’s what makes this season so fascinating. There’s a good chance LSU doesn’t make the NCAA Tournament for the first time since her third season at Baylor.

She says she’s a realist. She knows who is better than who. She knows what her team and her players are capable of, and she will judge them off that.

“We’re not gonna win (some) games,” she says. “There are gonna be games we lose, and I want to see that same enthusiasm and I want to see that same fire and grit. If you give it all you absolutely have, I’m gonna walk in that locker room and hug your neck.”

But she’s also one of the most competitive humans in sports. She acknowledges there will be sleepless nights after losses. Shoot, there were sleepless nights during the 40-0 season. “It’s going to be an emotional year for Kim,” Messer says, “but I think she’s built for it.”

Even before the wins come, though, there’s a new excitement. That’s undeniable. LSU has sold 4,500 season tickets, unprecedented for the program. With coach Ed Orgeron on his way out from the football program, Mulkey is the biggest figure on campus. She’s undeniably the biggest winner. She’s the polarizing figure who has said controversial statements that have not gone over well (quite a few times), including when she said she was “tired of hearing” about criticism of Baylor’s handling of incidents of sexual assault on campus.

Mulkey’s also the figure who can sell as well as anybody in sports. She’s a master at raising money, a star at rotary club meetings, a reporter’s dream at news conferences. Mulkey the public figure is already bringing something new to LSU women’s basketball even before Mulkey the coach has done a thing.

She believes her role at LSU is about “more than basketball.” She believes coaching is about developing young women. She tries to impart lessons to players far before anybody else brings up those lessons to them. She talks at length about how college is the best years of your life, but once you leave you need to be ready for the real world. Derrick recalls an experienced coach once telling him, “‘Kim is the best in the locker I’ve ever seen.’”

“Her ability to know when to push a kid, when to love them, when they need a day off, she’s just got a feel for it,” Derrick adds. Her new star guard Pointer already tells stories of her cracking up the entire team at practices with impressions and jokes.

So much of Mulkey’s greatest strength is also the thing that gets her in trouble. Honesty. She uses that honesty to be introspective with her own flaws, her own mistakes in 21 years as a head coach.

“A head coach leads, but a head coach is also very honest,” she says. “Sometimes, people can’t handle being brutally honest. I will never change and be one of these speakers that’s politically correct. That gets me in trouble sometimes, but I have no agenda. I have absolutely no agenda. I have no political agenda. I have no religious agenda. I’m just Kim, and I speak from my heart. I know my heart is good when I speak. It just might not come out the right way.”

Like Derrick says, Mulkey doesn’t change. And she doesn’t plan to. That’s what LSU signed up for. She’s the home run hire few thought athletic director Scott Woodward could pull off. She’s the person who will spawn new facilities and try to raise new banners.

She’s already seeing the boost in recruiting, bringing in Gusters and then landing four-star forward Sa’Myah Smith in October. It’s why this rebuild is so different from the Baylor one in some ways. At Baylor, there was no history, and all Mulkey could sell was her national-title-winning playing career and her national-title-winning assistant career. At LSU, there’s history from Gunter to Chatman to Chancellor. And this time, she has 21 years of evidence that she can build a champion herself.

In those ways, recruiting future champions will be easier. In others, there will be infinitely greater expectations than when she started in the background at Baylor. Because she certainly isn’t in the background anymore.

For now, though, Kim Mulkey is just going to build the thing. Then, you can’t turn her down.

(Photo courtesy of LSU Athletics)