It is unfortunate that Justine P. did not work out because she was a high HS ranked recruit that Kellie "closed on."
Kellie also signed T. Cooper but was done-in by transfer deadline dates. We can imagine that Coop in a line-up with Spear and Jackson might have made for a formidable Big 3.
I have always enjoyed your posts but you often write as though you "were in the room" when key events happened but whenever pressed on your relationship to the UTAD, you fall back to "No relationship, I am just a humble contract lawyer." So which is it?
If the latter, how do you know the coaches threw their hands up and quit recruiting? You seem to forget, that going too far down the food chain in HS recruiting can lock you into scholarship players that can't actually help and limit your options for the next recruiting cycle, Maybe Kellie and staff felt that Strickland with some NCAA experience and a good cultural fit was a better short term bet than a 157th ranked high school player. [Strickland kind of lit up the LVs this season by the way. ]
Your agenda seems to be authoritatively arguing that under no possible circumstances could Kellie have ever succeeded in HS recruiting and so she just had to go.
However, rumor has it (and perhaps this estimate is incorrect) that CKC has 3X the funds that Kellie had to work with. In a world where $ talks (and I would assume as a contract lawyer you are aware that $ is a poowerful incentive), having considerably more $ is a significant asset in recruiting.
I am not debating that after 5 years and never quite getting over the hump that a coaching change was justified but I am debating absolutist proclamations about what Kellie could or could not have done with CKC's level of resources.
For your likely retort, "hah, the donors weren't gonna give $ to Kellie cause she could not get to the Final 4," fine, but did they give the $ to CKC for the purpose of getting blown out by 30 and 43 points?
If donor confidence is the driving factor in hire or fire decisions, it seems like "Danny White, we have a problem."
Pissott was a miss, though I’ll give Shea credit, she finally has her playing well as a senior. Not at the 5-star, commands your defensive gameplan level, but she’s an important piece for Vandy.
Kellie took Cooper knowing that she would have to sit a year, she entered the portal well after the deadline when South Carolina took another player at her position after her family says Staley told them they would not. It certainly didn’t feel right, I believe she was one of only three players in the country that had to sit due to transfer rules and not getting a waiver. She would have made a difference for sure.
I’m certainly not in the room, but I have relationships with a lot of people who are, and I don’t post anything that I’m not confident about being 100% accurate. You’re free to discard it or disagree, that’s fine. I was around the old women’s athletics department every day when I was an undergrad, and was around the football program every day when I was in law school. A lot of people around have changed some have stayed the same. The biggest difference now is, a lot of my contacts at the school and in the NIL world are also asking me for money when we talk, haha.
I don’t think they threw their hands up and stopped recruiting, I do believe that they cast too narrow of a net too early in each cycle because Sam Williams was convinced that they could focus on a very small number of players and get all of them. That followed a period of time where Harper didn’t have relationships with high-level prospects when she got here because Missouri State was not recruiting those players. Then, the Covid restrictions prevented her and her staff from building in person relationships with those players for more than a year. That put her behind, and it’s to her credit that her first three seasons were as good as they were in spite of that. So then she makes the staff changes and brings in Sam as her lead recruiter, which should have changed things, and it did put them in a position with some high school players that they were not previously in on. But even in a pre-NIL situation, they didn’t sign them. They got Pissott, as you mentioned.
I do think it is accurate that she didn’t have as much money to work with the first year that NIL was a thing. They had more to work with on transfers than high school players because that was the area most donors were most comfortable/confident in spending their money on. The last full recruiting cycle she was here for she had every bit of the money available to sign high school players that Kim does presently, and signed nobody. That was when some of the donors lost faith, the results had not been there on the court and the money that they were willing to give went unused.
I don’t have an anti-Kellie agenda, you can go back and look at my posts around her last season, and even after she was let go. I think she’s a good coach, I don’t think she’s a great coach. I think the sweet 16 is realistically her ceiling as a head coach. That’s a really good ceiling at 95% of the programs in women’s college basketball. But that’s not the ceiling here. If she takes Missouri to the Sweet 16 in the next three years, she will coach there for as long as she wants.
Kim took her first team to the Sweet 16, if that’s as far as she ever goes, she won’t be long for the job either. What I’m not willing to do is overreact to a pair of lopsided losses against what I believe are the two best teams in the country on their home courts. You can’t make losses like that habit, but it isn’t a habit at this point. Again, I think an evaluation and postmortem on this season at its conclusion will be beneficial. She changed a lot of things about her system from last year to this year, and I’m not sure all of those changes have worked. They press less, which removes the advantage of wearing teams down late. Where Tennessee was a second half team last year, and part because of that, they are anything but a second half team this year. I think she will adjust that, but it’s not the kind of thing that is easily adjusted in the middle of the season.
