Arizona women’s basketball coach Adia Barnes deserves a new deal | Michael Lev

The Arizona women’s basketball team is halfway through its inaugural season in the Big 12 Conference.

Adia Barnes is about three-quarters of the way through her current contract.

She has yet to receive an extension.

She’s done enough to earn one.

That’s an easy thing to say with Barnes’ team coming off a 77-62 victory over No. 16 West Virginia on Saturday night — easily the Wildcats’ best performance of the season. But this isn’t about one game or the Cats’ three-game winning streak or their 5-4 record in the Big 12.

It’s about Barnes’ body of work. It’s about the way she’s elevated the program. It’s about doing right by someone who truly, deeply cares about the success of UA women’s basketball.

Deliberate approach

It’s unusual for a successful, popular college coach to get this deep into a contract without being extended. The five-year deal Barnes signed in May 2021 runs through the 2025-26 season. You’d think it would be done by now.

But Barnes inked that extension under former UA athletic director Dave Heeke. His successor, Desireé Reed-Francois, has been on the job for less than a year. She is taking a deliberate approach with every coach she inherited. Baseball’s Chip Hale and softball’s Caitlin Lowe are on the same timeline as Barnes (although their latest seasons haven’t started yet). They haven’t received new deals either.

Reed-Francois believes in taking a holistic approach when assessing a program. She looks at everything and everyone. She doesn’t rush to judgment. It’s a sound way of doing business.

The only coach Reed-Francois has extended is men’s tennis leader Clancy Shields, whose performance has been exceptional. The UA men’s tennis program, currently ranked sixth in the nation, has never been better.

UA women’s basketball isn’t quite at that level. But the program hasn’t enjoyed such sustained prosperity since the late 1990s — when Barnes was an All-American for the Wildcats — and early 2000s.

Arizona has made four consecutive appearances in the NCAA Tournament — and it would have been five if the 2019-20 season hadn’t been nuked by the pandemic. The Wildcats made it four years in a row from 1997-2000 and three years in a row from 2003-05. Between 2006 and ’18, they had one winning season.

Barnes returned to her alma mater in the spring of 2016. Three years later, Arizona won the WNIT. Two years after that, the Wildcats came within a shot of winning the national championship — a feat that still ranks somewhere between incredible and unfathomable.

This year’s team sits squarely on the NCAA Tournament bubble. The win over West Virginia nudged Arizona up to 59th in the NET rankings. The “Quad” breakdown reveals what the 2024-25 Wildcats have been for the most part: They’re 9-0 against Quad 4 opponents, 5-8 against everyone else. That’s why Saturday night’s upset was such a big deal.

The fact that Arizona’s losses to NAU and Grand Canyon aren’t in the Quad 4 category shows how good those teams are this season. But they’re still flaws in the Wildcats’ résumé — and undoubtedly something Reed-Francois will consider when assessing Barnes’ performance.

Counterpoint: The core of this UA team remains quite young. Three of the five starters vs. WVU were freshmen or sophomores. Five of the Wildcats’ top six scorers are underclassmen.

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After losing some top-shelf talent to the transfer portal — more on this in a bit — Barnes executed something of a reset by building around the class of 2023. Despite the lofty recruiting rankings of Montaya Dew (who was set back by injury), Breya Cunningham and Jada Williams, growing pains were inevitable.

Arizona snuck into the NCAA Tournament last year and won a play-in game. The Wildcats might not get to the right side of the bubble this year, especially with a schedule that still includes road games against Utah, Colorado and Oklahoma State and a home game vs. TCU. But landing in the equivalent of the WNIT again — that tournament is now called the WBIT — wouldn’t be the worst thing. Just ask the 2019 squad. Or the 2024 UA women’s volleyball team.

Barnes’ detractors will point to her portal problems. Arizona has lost some very good players in the past few cycles. One example: Madison Conner. She spent her first three seasons in Tucson. She’s now the leading 3-point shooter in the Big 12 — for TCU.

Some of those departures might simply be a product of today’s times. About 1,400 women’s basketball players entered the transfer portal last year. The issue isn’t unique to Barnes and Arizona.

But it’s still something Reed-Francois needs to investigate. Were the players unhappy? Were they seeking more playing time? Better NIL opportunities? A different style/system?

Barnes’ offense can be hard to watch at times. Despite her sideline stylishness, Barnes is an old-school coach who emphasizes defense first and foremost. Knowing that — and the fact that West Virginia has the second-best scoring defense in the Big 12 — made Saturday’s scoring outburst all the more startling.

Money matters

Money might be the biggest roadblock in hammering out an extension. Shocking, right?

Barnes smartly parlayed the 2021 run to the national title game into a sizable pay bump. Per USA Today’s database, Barnes was the 10th-highest-paid women’s basketball coach at a public school in 2024 at $1.2 million. The next-highest-paid coach in the current Big 12: Iowa State’s Bill Fennelly, at $850,000. Fennelly has been in Ames for 30 years and has transformed the Cyclones into NCAA Tournament regulars.

With Reed-Francois having a mandate to rein in the athletic budget — and with revenue sharing likely on the way later this year — it’s hard to imagine Barnes getting a raise. Or even matching her current salary.

She might be amenable to a slight reduction with incentives to make up the difference. Or revenue-sharing/NIL guarantees for the program. That’s a calculation Barnes and her representatives will have to make.

She clearly wants to be here. Tucson is the only home her young children have known. The immediate future of the program looks promising.

One could argue that Barnes is overpaid if you equate salary to team rankings. She’s in the top 10; the program hasn’t sniffed the top 10 since the 2022-23 season.

But there’s another way of looking at it: Arizona has ranked in the top 10 — or very close to it — in home attendance each of the past four seasons. The UA peaked at sixth in 2021-22 and hasn’t been lower than 12th. Saturday night’s attendance of 7,773 was a season high and the fourth crowd of 7,000-plus despite a middling slate of home opponents.

The Big 12 has been better than Barnes expected, but it lacks marquee attractions such as Stanford, UCLA and USC. UA fans show up anyway. It hasn’t always been like this. The average attendance in 2015-16, Niya Butts’ final season as head coach, was 1,386.

Would attendance suffer if the UA moved on from Barnes? It’s hard to say. It’s possible she’s built the program up to the point that it’s self-sustaining and the next coach could just take the baton. That’s a calculation Reed-Francois will have to make.

At the end of the postgame news conference Saturday night, Cunningham was asked about collecting her 500th career point and 100th career block. After Cunningham answered, Barnes chimed in: “A lot of other great things to come.”

Whether they do it together remains to be seen. Here’s hoping.