By RON HIGGINS, Journal Sports
BATON ROUGE – – Prior to taking over as LSU’s women’s head basketball coach two seasons ago, Kim Mulkey already had six national championships on her Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame resume.
There were back-to-back titles in 1981 and 1982 as a spunky ponytailed Louisiana Tech point guard, one in 1988 as a Tech assistant coach under Leon Barmore and three as Baylor’s head coach in 2005, 2012 and 2019.
As a player, Mulkey nearly won a third straight title in 1983 but lost to USC 69-67 when she missed a game-tying shot at the buzzer that would have forced overtime. As an assistant coach, Tech returned to the Final Four in 1989 and lost 76-71 in the semifinals.
As Baylor’s head coach, two of her defending national championship teams were eliminated in the Sweet 16 and the third never got a chance to play in the postseason when the COVID outbreak canceled the 2020 NCAA tournament.
The common thread of all those experiences is something her 2023-24 Lady Tigers squad is about to discover after winning the school’s first NCAA basketball title (men’s or women’s) last April.
“If you’re the underdog (as LSU was last season) and you win a national championship, you didn’t probably get everybody’s best shot,” Mulkey said Monday afternoon before her uber-talented team opened practice before an estimated Pete Maravich Assembly crowd of 2,500. “If you’re the favorite, you’re going to get everybody’s best shot.”
It’s what Mulkey expects with a team returning first-team All-America junior forward Angel Reese and sophomore guard Flau’jae Johnson, who was last year’s SEC Freshman of the Year.
There’s also the infusion of Louisville graduate student guard Hailey Van Lith and DePaul junior forward Aneesah Morrow, college basketball two highest-rated transfers. The icing on the recruiting cake is having the nation’s No. 1 ranked signing class led by Bossier City’s Parkway High School guard Mikaylah Williams (the No. 2 nationally ranked recruit) and Nashville (Tn.) Webb School center Aalyah Del Rosario (the No. 7 nationally ranked recruit).
Mulkey often said last season she didn’t mind coaching big personalities such as Reese and Johnson. But in the almost seven months since LSU scored the most points ever in a national title game when the Lady Tigers destroyed Iowa 102-85, Reese has become one of the most recognizable women’s athletes in the world.
Besides winning a silver medal playing for Team USA in the FIBA Women’s AmeriCup, she was photographed for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as well for a cover story of the magazine’s issue about college athletics legally earning income through name, image and likeness.
Reese also appeared in a Cardi B music video. She made an Amazon commercial with teammate Johnson and also appeared with several NBA stars in a commercial for Starry Soda. She was featured in Time Magazine’s Time100 Next issue.
In the On3 website listing the current top 100 men’s and women’s athletes NIL evaluations, Reese is No. 8 at $1.7 million, Johnson No. 19 at $1.1 million and Van Lith No. 79 at $550,000.
At this time last season, Reese was just a non-descript transfer from Maryland hoping a change of scenery and a new head coach could make her a pro prospect. But her expansive fame seemingly overnight has given Mulkey something to ponder that she never faced before as she starts her 24th season as a college head coach.
How do you motivate a star player who is a millionaire according to her NIL evaluation?
“Is Angel Reese hungry?” Mulkey wondered out loud. “She’s making money like crazy. Is she going to be hungry for another ring?
“You get a feel for that in your first individual meeting (before the start of the fall semester). I sat down with Angel, talked about her summer, and then we talked about her being here.
“She said something I won’t ever forget,” Mulkey said. She said `Coach, I’m tired. I’m so glad to be back. I’m ready to play basketball.’ I was looking to hear that and not have to pull it out of her.
“She understands she doesn’t have all of the things she has if she doesn’t have success on the court. She understands that she just had the most unbelievable year of her college career and it was fun. And you’re not entitled to that again unless you work.
“She gets motivated by things that most athletes do. Last week, they put a projection out that she’d be the eighth pick in the (2024 WNBA) draft. Well, that was an insult to her. She wanted to know what she had to work on. We told her and it motivates her to get in the gym. She gets motivated by somebody in practice going head-to-head with her and blocking her shot or talking trash back at her. She’s a competitor.”
So are transfers Van Lith and Morrow. After averaging 19.7 points and 25.7 points respectively last season, that duo provides the Lady Tigers with proven, experienced scorers.
“Morrow and Van Lith bring experience and it matters,” said Mulkey, who’s 60-8 overall and 28-4 in the SEC after her two LSU seasons. “When you take a freshman and then you take a transfer that’s got three years of college experience and you just put them out there, you just obviously can see the difference. And it has nothing to do with talent.”
Yet the freshman that could crash the playing rotation is Williams, the 2023 Morgan Wooten National Player of the Year and two-time reigning Louisiana Gatorade Player of the Year who led Parkway to a 2023 state title.
“Mikaylah brings a physical body that’s ready for college,” Mulkey said. “The first thing you’ll notice is she’s pretty physical and can play any position on the perimeter. That may not be fair to her. Because one day I may have her playing point guard and the next day off-guard. That’s tough, particularly if you’re having to learn the point guard position.”
LSU plays home exhibition games vs. East Texas Baptist on Oct. 26 and Loyola of New Orleans on Nov. 1. The Lady Tigers face Colorado on Nov. 6 in Las Vegas to open the regular season.
The NCAA national championship banner will be raised to the PMAC rafters in pregame of the Nov. 9 home opener vs. Queens.
“This season is going to be different in a lot of ways,” said the 61-year-old Mulkey, who had two stents surgically inserted into a blocked heart artery in June. “We’re just about to sell out the P-Mac (in home season tickets). The (LSU) brand is bigger, the NIL stuff is bigger, our schedule is a little harder, and our depth and our talent are much more.
“All of that is a good thing. And we’ll just have to stay away from injuries and see what happens.”
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com