A little less than 20 years ago, the nation was in a state of confusion, trying to figure out who won Florida in the George W. Bush vs. Al Gore presidential election. Kevin Steele was struggling through his second season as Baylor’s football coach. Chip Gaines had not yet met Joanna Stevens.
In that strange time that might not seem too long ago, Baylor’s first-year women’s basketball coach was getting ready for her first game at the head of a program on Nov. 18, 2000, at the Boston University Invitational.
Kim Mulkey’s most vivid memory of that first road trip with the Lady Bears has nothing to do with X’s and O’s.
“The bus going into the airport went underneath an overhang that was too short,” Mulkey said. “So we scraped the whole top of the bus. I looked back there at my players. They were screaming. Michelle Neely and people like that, Sheila Lambert. That’s what I remember.”
The Lady Bears defeated Miami of Ohio by 13 points in Mulkey’s first game. Now, after 20-straight 20-plus-win seasons, she is on the verge of her 600th victory.
Baylor will play Texas Tech at the United Supermarkets Arena at 7 p.m. on Tuesday in Lubbock. If the heavily favored Lady Bears win, Mulkey’s career mark will move to 600-100, making her the fastest coach to 600 wins in men’s or women’s Division I college basketball history. It took Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp, the current record holder, 704 games to get there.
It’s no surprise that Mulkey’s uber-successful tenure at Baylor, her only stop as a head coach, has inspired and spurred on some of her players to enter the coaching ranks themselves.
Earlier this month, former Lady Bear guard Jhasmin Player came into the Ferrell center as a Kansas assistant coach. She said she has to remind herself that, as a coach at a Big 12 school, she’s now in direct competition with the Baylor program.
But Player still takes Lady Bear insight with her at all times.
“I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned from Coach Mulkey is not to focus on the expectations at the end of the season,” Player said. “It’s the everyday grind. … It gets boring. It looks mundane, but it’s every day chopping wood. Doing the same defensive drills, but the end result is great.”
Player joined a long and distinguished list of former Baylor players and coaches who have recently marveled at the numbers behind Mulkey’s success while, at the same time, recalling the attention to details that made it happen.
On the night her Lady Bears jersey was retired in January, Nina Davis remembered how she was just trying to survive practice as a freshman. Last week, current WNBA player Kalani Brown talked about how tough practice can get. Former Lady Bear national champion Sophia Young, now the head girls’ basketball coach at San Antonio Cornerstone Christian, said some of the aspects of the Baylor program’s success are just too intense to push onto high school players.
Jordan Davis, one of Young’s teammates on the 2005 squad that claimed the Lady Bears’ first national championship, is in her first year as the Lake Dallas High School head girls’ hoops coach. Like Player, she pointed to the daily details that add up over time.
“I think it’s the approach and the way to do things, trying to do things the right way, demanding the little things out of your players,” Davis said.
As Mulkey patrols the bench area during games, it’s obvious how much she demands from the opening tip to the final buzzer. She has repeatedly said that she doesn’t look at the scoreboard, but just keeps coaching.
That’s merely the public show of how the program runs on practice and game days. To be a Lady Bear is to understand the overall system and where each individual fits.
“I think one of my biggest takeaways from Baylor was my teammates understood their roles and because of that we were successful,” Young said. “That’s one thing I try to instill within my players now, for them to know exactly what their role is and what I expect from them.”
Player said she craved structure as a college player and therefore fit perfectly into the Baylor program. There wasn’t any guess work, even from one drill to the next at practice.
As the teams warmed up for the Baylor vs. Kansas game on Feb. 5, Player could see the same routines were still in place.
“I’m sitting out there and I’m watching Moon (Ursin) shoot the same way I was taught to shoot here,” Player said. “That’s what makes Baylor great because it never changes.”
On Monday, true to form, Mulkey said her 600th win would be a tribute to the players and coaches that have made the program successful. But it will also just be one more game in pursuit of the Lady Bears’ 10th-consecutive Big 12 regular season championship.
Baylor notched its 53rd-straight conference win at Oklahoma State on Saturday. That’s almost three full seasons of being better at the grind than everyone else in the Big 12.
After the Lady Bears defeated Texas in Austin on Jan. 31, Longhorns coach Karen Aston, a former Baylor assistant, pointed to the Lady Bear way as the standard.
“There’s a mentality that it’s going to take for 18 games. Not just 1. Not just 2,” Aston said in the postgame press conference. “There is a mentality you have to have every day that you walk into practice and every day for 18 games if you want to win the league and they obviously have that mentality and that culture that is expected from player to player to player to player.”
That’s a succinct analysis of how the Lady Bears convert 5-star high school prospects into a championship collegiate team.
There’s no doubt that the talent on Baylor’s roster has leveled up several times over the last two decades. Mulkey credited her assistant coaches for recruiting as well as or better than any program in the nation.
But there’s also no denying that the Lady Bears’ ascent to the top of their sport and three national titles was done by the force of one personality.
“I was in Coach Mulkey’s first recruiting class,” Davis said. “It was kind of taking a chance, but there was something you really believed in in her that what she said was going to happen. She was going to turn it around and they were going to win 20 games. This is going to happen and she’s going to do it. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but what she has brought to the university is just incredible.”
— WACOTRIB