Thursday, May 7, 2009
“Come on, Lew, she may be your only hire but right now it looks like it’s a bust! I’m tired of buying season tickets and having disappointing seasons. Bring some excitement back to women’s basketball.”
— Posted by kuwin on Jan. 22, 2009, at
KUsports.com when Kansas was
1-3 in Big 12 play
Lew Perkins sits at a glossy-finished wood desk in the corner of his office. Across the table, his chief of staff, Nicole Corcoran, jots down notes while Perkins spends the next 15 minutes talking about the women’s basketball program — from the run to the WNIT championship game to the continuing process of building a winning foundation.
Throughout the interview, Perkins reverted to three key points that served as the backbone of the football program’s resurrection: consistency, patience and doing things the right way. He said these are the basis of coach Bonnie Henrickson’s turnaround, too.
“I said very frankly to Bonnie: The first couple years, I want to win,” Perkins said. “But when you’re building a program, you don’t do that. You have to do it right. We felt very strongly that we had the right person doing all the right things and it was just a matter of time.”
In Henrickson’s fifth season — she enters her sixth at Kansas next year — the Jayhawks began to show signs of progress. Kansas upset then-No. 21 Iowa State on Feb. 22 and shocked then-No. 5 Baylor two weeks later.
The Jayhawks won nine of their final 12 games and played in front of a record-setting crowd of 16,113 in the WNIT championship game against South Florida.
“That really sent a message to me that people are beginning to understand what we’re trying to do,” Perkins said. “And I still think we have some other steps we have to take.”
Perhaps more than any game this season — even more than any upset or conference victory — Kansas’ loss to South Florida represented progress for the women’s basketball program. Throughout the regular season, the Jayhawks played in front of modest crowds, only occasionally drawing more fans on promotion days.
But those fans that flocked to Allen Fieldhouse on April 4 didn’t come for a T-shirt or to support a noble cause. Instead, they came to watch a basketball game. Attracting fans without promotions, Perkins said, is the next step for a growing program.
“Because of my experience at Connecticut, if we can get people to come, they enjoy it,” said Perkins, who was the athletics director at Connecticut from 1990 to 2003. “Obviously, the basketball is the most important, but it’s the whole experience. And with women’s basketball, people can really identify with our players because they’re closer and a part of it.”
Yet, before Kansas closed the season with a winning streak and upset victories, Henrickson’s team struggled in Big 12 play. The Jayhawks suffered two losing streaks of four games and appeared destined for a bottom-of-the-conference finish.
At that point in the season, comments on message boards raved about the dire state of Henrickson’s team and how, after five years of drowning in mediocrity, it was time for her to go.
“When I gave (football) coach (Mark) Mangino that extension on his contract, everybody was like, ‘This guy is nuts — fire both of them,’” Perkins said. “By the way, in the same year he went to the Orange Bowl.”
And there is where Perkins’ patience, and the patience of any athletics director, is put to the test. It’s easy to preach patience with a winning program. But what happens if that program doesn’t immediately experience success?
“Patience is the biggest thing you have to do,” Perkins said. “All of us want instant gratification, and it just doesn’t happen, especially in building a program.”
Quickly, though, Perkins notes that winning is still important and that taking strides in that aspect is always crucial.
He said he’s excited with the program’s progress and the continued improvement in recruiting, and he said he expected the Jayhawks to finish in the top half of the Big 12 next season.
“I don’t want to get ahead of myself but we’re just beginning to open the pages,” Perkins said. “We took one step last year, now we have to take another. We’re probably three or four steps away.”
— — Edited by Andrew Wiebe
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