‘A fulfilling journey.’ Coaching legend steps away from court for UK women’s basketball.
As members of a new-look Kentucky women’s basketball team gather back in Lexington for offseason work ahead of a new season, a significant change has occurred to the UK coaching staff.
Kentucky assistant coach Gail Goestenkors — a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame and a longtime coaching figure at both the college and professional levels in women’s basketball — announced her retirement from on-court coaching Tuesday.
By retiring from on-court coaching, Goestenkors resigns her post as an assistant at UK, after serving in it for just one season (Goestenkors was hired in April 2021).
“Coaching has been the gift of a lifetime. It’s hard to believe I’ve been coaching for over 30 years. What a fulfilling journey it’s been,” Goestenkors said. “I have been blessed to work with so many amazing people. The friendships with colleagues and the relationships with players that I’ve forged throughout the years are the gifts I hold most dear.”
Goestenkors is expected to remain with the Kentucky program in an “off-court support position,” and will continue to serve as an assistant coach until a replacement is hired.
Kentucky head coach Kyra Elzy will conduct a national search to find a third full-time assistant coach.
UK’s other two full-time assistant coaches are Niya Butts and Amber Smith.
“Having Coach Goestenkors in our program for one year was instrumental in so many ways. Although her on-court involvement with our program has come to an end, we are elated that she will remain on our staff,” Elzy said. “Coach G will go down as one of the best coaches in our sport. She has impacted the women’s basketball community tremendously. … We will have significant shoes to fill and will start working on that right away.”
Should Goestenkors stay in the UK program, as is expected, a potential role for her to move into could be that of special assistant to the head coach.
Lin Dunn previously served as UK’s special assistant to the head coach from 2018 until February, when she left to move into a front office role with the WNBA’s Indiana Fever.
A look at Goestenkors’ coaching career
Goestenkors’ coaching career is legendary.
After a college playing career as a point guard at Saginaw Valley State in Michigan from 1981-85, Goestenkors immediately made the jump to coaching.
She was a graduate assistant at Iowa State and an assistant coach at Purdue (under head coach Lin Dunn) before taking on the only two head coaching jobs of her career at Duke (1992-2007) and Texas (2007-2012).
Goestenkors was a seven-time ACC Coach of the Year at Duke, and was named the Naismith Coach of the Year in 2003 and the Associated Press Coach of the Year in 2007.
Her career win-loss record as a head coach was 498-163 (.753),
She was twice the national runner-up at Duke, losing in the national championship game in 1999 and 2006.
Goestenkors then spent time in the WNBA as an assistant coach with the Los Angeles Sparks and Indiana Fever in 2014 and 2015.
She also spent time as a national women’s basketball analyst for ESPN from 2014-18.
Goestenkors returned to coaching as an associate head coach at Central Michigan for one season from 2020-21, before spending one season as an assistant coach at Kentucky.
In addition to this, Goestenkors was a longtime coach with the United States women’s basketball team. Goestenkors won gold medals as an assistant coach at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics.
She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.
Goestenkors was announced as an addition to the UK coaching staff in April 2021.
The contract Goestenkors signed with UK was a two-year deal slated to run through the 2022-23 season.
She was paid a base salary of $250,000 for her current contract year, and was scheduled to be paid a base salary of $275,000 for her next contract year (July 2022 through June 2023).
According to this contract, if Goestenkors left Kentucky for another coaching job during the duration of her contract, she would owe UK a prorated buyout of $100,000 per year(s) remaining on her deal.
This made Goestenkors the second-highest paid assistant coach on the UK staff: Niya Butts was paid a base salary of $275,000 for her current contract year (July 2021 through June 2022) and Amber Smith was paid a base salary of $200,000 for her current contract year (July 2021 through June 2022).
Head coach Kyra Elzy recently inked a new contract with UK that will continue to pay her a base salary of $400,000 per contract year, but with increased money due from multi-media deals and endorsements.
Goestenkors helped provide SEC-winning play for Cats
Despite only being in Lexington for one season as a UK assistant coach, Goestenkors had an obvious impact on off-court and on-court work for the Wildcats.
The most high-profile example of her influence came in March in Nashville, as the Kentucky women’s basketball team shocked No. 1 South Carolina to win the program’s first SEC Tournament title since 1982.
The buzzer-beating shot that won UK the championship — an open three-pointer from Dre’una Edwards — came from an out-of-bounds play that Goestenkors had a large part in creating.
“One thing (Goestenkors) challenged me with at the beginning of the season is every water break, let’s have a late-game situation, a side out of bounds or a baseline out of bounds,” Elzy said after the SEC Tournament championship game. “So we probably have done 100 of those during the season. Our players were very composed and confident because we had went over it a thousand times, so we knew exactly what we were looking for.”
This story was originally published June 14, 2022 at 9:27 AM.
