Missouri held its introductory press conference for new women’s basketball coach Kellie Harper on Monday in the practice gym at Mizzou Arena.
Harper joins the Tigers after taking a year off from coaching to be part of the SEC Network.
“I loved it, I thought it was great work,” Harper said. “But at the end of the day, I’m a basketball coach and I knew that I needed to be back on the sidelines. … I want to be there in the gym one-on-one with our players because that’s a big piece of who I am.”
Athletic Director Laird Veatch as well as the Tiger search committee and Turnkey search firm found Harper among what Veatch described as a deep pool of candidates with numerous potential options wanting to join the Tiger family.
“I was even more pleasantly surprised than I anticipated about the interest level in this job,” Veatch said. “From high-level, performing, power-conference coaches.”
Harper has become just the fifth leader at the helm of the Missouri women’s basketball program and just the fourth since the NCAA added women’s basketball as a sanctioned sport in 1982.
As a head coach at Western Carolina, North Carolina State, Missouri State and Tennessee, Harper has compiled a career record of 393-260 (.602) and led all four programs to the NCAA Tournament at least once. She reached the Sweet 16 in 2018-19 with Missouri State in a 25-10 season, and twice with Tennessee in 2021-22 (25-9) and 2022-23 (25-12).
“I’ve had the opportunity to coach four different programs to the NCAA Tournament,” Harper said. “I’ve coached multiple teams in Sweet 16 appearances. So, I know what it takes to be elite. I know the challenges that you have to be successful at this level. It takes everyone.”
Now, she takes over a Missouri team coming off of consecutive seasons with a sub-.500 record, as well as five consecutive seasons of losing more than the team won in SEC play.
The Tigers have not made the NCAA Tournament since 2018-19.
“She’s a winner, you know, look at her career, her resume,” Veatch said. “... She has a real passion for coaching and sometimes when a coach takes a year, kind of steps back like that, you wonder how they’re going to react. So it just really reinforced for me how passionate she was about thie job, about being here and being back at the table.”
After joining the Tigers just 12 days ago on March 19, Harper has already added three assistant coaches.
First, she brought in Jennifer Sullivan, who stepped down as head coach of the Florida Atlantic Owls to join Harper’s staff in Columbia. Then she added Liza Fruendt who most recently served as an assistant at Illinois, before adding Kenzie Kostas, who has spent the past three seasons as an assistant at Missouri State.
Sullivan was on Harper’s staff at both Tennessee and Missouri State, Fruendt was on Harper’s staff at ...
