The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2008
heading in the right direction
Niya Butts, the new head basketball coach for Arizona women’s basketball, gets her coaches, her team, and her fans on the right bus.by Steve Cox
As soon as the 2008 basketball season was over, Niya Butts, the new Arizona women’s basketball coach, took charge.
In early May, scarcely a month after accepting the job, Coach Butts had named the first two of her four assistant coaches, Alysiah Bond and Brandy Manning, and was shaking hands with Tucsonans, fielding interviews, meeting national recruits’ planes, and showing them The University of Arizona campus.
Butts is passionate about her new job, and why not? “The UA is a major institution,” she notes. “It’s in the Pac-10, and it’s strong in both academics and athletics. The opportunity is tremendous.”
“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” says Butts’ own coach, Pat Summitt of the University of Tennessee. “She’s excited about it. She never hesitated” about taking the UA job. “She seized the moment.”
Now, Butts has a basketball program to rebuild.
For a fast turnaround in Wildcat basketball, Lute Olson set the gold standard. More than 20 years later, Wildcat fans can still taste the thrill.
Following a men’s basketball season so lackluster that the desperate athletics director had tried to persuade even faculty members to buy season tickets (he hosted a buffet dinner as a lure), Lute Olson came to town.
Just two years later, in 1986, Lute’s Arizona team won its first Pac-10 title. Another two years, and the Wildcats were in the Final Four. Nine more years, and Wildcat fans were flocking to Arizona Stadium to welcome the 1997 NCAA men’s basketball champions home.
Against the Lute Olson gold standard, when should women’s basketball fans expect Butts to produce a championship team?
“Within three years would be my expectation,” says Arizona season-ticket holder Kate Gilbert.
“I’d be happy if it were tomorrow,” says the enthusiastic Butts. “I’m hoping not too long. There’s no secret to it. The first step is getting the right people on the right bus going to the right place.”
And the driver of the bus is Butts herself.
Butts has her own standard for measuring success — she has played basketball for the winningest coach in college sports, Pat Summitt of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols.
With Butts on board, Summitt’s Lady Vols won two of their eight NCAA championships — in 1997, when Butts was named Southeastern Conference defensive player of the year, and in 1998, when the Lady Vols went undefeated — and three SEC titles, in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Tellingly, in those three years Butts also was named all-SEC academically.
“She’s smart,” says Summitt of Butts. “She has a high basketball I.Q. She’s no-nonsense — people are not going to fool her.”
“The best thing about Niya Butts as a UT player was her defensive stops — her passion, her overall defense,” says Kelly Disney, the Lady Vols’ number-one fan. “She was a great player, just wanting to stop whoever she was guarding. She has a passion for the game. You can see it in her eyes and through her actions.”
After graduation, Butts continued her studies with a master’s degree in social work at nearby Tennessee Technological University, where she also was assistant coach for a year. She moved on to Michigan State as assistant coach for another year and then settled in for five years at Tennessee’s SEC rival, the University of Kentucky. For the last three years, she has been Kentucky’s recruiting coordinator.
Kelly Disney has watched Butts coach against
Tennessee, too, in both Knoxville and Lexington. (Disney sells Lady Vol merchandise in a landmark shop near the Tennessee campus and from a trailer on road trips.) Watching Butts on the bench, what Disney has seen is her quick, keen intelligence. “You could almost see the wheels turning in her head, breaking down the plays to stop the offense. Always focused.”
“She was a great teammate,” Summitt remembers, “and one thing I would hope — that, as a Lady Vol, Niya learned team-building, how to get people to play together.”
The first members of the team to step onto Butts’ Wildcat bus are her assistant coaches. By early May she had named her first two assistants — her recruiting coordinator, Brandy Manning, and her director of operations, Alysiah Bond.
Bond is an especially impressive catch. She played for The Ohio State University team that was runner-up in the 1993 NCAA tournament. She has worked as a sports broadcaster. Best of all, she was director of operations at Tennessee when Butts was a Lady Vol.
Bond and Manning seem well prepared to work as a team — they’ve already coached together at Murray State in Kentucky and at Central Florida.
By June, Butts had named the third of her assistants, Chance Lindley, a young coach at Barton County
Community College in Great Bend, Kan., with a dazzling 34-4 record and a fourth-place finish in the NJCAA tournament last season.
Coaches Manning, Bond, and Lindley represent the national and even international aspects of coaching — Butts’ first recruit was a Turkish player, Ipek Turkyilmaz, who had played for Lindley in Great Bend.
But, says Summitt, “the first priority for the UA is to keep Arizona and regional players at home, if possible. To build a fan base, Niya needs to recruit players in the state.”
The roster of 13 players Butts inherited included eight Californians and only one Arizonan — Sarah Hays of Oracle, a transfer from Chandler-Gilbert Community College in
Arizona.
Making the Arizona connection is the job of Sue
Darling, who joined Butts’ staff as assistant coach in July.
Captain of the 1982 Wildcats and a graduate of Canyon del Oro High School, Darling also contributes “a wealth of knowledge” of basketball, says Butts, having coached everywhere from Denver high schools to Dartmouth and the Air Force Academy. And Butts’ Wildcat bus seems to be the right bus for her — Darling regards her new job in her old home town as “a dream come true.”
A University of Oklahoma football letterman, Brian Odom, completes Butts’ staff. As associate director of performance nhancement, Odom coaches strength and conditioning for both football and women’s basketball.
Next stop, recruiting.
Arizona season-ticket holder Kate Gilbert is rooting for Butts to recruit “passionate and serious players” —people like Butts herself.
How does it feel, at age 30, to be recruiting and coaching against established coaches like Tara VanDerveer at Stanford? “I never run from a challenge,” says Butts.
And what about competing with Nikki Caldwell, the former Tennessee recruiter just hired as head coach at UCLA? “I love it,” says Butts — everyone who has played and coached at Tennessee is a member of the Lady Vol family.
Over the summer, while maintaining her national recruiting network, Butts also began to get acquainted with high-school players in Arizona, especially through her summer basketball camp, which brought her together with teenage players and their coaches on campus.
She also was working, as a teacher, to make a group of strangers recruited by her predecessor, including five freshmen, into her own team.
Pat Summitt offers herself as a model. “I consider myself a teacher,” she says. “The court is my classroom, and I would hope that Niya has learned how to teach the game.”
Getting the players to board Butts’ bus not only means getting them on board together, as a team, and getting them into shape physically, but also making sure that these student-athletes are prepared to be students — hitting the books, going to class — as well as athletes. Butts’ emphasis on academic matters might come as a surprise to returning players and, especially, for her five freshmen.
Butts, an academic champion herself, says emphatically, “Going to class will not be optional. Not on my team!” Especially in women’s basketball, she observes, “the players who go on to play professionally are few and far between. Kids leave with a degree — you have to have that.”
Staff members and student-athletes — those are the right people Butts needs to have on the right bus heading to the right place.
The rest of the right people wouldn’t fit on one bus, and Butts hopes to meet them at the right place. They’re Wildcat women’s basketball fans, and the right place is McKale Center. Seating 14,000, McKale is one of the two-largest arenas in the Pac-10 (the smallest, Stanford’s Maples Pavilion, seats fewer than 8,000), so, Butts says, “I want us to get the largest attendance, too.”
Attendance at Arizona women’s basketball games has been disappointing recently, says Kate Gilbert. She has followed the Wildcat team “since the late 70s,” she says, and she notes that “few people attend games — fewer than 1,000, I’d guess.” Sometimes attendance climbs toward 2,000, but even that would be a scant handful in McKale, and many of those who do show up, Gilbert observes, are “older ticket-holders” such as the aunt and uncle with whom she regularly attends games. So, says, Gilbert, the team needs to draw a younger crowd, too.
As a member of the Lady Vol family, Butts knows how grand it can be when nearly 25,000 fans crowd a sold-out arena to see the home team, heading for the national championship, play their major national rival.
That was the scene when the Lady Vols hosted the UConn Huskies on January 7, 2006, at Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville, Tenn.
How soon will a championship Wildcat women’s basketball have McKale Center bursting at the seams?
“There’s no magic wand,” says Butts. “You get to the top as fast as you can.”
On the Wildcat women’s basketball bus, Coach Niya Butts has put the pedal to the metal.
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