Kyra Elzy (Vicky Graff Photo)
Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart didn’t know anything about interim women’s basketball coach Kyra Elzy suspended All-American Rhyne Howard and Tatyana Wyatt to open the season until she told him. She had been named interim when former head coach Matthew Mitchell resigned and her first major decision turned out to be suspending UK’s star player.
“She walked in and we started talking about this, then she said I need to tell you something and she told me. I said, ‘Welp, that tells me a lot about how she is going to lead.’ That’s not the reason why all of that occurred, but she managed it right up front, right out of the shoot in a straight forward way,” Barnhart said Monday.
“I think that she has referenced it a couple of times in her comments that this is a lot more than basketball. If we just play basketball and that is all we do, that is all we give our young people, in any way shape or form, that is not what we are here for. We live by a little saying around here and it goes, you give us four, we will give you 40. That’s the next four years of your life, and we will give you 40. That’s what Kyra and her staff are preparing these young women for is the next 40. How to manage their lives after they walk out of the doors of the University of Kentucky.”
Barnhart said he knew he took a lot of courage for Elzy to sit her best player on the bench for two games to start the season. He said it sent the right message to the team and Monday he delivered his own message by removing the interim tag and making Elzy the full-time head coach rather than conducting a national search.
“When you’ve got one of the best right at home, why would you leave home? I was very comfortable with what we had at home. Standing on the sidelines is a little different than the interview process. That took care of itself, but when we sat down, she had an incredibly well thought through and detailed plan of the things that she wanted to do in order to help our program continue to move forward,” Barnhart said.
“I think as any administrator would want to know, what is the plan? When she unveiled that, it became very clear to me that she had thought this through at a pretty high level. It was that kind of high level thinking that I felt like was going to be necessary to get us to a spot where we had a chance to talk about some of the dreams she aspires to reach — Final Fours, national championships — those kind of things that our kids dream of and that she is dreaming of.”
Elzy didn’t know Barnhart when she was playing at Tennessee but he watched her and then got to see her as Mitchell’s assistant coach. He liked her work ethic and how she conducted herself.
“It wasn’t a hard step. There were just some ribbons that need to be tied up to make sure that we had it in the right spot. She answered all of those questions just like I knew she would,” Barnhart said.
“Most of y’all know that I love working with assistant coaches and making them head coaches. We’ve done a bunch of that here. A bunch of our head coaches came here from assistant coach worlds and they have been very successful. She is doing that same kind of thing where she is on that same trajectory.”
