Kim Mulkey article (part 2)

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.

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.

“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.”