Ard at work: USU women’s basketball has a new head coach
In six months, Utah State’s first-year women’s basketball coach, Kayla Ard, has turned a depleted roster into one ready to battle back from a historically disappointing 2019-20 season.
When Ard first showed up to Logan in March from the University of Denver, she was handed a young, depleted roster. Among the returners — from a team that won just two conference games the year prior — just one player, Steph Gorman, had averaged more than four points per game in a Division I season. Just a few days later, Gorman chose to enter the transfer portal.
The situation could set Ard up for failure, but as she said on a recent episode of The Statesman Sports Desk Podcast: “I came here to win.”
“I am a very impatient person when it comes to something like winning,” Ard said. “I have no interest in waiting two or three years to get where we want to go. I understand that things don’t happen overnight and we’re going to trust the process and do what we got to do to get where we’re going, but we want to make a big splash quickly.”
Accomplishing that task is no simple feat and Ard had to get to work on her multi-faceted plan of attack. The first step on this journey was the age-old coaching adage of changing the culture.
“I knew (changing the culture) meant I needed to get a couple of different players in here,” Ard said. “But also I needed to get a really good staff around me that was on the same page and that could help me get there and had the same vision for the program that I did and didn’t see the two wins. They saw what would come this year and the next year and the year after that.”
Just over a week after Ard’s hiring was announced, Utah State announced two assistant head coaches, Jeanne Kenney and Jauwan Scaife. Within three weeks after that, Taylor Ignoto and Karlie Burris were brought on.
One of her main priorities was to bring in experience. Ard’s upcoming roster had nine underclassmen and as aforementioned even the upperclassmen didn’t have much in the way of experience. So she brought in Jessica Chatman, a graduate transfer, three junior college players — Paris Williams, Monique Pruitt and Bre Mathews — plus one additional freshman. One would imagine that since Ard is a former junior college player and coach, she got some of these recruits via those connections. Not so.
Photo courtesy of USU Athletics
“I didn’t actually have any of these recruits established, I was not recruiting any of these players at Denver. It was just ears back, nose to the grind,” Ard said.
Aside from finding players from scratch, the recruiting grind had more than the usual number of obstacles this offseason due to the COVID-19 shutdowns.
“We signed four kids that we didn’t get to bring on campus,” Ard said. “We didn’t get to sit down with their parents in person. Everything was virtual. We had to show them virtual tours of the campus. I had to do the same thing when I was hiring a staff.”
The culmination of Ard’s efforts is something of an amalgamation of two rosters and two styles, but rather than see that as a negative, it’s something the new coach is happy to see.
“I’m really excited about the roster,” Ard said. “The roster that we currently have now with the mix of the four kids that we brought in, it gives us that athletic ability and that versatility and then it give us what the old system had with their previous coaching staff, they had some shooters. So it’s great to be able to mix those kids in.”
One of the goals Ard stated in her opening press conference at USU (recorded live in an empty Dee Glen Smith Spectrum, sitting six feet from John Hartwell and her lone interviewer, head of media relations Doug Hoffman), is to finish in the top half of the Mountain West this year. It’s a far cry from what men’s basketball head coach Craig Smith did in his first season, bringing the first conference championship in the Mountain West era back to Logan, but it’s a good start for a struggling program.
—sports@usustatesman.com
@thejwalk67