The Legendarium: Reign in Ruston, Part 2

Louisiana Tech continued their reign of dominance up until the early 2000's. But the Lady Techsters legacy and impact on the game reached far beyond that.

May 06, 2025

Kim Mulkey had never quite had her loyalty tested like this before. Sitting in the office of Louisiana Tech President Dan Reneau, she begged and pleaded. All it would take was what felt like a simple concession: a five year contract instead of a four year one. That one simple thing, and she would happily take over for Leon Barmore and continue the legacy of excellence that Tech had cultivated for the last 30 or so years.

Reneau wouldn’t budge. It was a situation where Mulkey either had to take it or leave it. There would be no negotiation and no room to maneuver. She couldn’t understand why. Louisiana Tech was her home, the place where she grew up as a person, basketball player and eventually coach. But now, it felt as if none of that mattered.

As she walked out of the office, she steeled herself to make a choice that would change her life and that of the Lady Techsters program forever.

Leon’s Lady Techsters

Kim had already made a name for herself as a star guard of Louisiana Tech women’s basketball but once she was done with her college career, she never really considered returning to the sport. International competition, like the 1984 Olympics, was still in play for her but Mulkey never seemed to have much of an interest in the fledgling professional leagues of the early 80’s.

After returning from Los Angeles, she was awarded a post graduate scholarship by the NCAA and came back to Louisiana Tech.

“I’m sitting in class and, towards the end of class, campus security came to the door and told me that the [University] President [F. Jay Taylor] wanted to see me,” she recalls, “and so I’m thinking, ‘something bad has happened to my family’.”

“[I] get up there and he tells me, ‘Sonja Hogg is retiring and Leon Barmore is going to take over but before I give him the job I want you to be on his staff’.”

Mulkey was surprised but didn’t blink.

“I said, ‘No it doesn’t work like that, Dr. Taylor’”, says Mulkey.

In her eyes, she was done with the game. She had won an AIAW and NCAA national title and wanted to go work as an executive in corporate America. But Taylor had one more card to play.

“He said, ‘Leon wants you. He just doesn’t think that you will do it’”, Mulkey remembers.

Eventually, the overtures worked. What was originally going to be a one year trial run while finishing a Master’s degree turned into a career that spanned over 30 years. Angela Lawson was a sophomore that season and remembers it well.

“I felt like Coach Barmore was the tactician and Coach Hogg was the marketing guru and the face and the flash and could go into a home and sell a recruit,” says Lawson. “I think Kim has both. [But] there’s a part of her that’s just her.”

With Mulkey on staff alongside top assistant Mary Kay Hungate, the Lady Techsters were retooled and ready to run again. During the 1984-85 season, they had made it to the Elite Eight before falling to Northeast Louisiana (now UL Monroe) and the legendary point guard EJ Lee. But with the addition of forward Nora Lewis and Lawson’s elevation into the starting lineup, Tech had the pieces to contend again.

Leading the backcourt was a 5’8 guard from Pineland, Texas named Teresa Weatherspoon.

“She always played very emotionally and very passionately,” Lawson recalls. “A lot of that was already there, it just developed and grew over time throughout her career.”

Her propensity for performing in the clutch was, at least, already well-known. In her freshman year, standing opposite Cheryl Miller who set a USC record with 43 points in a game, ‘Spoon’ hit a deep three pointer off the bank to tie the game at 63 and send it to overtime. She would then hit the two critical free throws in double OT to defeat the No. 8 ranked Women of Troy.

The Lady Techsters rivalries were varied and nationwide, given that they played independently of a conference until the 1987-1988 season. They would face off against USC, Old Dominion or Long Beach State. For players like Lawson and Weatherspoon, who were from Texas and heavily recruited by head coach Jody Conradt, the Longhorns were also a team to get up for.

But the one program that Barmore’s team routinely battled with was Pat Summitt’s Tennessee Volunteers.

“We, at Tech, and Tennessee were the two teams that really had great post players,” Barmore remembers.

They’d regularly meet during the season, drawing some of the largest crowds in Ruston. But it had been quite a while since the last time they faced one another with any real stakes on the line. So long, in fact, that the governance of the sport had shifted from the AIAW to the NCAA. In the spring of 1987, with a 30-2 record and just coming off a Final Four win over top seeded Texas in Austin, the Lady Vols got the better of the Techsters, 67-44.

It cost seniors like Tori Harrison a shot at a national title but it also began a process for vets like Lawson, Weatherspoon and Nora Lewis.

“We thought we could win the national championship our junior year,” Lawson explains. “We were disappointed and so I think that kind of started the confidence building piece.”

With Erica Westbrooks stepping into a starting frontcourt role and freshman Venus Lacy taking over for Harrison, the Lady Techsters once again made a push to win a national title. In 1988, they lost just two games. But one of those losses was a last minute two point defeat to Tennessee, so naturally that went over how one might expect.

“I remember going into the locker room at Tennessee and there was a big water cooler and I might not even have shook hands with opponents,” Lawson says. “I might have just run off the court, I was so mad. I remember kicking it over.”

But something also clicked on that trip, Lawson still believes. An understanding that they had the ability to compete with the best and win a national title. The 1988 NCAA Tournament felt like a bit of a deja vu, as the Lady Techsters placed Texas and Tennessee again. Only this time, they dispatched both and saw Auburn in the national title game in Tacoma.

The Tigers had a stacked roster of their own, from Ruthie Bolton to Vickie Orr. It was a tight matchup but there was an ‘air of confidence’, as Angela put it, among the Lady Techster players. Despite being down as many as 14 points, they came back and led by one point with 23 seconds to go.

Louisiana Tech would hang on to win another national championship off the strength of a suffocating defense and an elite interior presence. A Leon Barmore special.

Weatherspoon, Lawson and Westbrooks rode off into the sunset as champions while the Tech coaching staff centered their future team around Nora Lewis and Venus Lacy, who would become a regular 20-and-10 player on average. While Auburn would get revenge on the Lady Techsters not once, but twice, in the next two Final Fours, the championship continued to burnish an already established reputation as one of the top programs in the sport even in spite of the changing landscape around them.

Little Giants

The 1990’s brought continued realignment to collegiate sports. Back in 1984, the University of Oklahoma sued the NCAA alleging that the governing body’s TV plan viotlated the Sherman Antitrust Act. This opened the door for a couple of very important things to happen.

First, it increased the availability of televised NCAA games across a variety of sports. But it also meant that individual schools and athletic conferences were free to negotiate their own broadcasting agreement on their own behalf. In the world of college football, some schools tried to jointly negotiate their contracts through an individual body, known as the College Football Association. The Big Ten and Pac-10 opted out of the CFA and negotiated their own deals.

Effectively, this allowed for a full split of what had already been a widening gap between ‘power’ conference teams and mid-majors in terms of spending and attention towards athletics. But Louisiana Tech was committed to keeping women’s basketball a power program even as other long time historical powerhouses took a back seat to stalwarts like Tennessee, Texas and emerging mainstays like UConn or North Carolina.

“We didn’t have the money,” Barmore explains. “[Power programs] had the staffs they had but we had the name, we had the work ethic, we got players that could play. And in basketball, it’s not like football. I just felt like we got three players I could play then we could compete with anybody and that’s what we tried to do.”

President F. Jay Taylor, who had handed over stewardship to Dan Reneau in 1987, remained an ardent advocate of the women’s basketball program. And while the writing on the wall was just starting to be penned, Barmore remained confident that he and his assistants — now Kim Mulkey and Nell Fortner — could contend.

“We had a bad year, 20-10 or something like that,” says Barmore. “So I hired Nell Fortner and that girl could recruit. She and Kim were the top two coaches I had in those 15-20 [years]. We kept it going and I couldn’t have done it myself. I’ll give Kim and Nell, especially those players, so much credit in keeping Tech alive with some players that could play.”

“I think I became more comfortable in my role as an assistant,” Mulkey adds. “What I mean by that is that when you first finish [playing], you’re still in that ‘I’m [Coach Barmore’s] student-athlete, I’m his player and he’s my coach.’”

“I think as I matured and as I grew and gained more responsibilities I realized, ‘you know’ this may be what I’m really supposed to do.”

After an Elite Eight exit to Vanderbilt during the 1992-1993 season, the Lady Techsters brought on some more guards to adjust to a changing college basketball world. Vickie Johnson was one such player, living out a manifestation she had as a young girl.

“At the age of nine, I knew I was going to Louisiana Tech,” she says. “I watched Louisiana Tech — Kim Mulkey and them — play USC — Cheryl Miller and the McGee twins and Cynthia Cooper. And I said, I’m gonna play for that team in blue.”

Was it simply the color to a nine year old Vickie Johnson? No. It was more than that.

“[My mother’s] like ‘why the blue team?’”, she continues. “I said because there’s stars on the sleeve and stars on the jerseys’. I said, ‘because one day I’m gonna be a star and that’s the team.’”

At nine years old she could find Ruston, Louisiana on a map but she knew what the school was going to be. Even as the legendary Pat Summitt and successful upstart Geno Auriemma sat in her living room and tried to cajole her into joining their power programs, she knew where she was headed.

But it wasn’t easy initially. Barmore demanded a standard, as did his assistants. While they had a couple of transition years from 1990-1992, the Lady Techsters were still a top team in the nation. When an Elite Eight exit in 1993 is considered a disappointment by fans and the administration, it’s clear where the bar is.

“He was on me,” Vickie recalls. “I called my mom and said ‘I don’t want to be here’. I was gonna transfer because I was gonna go to LSU.”

She was winning every drill but still being heavily critiqued. While the standard was set at Tech, Vickie started to wonder if it was a bar set too high. The next morning at practice, Coach Barmore walked out towards Johnson and told her that her mother had called him.

He told Vickie that her mother had told him to be hard on her daughter and not grant her any shortcuts, to teach her about life beyond basketball and not to take any shortcuts past adversity.

“I can’t believe my mom ratted on me like this!” Vickie says with a big laugh when retelling the story.

Some time later, she called her mom to voice the same concerns again and said she was met with three questions.

“[My mom] was like ‘You signed with Louisiana Tech. You wanted to sign with Louisiana Tech?”

“Yes.”

“She said, ‘You’re at Louisiana Tech right?’”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, stay your ass down.”

*Click*.

“That was the third day and I never complained again,” laughs Vickie, "And I never called my mom ever again.”

From there, alongside team captain Danielle Whitehurst and the number one recruiting class in the country, the assignment was clear. The Lady Techsters only three losses during the 1993-1994 regular season were on the road at No. 3 Iowa, No. 1 Tennessee and No. 16 Alabama.

Despite one of the best records in the nation, the stratification of power conference tournament seeding had already begun and the Lady Techsters were given a four seed in the NCAA bracket. They rolled SMU and then dominated fifth seeded Ole Miss before facing off against Tennessee, the top seed in the region, in the Sweet 16.

It would be a schematic battle for the ages.

“Nell loved the run and jump defense, trapping and stuff like that,” Johnson remembers. “So we wanted to pick up the pace and turn them over and get turnovers and get out in transition and score some easy baskets.”

Despite losing to the Lady Vols by 34 in Knoxville earlier in the year, the Lady Techsters pulled off a stunner for the ages. Pam Thomas scored 18 points, running the floor to keep their rivals out of a Final Four for the third straight year.

Up next in the gauntlet was second seeded USC in the Elite Eight, coached by Cheryl Miller and boasting a frontcourt containing Lisa Leslie and Tina Thompson. Once again, the Lady Techsters pulled off the seemingly impossible and headed to the Final Four in Richmond, Virginia.

It was one of the more unique cast of characters in recent Tournament memory, with three of the four coaches making their first ever Final Four. Of the participants — Alabama, North Carolina, Purdue and Louisiana Tech — the Lady Techsters were the most battle tested and decorated of the bunch. Barmore’s crew once again pulled off a revenge game, paying back the Crimson Tide for a December defeat, setting up a title game against North Carolina.

Which is where one of the most iconic shots in women’s basketball history happened.

“It was quiet,” Vickie Johnson says of the locker room after Charlotte Smith’s buzzer beater ripped the national title hopes out of the Lady Techsters hands. “A lot of crying. Not a lot of blaming. Just quiet. It happened so fast.”

Smith ran to the three point with point seven seconds left as the Techsters lost her in an off-ball screen. Wide open and with .7 seconds left to go, she snapped the net to win North Carolina the NCAA title. It wouldn’t be the last time Louisiana Tech would go to a championship game but it felt like the beginning of the end of an era. Old Dominion and the Lady Techsters — the two mid-major programs that were standard bearers in the sport — would have their last hurrahs but would fall in the same fashion: to Pat Summitt and the juggernaut that was now Tennessee women’s basketball.

“Times have changed,” Mulkey says of that period and now. “And I will always say this, there will never be another era like that.”

And as she sat in Dan Reneau’s office two years removed from being a top assistant on the 1998 NCAA Runners-Up, Kim Mulkey realized just how much things were about to change for her.

Ruston’s Rocky Road

Kim Mulkey, by her own admission, is loyal to a fault. Even 25 years after that moment in President Dan Reneau’s office, she still attests that she never would’ve left Louisiana Tech.

It was the year 2000 and Leon Barmore was ready to step aside as the head coach of the Lady Techsters after over 18 years at the helm.

“There’s no question Kim Mulkey should have been hired as the next head coach after me,” he says flatly. “She spent four years with me as a player and 16 as an assistant coach. After 20 years, she deserved to have been my replacement.”

Over the course of the late 90’s, she’d been approached for head coaching jobs particularly in the SEC and Big 12. Texas A&M called, and she told them no. Missouri made an overture, she showed them the door. South Carolina offered her their job and she once again displayed her allegiance to the school that, in essence, raised her.

But when it came time, Louisiana Tech said they would be conducting a nationwide search to find their new head coach to succeed Barmore. Mulkey felt that she deserved the right to inherit the program and felt hurt by the gesture. As a public university, Tech was obligated legally to place a posting for the position. Nevertheless, Reneau did indeed offer Mulkey the job.

Here’s where it got sticky.

“They started with a three year contract, then it went to a four year contract,” she recalls, “and the whole time I said, ‘I want five years.’”

There were a variety of factors for why she pressed so hard for that number. Mulkey contends, even now, that it didn’t have anything to do with the money upfront. Instead, part of it was about her Louisiana state pension. She had already worked as a university employee for 15 years and, the way she saw it, even if she was fired at the conclusion of the five year contract she had 20 years and thus would be eligible for a state pension.

But perhaps more importantly, she wanted some security knowing the legacy she would be tasked with upholding.

“Leon Barmore is like a Bear Bryant of women’s basketball,” Mulkey explains. “Who wants to follow in those footsteps without having some security?”

The back and forth became more and more tense as Kim sought counsel from one of her very first mentors: former Lady Techsters matriarch Sonja Hogg. Hogg had just retired at Baylor and told her that if Mulkey was interested, she had a feeling that the administration would grant her the five year contract she wanted.

Timeless Techsters

There’s one individual that comes up when asking about what made Louisiana Tech unique: President F. Jay Taylor. Much like former Old Dominion Athletic Direct Jim Jarrett, Taylor saw what no one else seemed to at the time.

“I remember when I went up for my visit and when you drove in the main drive at the dormitories, they had LA Tech spelled out with lights.” remembers Janice Lawrence-Braxton, the two-time national champion and Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer. “They got us on a bus and took us over to President Taylor’s house. President Taylor had us a barbecue. He was at every game and a lot of our away games. When we won the national championship, he closed down the school.”

Taylor was even present for Lawrence-Braxton’s Louisiana Hall-of-Fame induction, years after she had finished playing for Louisiana Tech.

“Not many Presidents were going to go out on a limb and support women’s basketball,” Leon Barmore adds.

Taylor’s continued support for the program lasted well after he retired as President, arriving at inductions, games and luncheons for the team.

“He was a visionary,” says Mulkey. “He knew that we needed to start a program and he got it going and he’s one of the biggest supports. The Lady Techsters were his pride and joy.”

But beyond Taylor’s influence, the success of Louisiana Tech lies in an almost perfect confluence of events. Sonja Hogg’s ability to market and sell a program was only rivaled by other legendary contemporaries of her era, from Texas’ tandem of Jody Conradt and Donna Lopiano to Old Dominion’s Marianne Stanley and Tennessee’s Pat Summitt. That, coupled with the fact that the Lady Techsters had beaten LSU to the punch and thus were able to secure some of the top players in a state flush with talent, created a juggernaut in Ruston.

“We had that track record of being the best,” says Pam Kelly, one of the original stars of the first Techster dynasties. “It’s probably easy for people to want to be associated with that.”

While her exit from Tech remains one of the more controversial coaching moves and fascinating ‘what if’s’ in women’s basketball history, Mulkey’s legacy in Ruston can’t be understated and she’s credited by Leon Barmore himself for continuing to keep the standard at a championship level.

“The most proud I was was the fact that we lasted as long as we did when the big schools took over,” he says.

Barmore’s coaching tree is extensive and includes some elite names. Kim Mulkey, former Texas A&M head coach and NCAA champion Gary Blair, Nell Fortner — who was just recently named the head coach of the Canadian national team —, Alabama head coach Kristy Curry as well as a multitude of assistants all over the nation.

“I think people who aren’t affiliated probably forget that,” Mulkey, now at LSU where she won the 2023 NCAA title, adds. “I always have this saying, don’t ever forget where you come from. And I never forget where I come from.”

Program alumni include three Wade Trophy winners, five Olympic medalists and eight members of the Women’s Basketball Hall-of-Fame. Teresa Weatherspoon and Vickie Johnson would go on to become WNBA coaches while Angela Lawson spent years leading Incarnate Word’s program before settling into a new university role at UTSA.

“We were the blueprint,” Vickie says. “You just never saw women’s basketball played in the south the way it was played at Louisiana Tech.”

During the 2003 WNBA season, Louisiana Tech had seven players in the league, among the most from a single school.

“We were part of the pioneer days,” adds Lawson. “To be a part of the very beginning of the women’s game and seeing it where it is now is a pretty cool thing.”

And while there is a faint and fleeting hope that the Lady Techsters will be able to recapture some magic again, it may never be the same as it once was where state highways were closed to welcome home the national champions, the conquering victors. But many affiliated with Louisiana Tech say that the goal shouldn’t be to try and reboot the old days. Instead, performing within the parameters of what college basketball is now and giving fans something to cheer about again is enough.

“I love this new President [Jim Henderson] that’s there now,” says Hogg. “He remembers his mother bringing him to some of our early games and him going up under the bleachers and I was on the sideline. Maybe he remembers those things and that’s good because he will be as much like a Jay Taylor for that program. He’ll be a great leader.”

As banners continue to hang in the TAC, telling tales of greatness and glory. And the names of Lady Techsters’ stay embedded in the minds of Ruston residents, who remember the titles and the people who helped earn them.