By JIMMIE TRAMEL Sports Writer on Mar 3, 2012, at 10:19 PM Updated on 3/03 at 10:19 PM
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Kim Mulkey led the Baylor women’s basketball team to an unbeaten regular season. The Bears are 31-0 overall and 18-0 in Big 12 games.
Mulkey is at the top of her profession and she -- rightly so -- is a finalist for national coach of the year honors.
What she’s not, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the Big 12’s coach of the year.
The league’s coach of the year is Jim Littell.
Go ahead and point out that Mulkey’s team, a Brittney Griner-led juggernaut, beat Littell’s team by 27 and 31 points in two meetings this season. That doesn’t change my opinion even a tiny bit.
Littell took over as head coach amid the most nightmarish of circumstances. Former coach Kurt Budke and assistant Miranda Serna died in a November plane crash.
You’ll never know and I’ll never know how much of a challenge it must have been just to shepherd the Cowgirls through life on a day-to-day basis following the plane crash.
“There is no road map,” Littell told me during a December interview. “There is no book you can read to help you through this.”
During the same interview session, I asked Littell if it was possible to conduct a tear-free practice.
His reply?
“Coach (Budke) and I were around each other so long. I will say something and (players) will give me a look of ‘That’s something Coach used to say.’ It will trigger some reflection out of them, if not tears.
“Coach Budke and Coach Serna were loved by these kids and they knew they could go in and talk to them at any time. This isn’t going to be something that goes away in a day, a week, a month. There is always going to be some reflection by the people that are here. We said they will never be forgotten, and they never will be forgotten.”
If Littell has my vote as the league’s coach of the year, don’t assume it’s a sympathy vote. Trust me. He’s old school enough that he doesn’t want sympathy.
Littell has my vote because he earned it.
The Cowgirls could have fallen apart because of what they endured. Instead, they lost just one nonconference game and played well enough during the Big 12 season to split games with three (defending national champion Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Iowa State) of the five squads that finished ahead of them in the standings.
We won’t know for sure until Sunday, but Littell’s team seems positioned to get a first-round bye in the Big 12 Tournament.
And we won’t know for sure until the bracket is unveiled. but Littell’s team, by winning three consecutive games to close the regular season, may have done enough to merit an NCAA Tournament invitation.
OSU doesn’t have a senior on its roster this season.
In many seasons, that might be considered a hardship.
The Cowgirls know what real hardship is, and they overcame it. They deserve credit for that and so does my Big 12 coach of the year candidate.
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