At Marshall, ex-Transy coach Juli Fulks relishes new challenges — like facing UK
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Fulks left Division III Transylvania after a national title to join Marshall.
- She rebuilt Marshall’s roster and systems and improved competitiveness in 2025.
- Fulks prepares tactical plan to face No. 23 Kentucky and boost program profile.
This is how life changed for Juli Fulks when she departed the powerful women’s basketball program she had built at Transylvania University to take on a Division I coaching job at Marshall:
Over the final three seasons of her ultra-successful stint as head coach at NCAA Division III Transy, Fulks lost a combined total of two games.
Last year, in her first season at Marshall, Fulks lost three times in her first four contests.
“It’s really fun when you don’t lose,” Fulks says, laughing, of what she’s learned from the two experiences.
After coaching Transylvania to the 2023 NCAA Division III national championship and to another Final Four trip in 2024, Fulks, now 47, sought out the new challenge of coaching at college basketball’s highest level.
On Saturday at 1 p.m. (EST), Fulks will get the kind of test she sought when Kenny Brooks brings No. 23 Kentucky (4-0) to Huntington, West Virginia, to face the Thundering Herd (2-1).
Having the Wildcats make the 126-mile trek east along I-64 to play at Marshall “is all everybody’s been talking about since (the game) was announced,” Fulks said.
At Marshall, Fulks says she has found what she sought when she walked away from the dynastic program she had built at Transy.
“I’m having a blast,” Fulks said Thursday. “There were lots of things we didn’t know coming into it: How we ran the zone (defense) at Transy, would it translate (to Division I)? Now, we know, it does. I didn’t know if some of the stuff we did rebounding, would it translate? Now we know, and it does. For me, that’s been really fun.”
Fulks reports that the differences in coaching non-scholarship athletes in Division III and scholarship players in Division I are not as great as one might think.
“College athletes are the same. They’re still 18 to 24,” Fulks said. “Now, they’re bigger, faster, stronger (in D-I), but a 20-year-old player is a 20-year-old player. They want you to care about them. They want you to invest in them, but they’re still just young college players who are trying to figure out life. They want to be successful, they’re just doing it on a very public stage.”
After succeeding current Tennessee coach Kim Caldwell at Marshall on April 12, 2024, Fulks went 15-20 in her first season. “I thought last year we should have been four or five wins better,” Fulks said. “I was disappointed.”
Marshall was more competitive in Fulks’ initial season than its final record indicates. The Thundering Herd lost nine games by six points or fewer. Marshall also ended its season winning seven of its last nine contests, including going 4-1 in the Sun Belt Conference Tournament.
That finish foreshadowed what Fulks believes is a substantially better Marshall team this season.
“We are considerably better at everything,” Fulks said. “Whether it’s offense, defense, scoring, team culture, everything is a year later and better.”
Already this season, Marshall has a 15-point win over a Northern Kentucky team which beat the Herd by two points in 2024-25. The Thundering Herd were also competitive in a 57-51 loss at Indiana on Tuesday night.
“I thought for Indiana, we had a great plan,” Fulks said. “We had a chance to win.”
A familiar name on the 2025-26 Marshall roster is ex-Mercer County star Timberlynn Yeast. The 5-foot-9 redshirt sophomore is averaging 3.3 points, 5.7 rebounds and 2.3 steals in 24 minutes a game.
“She can play the bottom (of the) zone, she can play the top of the zone,” Fulks said of Yeast. “She’s really, really smart, so she lets us do a lot of different things.”
By the end of her coaching tenure at Transylvania, the visibility of the Pioneers women’s basketball program reached such prominence that Fulks finished third in voting by statewide sports media members for the 2023 Lexington Herald-Leader Kentucky Sports Figure of the Year Award.
Fulks has brought some “Transylvania” with her to Huntington. One of the starters on Transy’s NCAA championship team, point guard Madison Kellione, used her final season of college eligibility last year playing for Marshall.
Two of the other starters off the 2023 national champs, Kennedi Stacy and Laken Ball, are presently Marshall’s director of operations and a graduate manager, respectively.
On Dec. 14, Fulks will bring Marshall to Lexington to play coach Greg Todd and Eastern Kentucky at Transylvania’s Clive M. Beck Center. The game will pit two former Transy women’s hoops coaches against each other.
First things first, Fulks was spending the end of the week getting together a plan to face the Kentucky Wildcats.
“I was in Lexington 10 years, and Kentucky was always very kind to us,” Fulks said. “It’s just fun that they wanted to come here. We’re going to have a great crowd. People are excited about this game, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure we have a really good plan going into it.”
This story was originally published November 14, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
