Kellie Harper all the time knew she wanted to educate college basketball, but she never thought it could be possible at her alma mater in Tennessee.

That’s because she thought Pat Summitt could be there ceaselessly.

“For us, she is that (human) being that will always be there,” Harper said. “You never thought anyone else would coach at Tennessee. You just didn’t feel prefer it was a possible option. So it wasn’t really a practical goal that occurred to me after I was a player.

Harper is one in all the few coaches in this 12 months’s NCAA Tournament who coaches at the school where they played. On Saturday, two of them fought in the first round. Adia Barnes and Arizona faced Felisha Legette-Jack and Syracuse.

“I’m just excited to return to my alma mater after the season,” Legette-Jack said. “That’s something that when we first got to Syracuse, Jake Crouthamel, the AD at the time who helped create the Big East, said that’s what we’re all about. We wanted the postseason. Everyone, from the janitor to the secretary to the president and chancellor of the university, understood this task.”

Legette-Jack needed to rebuild a program that lost most of its players to the transfer portal just before her 2022 arrival.

Niele Ivey led her own rebuilding project at Notre Dame, where she took over from her mentor and friend Muffet McGraw in 2020. Ivey helped the team win its first NCAA championship as a player in 2001 and then was an assistant on the 2018 team that also won the title. Now she’s the one in charge.

“It’s a dream,” she said. “I didn’t realize that coaching would be my next step after my professional career, so when I started coaching, I never imagined that my first head coaching job would be here at my alma mater, so I’m blessed.”

There were also expectations related to the program being so successful. She has been successful to this point, winning the ACC regular season and tournament crowns in her first 4 years as head coach.

She took over while the coronavirus was still raging in 2020.

“It’s certainly been really difficult to take on the responsibilities with Covid-19 and the pandemic, so it’s been an adjustment for me,” she said. “My press conference was over Zoom, so it wasn’t a standard first-year head coach, and then the next 12 months it was NIL and the transfer portal, so I got here in with an athletics vibe that modified the 12 months I got that chance, so I adjusted to that “

Ivey wasn’t the just one getting her first shot at the head coaching job at her alma mater. Megan Griffith took over a struggling Columbia program that had never made the NCAAs and had only three winning seasons before arriving as coach.

Over the past few years, she led the team to a few straight 20-win seasons, won the school’s first Ivy League regular-season championship, a runner-up finish in the WNIT and an inaugural trip to the NCAA Tournament.

This is an enormous change from when she played, with the team only winning a complete of 38 games in her 4 years.

Featured Stories

While most coaches who returned to their old schools made appearances during the game, Amy Williams had a special experience with Nebraska. She said she actually never imagined being a coach when she was a player.

“I was on the basketball team at Nebraska and ended up winning a scholarship after a few years. I felt honored to be a part of it and now I can host the show again,” she said. “I think sometimes when you’re in that role where, I don’t know, I joke all the time that I’m in the 30-30 club, where if we were up 30 or 30 downs, I’d get 30 seconds of game time.”

Williams stated that it can have helped her grow to be a greater coach.

“Sometimes when that’s your role, you learn a lot by being on the sideline, so you look at the game and think about it in a different way,” she said. “My dad was a high school coach my whole life growing up. I think I’ve always had a desire to watch movies, to destroy a movie. I think coaching has been in my blood for a long time.”