Adia Barnes, Arizona’s career leading scorer and most successful coach in program history, has accepted the head coaching position at SMU, according to a report by Michael Lev of the Arizona Daily Star on Saturday morning.
The news of Barnes likely leaving for SMU was first reported by On3.com’s Talia Goodman on Friday night.
Barnes leaves her alma mater as the coach who took the Wildcats the farthest in the NCAA tournament — a spot in the 2021 NCAA championship game against Stanford behind All-American guard Aari McDonald.
Arizona led the Pac-12 in attendance in its last two years in the conference and was second in the Big 12 in attendance this season averaging 6.326 fans a game. In the season before her arrival in 2015-16, Arizona averaged only 1,303 a game and was an afterthought in women’s college hoops.
Barnes, who was 169-114 at Arizona after her hired in 2016 by former athletic director Greg Byrne, struggled in recent years holding on to players, partly because of the difficulty of matching lucrative NIL offers by other programs.
The list of players who have departed include guard Madi Conner (TCU), center Aaronette Vonleh (Colorado and Baylor), center Lauren Ware (Texas A&M) and guard Kailyn Gilbert (LSU).
In the last couple of weeks, Arizona lost Jada Williams to Big 12 foe Iowa State and Skylar Jones to Louisville. Freshman guard Lauryn Swann, freshman forward Katarina Kneževic and sophomore forward Breya Cunningham are in the transfer portal. Cunningham reportedly visited USC this week.
Arizona has two Class of 2025 signees who may decide to head elsewhere with Barnes gone — forward Jasmine Gipson of Duncanville, Texas, and forward Roxy White of Frankfort, Ill.
Barnes’ five-year contract worth a base salary of $5.85 million that was signed in May 2021 was set to expire after next season. The buyout of her contract is $250,000. She was set to earn $1.3 million in 2025-26.
The deal was reached a month after Arizona defeated UConn and Geno Auriemma in the Final Four and nearly defeated Stanford and legendary coach Tara VanDerveer in the national title game at San Antonio.
That was negotiated with former Arizona president Robert C. Robbins and athletic director Dave Heeke, both of whom have been replaced by Suresh Garimella and Desireé Reed–Francois, respectively.
A name prominently mentioned by multiple sources as a potential replacement for Barnes is UNLV coach Lindy La Rocque, a Goddaughter of legendary Arizona coach Lute Olson. La Rocque’s dad Alan played for Olson at Long Beach City College.
Reed-Francois hired La Rocque to coach the Rebels in 2020 when she was the AD at UNLV.
Arizona men’s basketball assistant coach Jack Murphy, the Arizona men’s associate head coach, has known her since she was a child,and La Rocque said she’s always looked up to him as an older brother. He helped her father’s AAU team. Part of his job was babysitting La Rocque and her sister.
La Rocque coached the Rebels (who featured former Sahuaro standout Alyssa Brown) to three straight NCAA tournament appearances from 2021 to 2024. She is 128-30 in her five seasons at UNLV.
She broke UNLV’s 20-year drought of playing in the NCAA tournament. The Rebels were 25-35 in the two years before her arrival. She was 41-16 in her first two years and won the first of four straight Mountain West regular-season titles in her second season.
Another name that has been speculated is former Arizona standout Brenda Frese, who has reached a status worthy of the Hall of Fame for her career at Maryland. She has won a national title with the Terrapins and has a career record of 607-169 with the program and 664-199 overall.
Frese’s contract terms are similar to those of Barnes. Frese signed a contract extension in 2022 that goes through the 2028-29 season and includes a base salary of $1.4 million annually.
Evans left Maryland and Frese for SMU recently.
With Barnes reportedly leaving, the new Arizona coach must work very hard toward improving the program’s NIL budget and stature in order to compete with mid- to high-level Power 4 programs.
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ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He is a former Arizona Daily Star beat reporter for the Arizona basketball team, including when the Wildcats won the 1996-97 NCAA title. He has also written articles for CollegeAD.com, Bleacher Report, Lindy’s Sports, TucsonCitizen.com, The Arizona Republic, Sporting News and Baseball America, among many other publications. He has also authored the book “The Highest Form of Living”, which is available at Amazon. He became an educator in 2016 and is presently a special education teacher at Sunnyside High School in the Sunnyside Unified School District.
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