Four years ago, after losing in the last ticks to Stanford in the women’s NCAA championship game, Arizona’s Adia Barnes was the rising star of women’s basketball coaching. It didn’t take long to see how high Barnes’ status had climbed.
A month after the 2021 Final Four, Baylor’s star-level coach Kim Mulkey left to coach at LSU. Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades, a UA grad, flew to Tucson to talk to Barnes about replacing Mulkey. Rhoades insists he didn’t offer Barnes the job, but the meaning was clear to then-UA athletic director Dave Heeke. He almost immediately re-wrote Barnes’ contract, giving her a five-year contract and a raise from about $400,000 to $1.25 million a year, an almost unprecedented jump in compensation in women’s college sports.
That salary still turns heads in the Big 12. According to Sportico, the highest paid Big 12 women’s basketball coaches are, in order, Barnes, $1.25 million; Iowa State’s Bill Fennelly, $850,000; Colorado’s JR Payne, $730,000; and Kansas State’s Jeff Mittie, $670,000. The salaries of private schools Baylor, BYU and TCU are unknown.
Arizona coach Adia Barnes talks to her bench in the second half during a game against TCU at McKale Center on Feb. 16, 2025. The Horned Frogs won 85-73.
Heeke did not act to renew Barnes’ contract before he was fired a year ago. Thus, Barnes’ contract uncomfortably expires at the end of the 2025-26 season. What would you do if you were Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois? In the last two seasons, Arizona has been unranked, a non-contender, riddled by losing one key player after another in the transfer portal.
The Wildcats have gone 18-18 in league games the last two seasons. And although home attendance still rocks — the UA drew an average of 6,539 at McKale Center this season — it’s difficult to imagine Arizona returning anytime soon to its nationally-ranked perch of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
It seems to be a stalemate. Does Barnes stay, take a chance on a bounce-back season in 2025-26 or does she seek another job? Does Reed-Francois extend Barnes for, say, one season, through ’26-27, or does she let it play out on a tense 2025-26 season, or even ask Barnes to take a pay cut commensurate with the other Big 12 coaches?
If there’s a happy solution, Reed-Francois knows.
