Coaching Turnover Shows Increasing Pressure

Jim Izard is fired after 12 seasons at Indiana. Angie Lee, once the national coach of the year, resigns under fire at Iowa. Marianne Stanley, who won national championships at Old Dominion, steps down after four losing seasons at Cal.

Coaching jobs have turned over at a dizzying pace in women’s basketball this year and in almost every case, the change occurred in programs that were losing.

Times have changed. No longer are universities content merely to field a women’s basketball team. Now they want a winner. Because of that, the pressure on coaches has never been greater, the profession never so volatile.

Old Dominion coach Wendy Larry said it comes with the territory. Coaches are being paid more and administrators are putting more into their women’s basketball budgets, so they expect more in return.

“I think we’ve asked for this for a long time,” Larry said. “We’ve wanted to take our game to a different level and certainly as a result, we have to anticipate that there’s going to be a flip side to that as well.

“So yeah, I don’t think there’s a question that with the money that’s put into it, the expectation is they’re going to get something out of it as well.”

Though salaries in the women’s game remain far below the multimillion-dollar contracts handed out to men’s coaches, they have improved. And some women’s coaches, such as Larry, do quite well.

She recently signed a five-year contract extension that will pay her a base salary of $140,000, plus income from radio and TV shows, summer camps and annuities. Geno Auriemma has a package worth $550,000 at Connecticut. Pat Summitt receives $500,000 at Tennessee. Vivian Stringer makes $400,000 at Rutgers.

Those last three, by the way, all had their teams in this weekend’s Final Four.

Just before the NCAA tournament, Iowa State coach Bill Fennelly received a raise that brought his total package to $250,000 a year. His base salary of $160,000 matches that of men’s coach Larry Eustachy, although Eustachy receives supplemental income of $640,000 a year, plus another $300,000 every third year he stays.

Still, Fennelly is making almost four times what he received five years ago. He also knows he has to earn it.

“Very few Division I schools now are going to stand for mediocrity,” he said. “Well, if I don’t cheat, the kids are OK, whatever. Those days are gone. You’ve got to start winning.”

Izard won for many years at Indiana but was 10-18 this season and 5-11 in the Big Ten. The university hired Evansville’s Kathi Bennett to replace him.

Lee was The Associated Press national coach of the year in 1996, when her team was 27-4. But Iowa has gone 21-33 the last two seasons, recruiting has fallen off and attendance has dropped. Lee insisted she wasn’t forced out, but the administration never publicly backed her.

Unable to come close to the success she had at Old Dominion, where her teams won three AIAW and NCAA titles, Stanley left Cal with a 35-75 record.

Winthrop fired coach Robin Muller and Texas Pan-American reassigned Kathy Halligan to another job and fired her two assistants. Halligan’s teams won just 20 games in four years.

Others getting out after losing seasons include Kristen Foley at Temple, Donna Freitag at Bradley, Cheryl Rice at South Alabama, Kevin Murphy at Drexel and Kellee Barney at Gonzaga.

The sport also lost three prominent coaches who left on their own terms: Leon Barmore at Louisiana Tech, Karen Langeland at Michigan State and Sonja Hogg at Baylor.

All that turnover distresses Penn State coach Rene Portland, who says schools still need to ante up a lot more for women’s programs before firing a coach for not winning.

“We’re so different than the men,” Portland said. “If they ever invested in us what they invested in the men, then you can go ahead and fire me. We’re apples and oranges.

“So I think administrations have nerve firing people for stuff like that. Because we’re not even close to the men’s level yet.”

But Jean Lenti Ponsetto, senior associate athletic director at DePaul, said many schools are making a sincere commitment to the women’s game.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily driven by money. I think it’s really driven by competitive success,” Ponsetto said. “I think we do that in all our sports programs.

“If you’re not adhering to whatever the institution’s mission is academically and socially for your kids and you’re not winning, that’s usually a formula for change for most of us.”

Beyond meeting the equal opportunity requirements of Title IX, administrators are seeing what a commitment to women’s basketball can do for a school.

They see the all the success and TV appearances by Connecticut and Tennessee, the large crowds that fill arenas at Texas Tech and Iowa State, the exposure that comes from playing and advancing in the NCAA tournament.

“There’s revenue generated and positive PR that comes with having a good program,” said Fennelly, who led a dramatic turnaround at Iowa State. “When the foundation or the president go out to raise money, alumni like that. Hey, that’s my school. Oh, by the way, I will write you a bigger check.”

Stringer is the only coach to take three schools to the Final Four. But she said it’s harder to build a program now than when she started coaching at Cheyney State in 1991.

“More schools have made a commitment dollar-wise and they have made a commitment to raise expectations,” she said. “You are seeing women being fired as quickly as men and that speaks to the seriousness with which the game is being taken.”