Decision to hire Barnes more about ability than alma mater, Byrne says
Adia Barnes became just the fourth UA graduate to currently coach a Wildcat team when she was hired Monday. Barnes was an assistant for a Washington squad that made the Final Four this year.
Before I could ask the question, Greg Byrne filled in the blanks: “I’m not hiring Adia Barnes because she went to Arizona.”
But you wonder: Would any other Pac-12 school with a women’s basketball coaching vacancy have considered Barnes, a Washington assistant, worthy of a head coaching job?
The other three UA graduates who are Arizona head coaches — swimming’s Rick DeMont, women’s tennis coach Vicky Maes and women’s golf coach Laura Ianello — all were promoted from within the athletic department after head coaches in those sports left in mid-season.
It’s not an excess. When it comes to hiring one of your own, Arizona is nowhere close to the Pac-12 lead in what could be called sports nepotism.
UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who is an alumnus, has 10 ex-Bruins as head coaches on his staff: women’s golf’s Carrie Forsyth, gymnastics coach Valorie Kondos Field, men’s soccer coach Jorge Salcedo, softball coach Cyndi Gallagher, women’s tennis coach Stella Sampras Webster, sand volleyball coach Stein Metzger, men’s volleyball’s John Speraw, women’s volleyball coach Mike Sealy, men’s water polo coach Adam Wright and women’s water polo coach Brandon Brooks.
Stanford has six Cardinal grads in head coaching positions, including football’s David Shaw and baseball’s Mark Marquess.
I suspect the most important part of Barnes’ start at UA will be hiring capable assistants, which may include her husband, ex-Montana State and Italian EuroLeague coach Salvo Coppa. Byrne declined to say how much he will pay Barnes, saying it will come from a pool of available money split between her and the assistants she chooses to hire.
Barnes’ predecessor, Niya Butts, who earned $210,000 this season, paid assistants E.C Hill, Sean LeBeauf and Calamity McEntire a total of $305,000. None were shoulder-to-lean-on, experienced coaches, which was probably a mistake. McEntire had basically been an operations staffer at Boise State; LeBeauf had been the head coach at a Texas junior college; Hill had coached at Northern Illinois.
It’s similar to the coaching mistakes Josh Pastner made at Memphis, hiring ex-Arizona Wildcats Luke Walton, Damon Stoudamire and Jack Murphy, none of whom had been full-time college coaches.
The Commercial Appeal in Memphis on Saturday wrote that losing Pastner to Georgia Tech was “a moment of giddy relief.”
For his part, Stoudamire seems to understand you need a veteran coach with whom to collaborate. As the new head coach at Pacific, he is expected to hire 47-year-old Leonard Perry, who has been the head coach at Idaho and an assistant at Iowa State, Colorado State and Southern Miss.
There is no established or preferred template in the makeup of a Pac-12 women’s basketball staff. Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer , USC’s Cynthia Cooper and ASU’s Charli Turner Thorne do not employ a full-time male assistant coach. But Oregon State’s Scott Rueck and WSU’s June Daugherty both have two full-time male assistants; Daugherty’s husband is one of her assistants.
Barnes has never been a head coach. But neither had her boss at Washington, Mike Neighbors, who kicked around in assistant jobs at Arkansas, Colorado, Tulsa and Xavier before taking the Huskies to the Final Four last week.
