DALLAS — Since 2000, when Kim Mulkey first became a head coach, she has slept with a small notepad and pen next to her bed. In the middle of the night, whenever an idea strikes, she rolls over and, without turning on the light, jots down whatever it was that woke her — she wants to try a new out-of-bounds play, she should check in with the janitors about the mops, her roof really ought to be power-washed.
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“I’m afraid if I sleep on it,” she says, “I’ll wake up and forget.”
In the morning, she rolls over to check her list and sends text messages — the first task of the day — to the appropriate parties to make sure everything gets done.
But in recent years, hotels have stopped stocking rooms with notepads and pens (an issue that doesn’t thrill Mulkey), and since she doesn’t feel like traveling with her own, she just uses her phone and sends out texts in the middle of the night.
Saturday night, on the eve of the national title game, she sent a few text messages to her coaches’ group chat: Tell me to visit with Sa’Myah Smith so I can remind her that she can be very impactful in this game. A few hours later: I need y’all to remind me to look at the 3-2 and extend it if we can’t guard her.
The “her” in question was Caitlin Clark, the national player of the year and the guard whose 3-point range has made every opponent pay this season in one way or another. Clark and her Hawkeyes, after downing top-seeded South Carolina in the Final Four, were the favorites to take home the national title. They were something of a team of destiny, with Clark being the player whose range — basically anything inbounds on a basketball court — had captured the eyes of America.
Kim Mulkey called her shot 🏆 @LSUwbkb pic.twitter.com/54ZsrUbdi1
— SEC Network (@SECNetwork) April 2, 2023
Here’s the thing: LSU could guard her. Almost better than any other team this season. And not just with a zone defense.
But then the Tigers went and did one better: They completely stole the Hawkeyes’ MO, got Clark-like hot from range and did what everyone — even themselves at one point in the season — thought was impossible. They won the national title in a year in which they didn’t even win the SEC title.
Read more: Iowa-LSU national championship game sets new viewership record
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For months, Mulkey had been tempering high expectations. They were winning too much and too fast, she said; it wasn’t sustainable. She had said they’d hang more banners in Baton Rouge, but she didn’t mean right away.
“I kept trying to tame that monster,” Mulkey said. “I said, ‘We may be feeding this monster too early.’”
Every chance she got, she shoveled effusive praise onto South Carolina, the team everyone expected to hoist the trophy at season’s end. And as the season wore on and South Carolina and LSU often existed as the only two ranked SEC teams in the Top 25, it became easier to believe that maybe this team was more show than substance.
But the monster kept on. LSU kept winning.
When Mulkey arrived at LSU before the 2021-22 season, she came in with a simple goal for the team in Year 1: win more games than the season before (nine). The Tigers accomplished that in 11 games.
So then the goal became: win enough games (16) to finish with a winning record. That took 18 games to achieve.
At the end of last season, the Tigers finished a spot behind the Gameco*cks, who went on to win the national title. They celebrated coming in second.
In the offseason, even as LSU added players who oozed national championship potential — namely Angel Reese and Flau’jae Johnson — the Tigers still talked about just that: their potential. A national title was the goal, but not now. Soon, but not now. Because even the most confident players understand that goals should still be rooted in reality.
“I didn’t think I was going to win a national championship within my first year at LSU,” Reese said.
And it wasn’t just that this was Mulkey’s second season. Because she had won quickly before. At Baylor, it took her and her staff five years to take the Bears from the middle of the Big 12 to a national title.
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There was skepticism because how could this be the team that would bring LSU its first national title? This is the program that had Sylvia Fowles and Seimone Augustus. This was a program that went to five straight Final Fours and never figured out how to get over the hump. How could a team with a second-year coach and an entirely new roster built out of the transfer portal and freshmen become not just elite but the only team strong enough to end the season with a win?
Because LSU had nine new players and only one key holdover from the prior year: fifth-year senior Alexis Morris, who played with the momentum that could hoist a team above its ceiling or sink it if she wasn’t careful. As of the beginning of the season, she hadn’t figured out how to harness that superpower yet.
Quickly, the theme among the new-look Tigers became “put the pieces together.” And through the season, that’s what they constantly referenced to one another.
When practices began, so did the trash-talking. Coaches cautioned that it was maybe getting a bit too heated. Maybe they should cool off, take a beat. But the players pushed back — this was them putting the pieces together; trust them that it was part of their process. So, the coaches relented and let them be.
In November and December, players drew foul after foul but couldn’t shoot better than 60 percent from the free-throw line. Reese comforted Mulkey. Don’t worry, Reese said, we’ll hit them when they matter. The pieces will come together.
And when Jasmine Carson struck cold spells shooting from the perimeter, players and coaches reminded her to stay the course. She was still LSU’s best outside threat, and shooters had to keep shooting. The Tigers needed her to keep shooting. Because without her, the team wouldn’t be complete.
But even when all of those pieces were together, no one expected this to be the final picture.
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However, the monster kept going. Through March, LSU looked better and better. When Reese nearly outrebounded the entire Michigan team in the second round, coaches thought the Tigers might be hitting their stride. When Ladazhia Williams dropped 24 points in the Sweet 16 while three other starters fouled out, there was a stronger belief that this could be a roster upon which any night could be someone else’s night. Then they punched their ticket to Dallas by stopping Miami, which had become the hottest postseason team.
When LSU landed in Dallas, coaches looked around and thought: “We haven’t played our best 40 minutes yet. Could it happen in the next two games?”
The midnight and 3 a.m. texts from Mulkey rolled in. Game-planning questions for Virginia Tech and then Iowa. Thoughts about matchups. Reminders about conversations.
And when LSU’s players took the American Airlines Center floor Sunday afternoon, Mulkey saw the full picture start to come together. It looked like the team she has coached this season and also a far better version of the team she has coached this season.
Johnson sunk a corner 3 less than a minute into the game, a harbinger of the eight more that would come in the first half and two more that would come in the second half, nearly surpassing LSU’s tournament total for 3s in the title game alone. Morris’ momentum spilled over to her teammates; she steadied them when the Hawkeyes hit runs. And Carson put together the game of her life as she poured in 22 points. Every player played her part, added her piece and didn’t do more than that.
You can’t game plan against that kind of momentum, can’t push back when a team has seemingly usurped a destiny. By the second half, LSU could feel the national championship was within reach, if only this monster could keep it together a bit longer.
“All season, we’ve been trying to figure out how we were going to piece it together,” Reese said. “We’ve got a lot of big personalities on the team. We go at it all the time. But at the end of the day, we love each other and we’re sisters. We got to where we wanted now.”
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This is not where the Tigers saw themselves, not where Mulkey would’ve predicted this team would stand in April. Not last fall. Not even last month.
But one by one Sunday, each took her turn and climbed the ladder to cut the nets. Players turned to the cameras and smiled before climbing back down, clutching the piece of this impossible season that will forever be theirs.
(Photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
Chantel Jennings is The Athletic's senior writer for the WNBA and women's college basketball. She covered college sports for the past decade at ESPN.com and The Athletic and spent the 2019-20 academic year in residence at the University of Michigan's Knight-Wallace Fellowship for Journalists. Follow Chantel on Twitter @chanteljennings
