During March Madness, everyone was focused on the tournament games so the news about former Arizona women’s basketball coach Adia Barnes slipped under the radar.
Last week, Barnes, an Arizona alum and former star for the Wildcats, decided to leave her Alma mater and become the new head women’s basketball coach at SMU.
“We are happy to welcome Adia to the Mustang family,” said new athletic director Damon Evans, who made the move to SMU from Maryland at the end of March. “She has had great success at Arizona, leading her teams to post-season appearances and 20-win seasons while her teams also set records in the classroom. She has landed stellar recruiting classes and has been heavily involved in the Tucson community, showing her talent for building programs. The future is bright for SMU Women’s Basketball.”
Not many are familiar with Barnes’ story, but they need to be.
At Arizona, she was a 3x All-Conference player in the Pac-10. In her senior year in 1998, she was voted Pac-10 Player of the Year and a USBW First-Team All-American. Barnes finished her career as the university’s all-time leading scorer and ranked 9th on the conference’s all-time scoring list with 2,237 points.
She played professionally for 12 years, both internationally and in the WNBA, and won a WNBA championship with the Seattle Storm in 2004. She then transitioned into broadcasting before entering the coaching ranks as an assistant coach with the Washington Huskies.
In 2016, Barnes returned to Arizona as the team’s head coach and built the program up from a team that hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 2005 to a national contender.
She became the fastest coach to reach 75 wins in program history and in only her fifth season in 2020-21, Barnes became the youngest coach since 2014 to lead a team to the Final Four. That year, the program, ranked third in the Tournament, shocked the world and upset no.1 ranked UConn to reach the National Championship Game, where they fell in a heartbreaker to no.1 Stanford 53-54.
But Barnes had proved that she was a force in the college coaching ranks, and that’s what caught SMU’s eye.
After moving to the ACC, the school knew it needed a coach who could build and lead a program, and who better to do so than a young, passionate and successful coach who was one basket away from winning a national title only four short years ago.
While Barnes might be overshadowed by names like Geno Auriemma, Dawn Staley and Kim Mulkey, her resume speaks for itself. And how could you not love and respect a coach who, during halftime of the National Championship, took a few minutes privately to pump breast milk for her newborn before getting her team ready for the second half?
“I’ve been an underdog all my life,” said an emotional Barnes after the NCA title game. “Too small to do this, too this to do that, too inexperienced to do this.”
But Adia Barnes is no longer inexperienced or too small to do big things.
“I’m truly excited for the opportunity to be the next head coach at SMU,” said Barnes in a statement. “Having seen the commitment and alignment on the Hilltop, I believe we can compete on the national stage and for ACC championships.”
And after seeing what she’s accomplished in her career, there’s no doubt that championships will be arriving in Texas.
