It was not his health. Matthew Mitchell explains exit as UK women’s basketball coach.
In the run-up last fall to the 2020-21 women’s college basketball season, a convalescing Matthew Mitchell would observe Kentucky Wildcats practices.
The winningest coach in UK history (303-133) was recovering from a late-June brain surgery. The operation had been necessitated by a head injury suffered in a March hiking fall.
Though few knew it, Mitchell, now 50, was struggling internally with the question of whether he still wanted to be a college basketball coach.
So after being impressed with how then-Kentucky associate head coach Kyra Elzy was conducting practices, Mitchell gave voice to his inner turmoil. “’You are doing a great job,’” Mitchell told Elzy. “’You all could probably do this without me.’”
In retrospect, Mitchell thinks “that was, maybe, my first attempt at, maybe, just kind of checking the temperature (toward his resigning). That was, maybe, my first stab at it. But Kyra pushed back on that — ‘No, Coach, we want you back.’”
As Mitchell left the Joe Craft Center that day, he tried to gin up the resolve to remain as UK coach. “That kind of got my mind on, ‘OK, I am going to go back and do this. These people are counting on me and they want me to do it,’” he recalls.
That resolution did not even make it to the start of the season.
When Mitchell announced his unexpected departure as Kentucky head coach last Nov. 13, it was widely assumed to be for health reasons. He had suffered a subdural hematoma, a buildup of blood on the brain, as a result of tripping over a rock while on a family hiking trip in Mexico.
Once he resigned and Elzy was promoted to replace him, Mitchell opted to stay out of the public spotlight so as not to detract from the Kentucky season. So it is now that he has chosen to expound on his reasons for leaving UK only days before his 14th season as Wildcats head coach would have begun.
Though the surgery and the time needed to recover from it had an impact on how he thought about his future, Mitchell says he did not resign for health reasons.
“I am physically fine. I was physically cleared to go back to work,” Mitchell says. “I could have coached the team this year. Physically and mentally, I could have done it.”
Rather than health, Mitchell says his leaving as UK coach followed a period of introspection and prayer that led him to believe he is being called to take a different path through life.
A shift in priorities
Mitchell’s doubts about remaining UK’s coach began after the coronavirus pandemic shut down the University of Kentucky last March.
Forced to work virtually, Mitchell says spending so much time at home heightened his awareness of just how much his job — filled with recruiting trips and public-speaking engagements — required him to be away from wife Jenna and daughters Saylor, 9, and Presley, 7.
That led him to thinking about how little time he had to travel to his native Mississippi to visit his adult daughter Lacy and her two children, as well as to see his aging parents.
“I got into a contemplative state during that time,” Mitchell says.
In June, Mitchell says he “sort of breezed through” his surgery at UK’s Albert B. Chandler Hospital. However, the recovery time that followed “was another event that got me thinking about life being short and, ‘Is this what I need to continue to do?’’’ he says. “But I still had not made any type of decision.”
Yet as the time approached for him to return full-bore to coaching, Mitchell says he kept hesitating. “That’s where I really went into deep prayer and really sought some guidance to get a final decision,” he says.
After Elzy gave thumbs down to his initial mention of resigning, Mitchell says he made a good-faith effort to reinvest in coaching and returned to conducting practices.
But it just didn’t feel right.
“I was like, ‘OK, I just don’t think this is happening,’” Mitchell says.
Walking away from UK
Once he felt a divine call that his life needed to move to a new phase, Mitchell says, “It was not difficult for me to say. ‘Hey, I’m no longer going to be the coach at Kentucky.’”
It was brutally hard, however, to set in motion the altering of relationships that would ensue from his leaving UK.
When he first broached the idea of stepping down as coach with Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart, Mitchell says the UK AD said, “’Oh no, you don’t need to do that. Take as much time as you need. If you need to take a year off, you can.’”
By this point, Mitchell says, “I knew what I needed to do. That night, I called Kyra and Mitch and told them (I was stepping down).”
The following afternoon, Mitchell appeared — in a socially distanced manner — before the Kentucky women’s basketball team as its head coach for the final time.
“It was a tough meeting in the sense that you just hoped people could understand,” Mitchell says. “I knew I wasn’t letting them down, but you were hoping they weren’t feeling that way. But some really kind and unselfish comments were made. They were just glad I was healthy and OK.”
A future without coaching
Now with the free time that a major college basketball coach never has, Mitchell is in the early stages of writing a book on leadership.
His goal is for the self-published work to be available early in 2022.
Working with his wife, Mitchell plans to launch a consulting firm that will try to help others develop leadership skills. Daughter Lacy will also play a role in the venture.
Mitchell is engaging his love for singing by cutting a Christmas album that will be sold as a fundraiser for his charitable entity, The Mitchell Family Foundation.
Asked if he watched the Kentucky games this past season, Mitchell laughs. “I would watch the games unless I was too big a wimp to go through the nervousness,” he says. “Sometimes, that would be too much for me, so I would have to turn it off.”
As to whether Mitchell will ever coach major college hoops again, he is astute enough to never say never.
“I would never say I wouldn’t be led back into coaching but I am just telling you from my absolute, gut-level, honest place, I do not think that is the direction my life is headed,” Mitchell says.
Since leaving UK, Mitchell says he has not experienced “moments of regret or second-guessing. I did not sit around at any point going, ‘Gosh, man, I think I’ve really screwed this up and made a bad decision.’ That has never crossed my mind.”
Instead, he says he thinks about things like this: As Kentucky coach, Mitchell says he spent many a Saturday morning at breakfasts with recruits — many of whom did not subsequently choose UK.
That meant he was missing the Saturday morning soccer matches of his own daughters.
“I’m looking forward,” Mitchell says, “to being at those soccer games going forward.”
This story was originally published May 2, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
