Adia Barnes, other top coaches struggle to lock in games; costs, wins and fanbases a factor

One of Adia Barnes’ first tasks as Arizona’s head coach was setting the schedule.

It seems like everyone wanted to play the Wildcats back in the 2016-17 season. Barnes said she could have booked her nonconference schedule in three days.

This year, it took Barnes seven months. On Sunday, No. 19 Arizona (1-0) will take on Cal State Northridge (0-2) at McKale Center.

“It’s hard to schedule games when you have a difficult venue to play in,” Barnes said. “We have a lot of fans that come to our games and McKale (Center) is a tough place to play. People don’t want to travel to play in McKale ... That’s a good thing.”

Arizona has climbed from the Pac-12 depths to become a Top-25 program. In 2021, the Wildcats advanced to their first-ever Final Four and played in the national championship game.

Along the way, they’ve encountered big-program problems, like scheduling. The most anticipated game on UA’s nonconference schedule this season is a Top 25 matchup against No. 18 Baylor. But that game will played in Dallas, part of the Pac-12 Coast-to-Coast Challenge. Arizona’s toughest nonconference home opponent is most likely Kansas, which was picked to finish fifth in the Big 12. After hosting Northridge, Arizona will take on Loyola Marymount and Long Beach State.

Barnes already has a leg up on next year’s schedule, starting with a home-and-home series against Gonzaga. The Wildcats will finish a series with Texas by hosting the Longhorns, and will play the back end of the Kansas series, a game at UNLV and in a Thanksgiving tournament in the Bahamas. Barnes said a home-and-home series with powerhouse UConn is coming up, but did not offer specifics.

Barnes isn’t the only coach who has issues finishing schedules.

Pac-12 coaches like Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer’s, USC’s Lindsay Gottlieb and Oregon’s Kelly Graves, along with Barnes, wanted to play more league games this season to avoid having to book another nonconference game. Ultimately, the Pac-12’s other coaches decided to stick with 18 games instead of 20. The coaches wanted more control of their schedules and to win more before they started league play in one of the toughest conferences in the country.

Stanford has had the most trouble booking games. This year’s schedule wasn’t finished until Sept. 7, less than two months before their home opener against San Diego State.

“There’s a lot of, I don’t want to call it gamesmanship, but there seems to be a lot of juggling of games. You know, ‘Can I get a better game? Can I get more (money for it)?’” VanDerveer told the Star. “I voted for more conference games so that we wouldn’t have to spend as much time on the scheduling of nonconference games, but that didn’t pass or it did pass and then it got re-voted on. But it’s very hard on the West (Coast) to schedule 11 nonconference games.”

Stanford will play No. 5 Tennessee and No. 1 South Carolina this season, but VanDerveer said she isn’t happy that she doesn’t have multiple ongoing home-and-home series booked. Stanford’s location is a factor, she said: It’s hard to get teams to travel to California when they have similar — and cheaper — options closer to home. As a result, Western teams often have to pay more. Guarantees can range from $20,000 to $35,000.

“I think a lot of time it is geographic because expenses of travel and then it puts a burden on the West Coast teams to pony up guarantees,” VanDerveer said.

Gottlieb, the coach at USC, told the Star that schools are asking for more money. She didn’t release the Trojans’ schedule until September. One of her opponents, Penn, is turning its trip west into a two-fer. The team will play at San Francisco on Nov. 21, then take on USC two days later. It’s a way to curb costs, which have exploded since the coronavirus pandemic hit.

South Carolina’s Nov. 20 game at Stanford will include a “six-figure” charter, coach Dawn Staley told the Star.

“They are budget-busters,” Staley said.

Staley searched for a second game close to Palo Alto to help offset the costs. She had to call on a friend of a friend for a chance to play Cal Poly on Nov. 22 in San Luis Obispo.

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“We had to beg. We had to beg to play that second game,” she said.

And here’s where scheduling gets trickier.

In order to continue the series with Stanford in 2024, and justify another trip west, Staley asked UCLA’s Cori Close if she would push their scheduled game in Los Angeles from 2023 to 2024. Close said yes, and so South Carolina will play both Stanford and UCLA during the same week two years from now.

“Cori was very cool to work with,” Staley said. “Usually people are like, ‘No. Come on back here. I need your game.’ She thought about it and was like, ‘We’ll do whatever you need us to do.’ Those conversations don’t happen very often. They don’t go like that. I appreciate Cori for working with us, because it just makes sense. Two quality games when we come out to California.”

Staley isn’t afraid to play any team on any day on any court. While she may have understanding for coaches on their last few years of their contract who need wins, she has never operated like that. Early on in her coaching career at Temple, she played the Pat Summit-coached Tennessee teams and the Vivian Stringer-coached Rutgers teams.

“We tried to play the best teams to measure ourselves,” Staley said. “They would always play us and they gained nothing. … They did it for the greater good of the sport and women’s basketball.”

That’s becoming rarer and rarer.

In the opening week this season, 71 of the 207 games scheduled were between Division I and non-Division I teams; 34% of the games were between Division I and either Division II or NAIA teams, 21% were between Division I and Division III teams, and 8% were between Division I and NCCAA teams.

Why don’t more teams play good-on-good matchups in cities like Tucson and Palo Alto?

Staley isn’t sure.

“Everybody wins. A loss is a win because it helps your NET (ranking). People don’t understand that,” Staley said. “You can lose but you are always going to win because you’re going to get more points for going out playing on the road. There are some metrics that say you get more points than you would if you would have gotten that win at home. They weigh it differently when you are playing on somebody else’s home court. I think people don’t know that.”

Gottlieb said Arizona could be particularly challenging for other schools. While some coaches might want their players to experience McKale’s atmosphere, others might pursued a more-subdued stop.

“I think maybe Arizona is one of those where now people have to judge … ‘Can I get there? What does it look like in my schedule? And you know, how likely am I to win?’,” Gottlieb siad, “and it doesn’t check all the boxes anymore.”