SPOKANE, Wash. — The morning after LSU trounced Hawaii in the first round of the 2023 NCAA Tournament, the Tigers walked into practice on their home court to prepare for the next round. Much was on the line: It was coach Kim Mulkey’s second season in Baton Rouge, and a win over Michigan would secure LSU a Sweet 16 bid, its first in nearly a decade. The early signs were there for a program rebuild, but beating Michigan was essential.
Mulkey stood off to the side and observed her players as they ambled into the PMAC. Something was off, and it bothered the veteran coach.
She overheard two players talking about their sore legs, how tired they were at this point in the season. With only one day to prepare for the Wolverines, she couldn’t afford to give players an off day or a short practice for fear it would inadvertently signal they could take Michigan lightly.
Mulkey had another plan. She began masterminding a way to light a fire under the players and still give them some downtime.
As LSU began its walkthroughs, she grew frustrated with players’ lack of energy and focus. A surprise to no one, she let her team know about it. As her irritation mounted, she threw the entire team out of practice. Told them to go home.
LSU had 30 hours until Michigan.
The next morning, players returned for the pregame walkthrough. On the practice sideline, Mulkey still didn’t see the fire, so she cooked up another motivational ploy.
She leaned over and whispered to associate head coach Bob Starkey: “We need to go over Michigan’s inbounds plays, and then I think I’m going to toss them again. Just to check their pulse.”
Starkey, who was in just his second season working with Mulkey, stared at her to make sure she was serious before complying with the plot. As LSU neared the end of the inbounds review with Starkey and started a new drill, a player made a mistake, and Mulkey took the opportunity. She walked onto the court.
“You’re still not with me. You’re still not here,” Starkey remembers Mulkey yelling. “Get out!”
But the players refused. Alexis Morris and Angel Reese pushed back, and their teammates stood behind them. Mulkey looked at her coaches. “Fine,” she said. “Then, we’ll leave.”
Some assistants protested, but Mulkey would have none of it. As they gathered their things and silently walked to the exit, players stayed on the floor, stunned. A second-round game with a tough opponent stared them down that night, and now, for the second day in a row, the players’ schedule wasn’t going to plan. But Mulkey’s was.
“As a freshman, your mind is going a little crazy, like, Coach is really going to walk out?” Sa’Myah Smith said. “What are we doing? We’re going into the second round. We need you right now. But it helped us. We needed that.”
As the coaches left, Morris and Reese led LSU through a typical pregame walkthrough. From the coaches’ offices, where there’s a live camera feed from the floor, Mulkey and Starkey watched as the team ran a perfect walkthrough.
Mulkey smiled. “We’re ready,” she told him.
LSU would go on to beat Michigan by 24 points that night, and 14 days later the Tigers won the national championship, a now-iconic victory over Caitlin Clark and Iowa.
Mulkey, a Hall of Fame coach with four national championships, has become one of college basketball’s most recognized figures, winning at a near-unmatched rate and becoming the first women’s coach to win national titles at two programs. Some consider her methods and persona rare in college basketball, but few can argue her success.
She is the first person in NCAA history male or female, to win a national championship as a player, assistant coach and head coach. We congratulate 3x National Champion Coach Kim Mulkey. #20HoopClass pic.twitter.com/0YUcd11p7p
— Basketball HOF (@Hoophall) April 4, 2020
Mulkey’s colleagues and players who have competed with and against her through her 24 years as a head coach surmise that her success isn’t just about her ability to recruit (now an expert at mining the transfer portal too), develop players or strategize. She’s won 86 percent of her games and four national titles.
But as well as any coach, Mulkey’s accomplishments are a result of her ability to understand her teams and comprehend their needs — when to deliver hard truths, when to test them, when to ease up, when to back them up. In an era where players have more leverage than ever — through the transfer portal, NIL deals and a general softening of the coach-player relationship — Mulkey has surprisingly thrived and won while not changing her approach, as many coaches feel required to attempt to adapt.
Thinking back to that ultimate game of chicken Mulkey played with the 2023 team, Starkey said: “It’s only a gamble if you don’t know your team. And she did. … She knew the character of that team. She had a feel for how they’d respond.”
Her fingerprints likewise are on this season’s LSU team, which faces second-seeded NC State in the Sweet 16 on Friday evening in Spokane. A season after graduating the relentless rebounder Reese, the Tigers have regrouped, with a new bevy of transfers, and come together at the end of the season to attempt an unexpected run to the Final Four. To do so, they’ll need to get through NC State, which made the Final Four last season, and potentially through UCLA, the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed.
But given this is a Mulkey team, it’s not surprising that it gladly welcomes the challenge ahead.
“She gets a feel pretty quickly about what a team can handle and what version of her they can handle,” said LSU assistant coach Daphne Mitchell, who also worked with Mulkey for six years at Baylor. “She has a feeling of like, ‘You know what? I gotta turn the heat up. I’m being too soft. They can handle more. I’m not giving enough credit for what they can handle.’”
Mulkey is also among the most polarizing coaches in college sports. She’s had a strained public relationship with her former Baylor star Brittney Griner, made insensitive comments about a sexual assault investigation into Baylor football and during the height of the pandemic was flippant about masks and testing.
Yet, legions of players vigorously defend and love on Mulkey. Morris, whom Mulkey had kicked off her team at Baylor, returned to play for Mulkey for one season at LSU. When asked about coming back, Morris said: “When I went to find myself and was on this crazy up and down journey, I started to realize all the things she had in place were the things that I needed — like the structure, the discipline, the organization.”
When Reese met with Mulkey after deciding to transfer from Maryland, Reese expressed wanting hard coaching from Mulkey. She saw Mulkey as someone who would make sure she never took a play off or took a drill too easily. “I knew what it was when I got here,” Reese said. “I told her … ‘I don’t want you to make me feel like the best player, I want you to make me feel like I’m at the bottom.’”
Players aren’t surprised by that kind of coaching from Mulkey. Rather, it’s why many specifically seek her out.
“Kim is the best in the locker room I’ve ever seen,” said former director of women’s basketball operations Johnny Derrick, who worked with Mulkey from 2000 to 2024. “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.”
In an era of rampant player movement, when many coaches privately bemoan feeling like they need to walk on eggshells to keep players content and out of the transfer portal, Mulkey seems to exist in a world without eggs.
Notably, LSU has been the beneficiary of the transfer portal but hasn’t experienced nearly the attrition many programs across the country experience. In the last three seasons, LSU has lost only a few highly regarded players to the portal but only one (Hailey Van Lith) was a consistent starter.
Many say that’s because players know what they’re getting into when they come to play for Mulkey. She might be intense and brutally honest, but she doesn’t waver from who she is. No player is caught off guard when Mulkey is … Mulkey.
“Whether you like it or not, she’s going to say what’s on her mind. She’s going to stand on that — I think that’s the realest thing,” junior Flau’jae Johnson said. “I think she just keeps it real, and people like that. Whether they hate it in the moment, and be like, ‘I’m going to leave,’ … you always come back, because she’s just, she’s genuine, she’s real.”
Senior Aneesah Morrow said last season Mulkey didn’t dance around the reason she took her out of the starting lineup. Morrow wasn’t playing up to Mulkey’s standard. Play to that standard, Mulkey explained, and she’d be back in the lineup.
“I was like, dang, I really got humbled, because I was underperforming,” Morrow said. “But she has a standard for me, and she knows what I’m capable of. So that’s why every night I step on the floor, I tell her, ‘I got you. I got your back; you got my back.’”
Mulkey’s competitiveness and drive to push her players to greater heights mirror much of her own path as an athlete. As a 12-year-old in Louisiana, she was the first girl to play on a Little League team until officials ruled girls ineligible for an All-Star game. She was the first girl in Louisiana to score 4,000 points in high school, and as a 5-foot-4 point guard, she won four state titles before going on to win two national titles at Louisiana Tech in the early 1980s. Competing under firm and fiery coach Pat Summitt in the 1984 Olympics, and maintaining a lifelong friendship with Summitt, shaped Mulkey, too.
“Being a player and knowing what motivated me at this time of year and what you need to do in challenging young people and then loving on young people,” Mulkey said. “Maybe it’s just who I am, and I have a good feel for the game.”
Whatever it is and from wherever it comes, coaches around Mulkey say this only works for her. Her exuberance is often on display — her flashy outfits, sideline theatrics and outbursts at officials — and earns her attention, but the passion isn’t a product of being in nationally televised games. It’s a constant and expected. No player who picks LSU walks into the first practice expecting all rainbows and unicorns; no assistant who accepts a job on her staff expects an environment devoid of fiery moments. If that’s what they wanted, they wouldn’t go to LSU.
And as much as they acknowledge these moments, they’re also quick to mention the other, lesser-seen moments — how some players see her as a mother figure, the annual practice during the conference season that is swapped out for an ice cream field trip, how Mulkey shows off her garden to players when they visit her house.
LSU’s got Coach Mulkey doing the Flex Line Dance with the squad 🔥 pic.twitter.com/XNxPAqhI37
— espnW (@espnW) March 24, 2025
Earlier this season, a broadcast captured Mulkey in a fit of outrage, slapping a clipboard out of the hands of Seimone Augustus, a first-year LSU assistant coach and women’s basketball legend who played for the Tigers two decades ago. Later, when asked about the incident, Augustus only smiled.
Assistant Coach Seimone Augustus’ reaction to Head Coach Kim Mulkey slapping the clipboard! 🤣 pic.twitter.com/ZTe58j3aE5
— I talk hoops 🏀 (@trendyhoopstars) January 31, 2025
“I’m like, it’s Mulkey,” Augustus said. “To know her is to love her. A lot of people, I think, misunderstand who she is as a person. She is an amazing person once you get a chance to be on the inside and get to know her. But she is emotional. You can probably put together a highlight reel of different fiery moments she has had.”
There is no shortage of those moments because Mulkey doesn’t change her intensity in front of the cameras or behind closed practice doors. Players know it, coaches know it and she knows it.
“She’s incredibly honest and up front. She, in no way, shape or form, hides the fact that she’s going to coach them hard, and that she had great expectations,” Starkey said. “She doesn’t sugar coat anything in the recruiting process. And I just think that’s huge. I’ve seen it, I’ve been around it, and I know coaches that will try and paint a picture of something that they’re not.
“That’s just not Kim.”
— The Athletic’s Brody Miller contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; photos of Kim Mulkey: Brandon Sumrall, Jacob Kupferman, Eakin Howard, Beau Brune / Getty Images)
