COLUMBIA, Mo. — There were hugs before the game, and afterward too. There were emotions — mixed, complicated ones — throughout. Next, there will be departures, but there’s now a question of who.
Such is the landscape for Missouri women’s basketball, which lost its last home game of the season Thursday night to Vanderbilt. The Tigers are now 11-17 overall and 2-13 in Southeastern Conference play, riding a 10-game losing streak into the regular season finale.
Mizzou looks likely to enter the SEC Tournament as the bottom seed, though it does have the head-to-head tiebreaker over 13th-place Georgia.
That didn’t make a senior night loss to the Commodores any easier. Among those sent off by the program were fifth-year standout Hayley Frank and senior Mama Dembele. With eight more points, Frank will become the fourth player in MU history to score 2,000 across her career. Dembele entered Thursday’s game with the SEC lead in assists and moved up to eighth in the Missouri record books for career steals.
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“We really wanted to get it done for them,†coach Robin Pingeton said. “This one cuts pretty deep.â€
And now, the question is whether Pingeton will be leaving alongside two of her recent primary contributors.
The standard for keeping her job, headed into this season, was making it back to the NCAA Tournament. The Mizzou women hadn’t been to the postseason since they were a No. 7 seed in 2019, Sophie Cunningham’s last year as a star for the Tigers.
“We are not going to apologize for wanting our student-athletes to experience the NCAA Tournament,†former athletics director Desiree Reed-Francois said last year after deciding to give Pingeton one more crack at returning to the tournament.
“I think we all know the expectations,†Pingeton said at the time.
But the times, of course, have changed. Reed-Francois has left Mizzou, adding uncertainty to Pingeton’s future.
The women’s basketball coach’s contract runs through the 2024-2025 season, meaning it has one more year left on it. Pingeton’s contract buyout, should MU fire her shortly after the end of this season, would be in the ballpark of $233,000.
That’s a fraction of the eight-figure buyouts for men’s basketball coach Dennis Gates and football coach Eli Drinkwitz — and very little within the context of an athletics department budget. If Mizzou wants to increase its investment in women’s hoops, too, it remains a rather inconsequential amount to that potential effort.
What that suggests, then, is that the question is not so much whether Missouri has the means to fire Pingeton, who as the third women’s basketball coach in MU history has led the program since 2010, but whether it’s willing to do so amid some sub-optimal timing.
Reed-Francois’ resignation leaves a few paths forward for the athletics department and women’s basketball program. It could allow Pingeton to coach another season, potentially parting ways with the coach as her contract runs out after next year.
Interim AD Marcy Girton could dismiss Pingeton, though the optics of that move would have a temporary administrator who’s been with the university for less than a year firing a coach who’s been around since the Tigers played in the Big 12. And it seems unlikely that Girton would hire the next women’s basketball coach, given athletic directors’ preference for making their own hires when possible.
Missouri could stall and let the new athletics director decide Pingeton’s fate. The search for a new AD isn’t exactly off to a roaring start from a speed standpoint, though, so such a decision would likely need to be almost immediate from the new leader of the athletics department — and is a brand-new administrator ready to fire and subsequently hire a coach after just a few days on the job?
There’s also a contractual requirement with possibly dismissing Pingeton: MU must give her 30 days’ advance notice of a decision to terminate her without cause.
Speaking with reporters after Thursday’s loss, Pingeton didn’t go into any specifics in response to a question about her future with the Tigers.
“I’m a firm believer in being where my feet are, about being present, about controlling what I can control, you know, winning the day,†she said. “That’s what we talk to our players about on a daily basis. I think it’s really important that I’m in a place modeling that behavior for them.â€
The young core of this year’s team, including freshman Grace Slaughter, who has been one of the SEC’s most productive first-year players with 11.4 points, 3.3 rebounds and a 37.5 percent 3-point shooting rate, has routinely prompted Pingeton to laud her current group of players as one of her favorites.
“I know it seems weird from a maybe 50,000-foot viewpoint,†she said, “but it’s been my most enjoyable season that I’ve had. It’s just an incredible group of young ladies.â€
And for their part, Mizzou’s two most prominent departing seniors praised the locker room culture that they found during a difficult season and now leave behind.
“This staff is amazing. My teammates are amazing,†Dembele said. “It’s just hard to say goodbye or even think about it because of that. So yes, we want to win. Everyone wants to win. But at the end of the day, we’re getting better as persons and players and I think that’s the biggest accomplishment that we can have. It’s difficult to control those emotions.â€
“Obviously, we’ve been kind of struggling, wins-wise,†Frank said. “We’re competitors — it is hard. I think I’ve just really tried to shift my focus to how special the relationships are, how thankful I am for this coaching staff and my teammates.â€