Following the Monday morning announcement that Kyra Elzy has been relieved of her duties as head coach of Kentucky women’s basketball, UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart filled in during Elzy’s typical time slot on the UK Sports Network’s “Kyra Elzy Show” to discuss the change. “These are never easy days,” Barnhart said Monday night. “First, I want to thank Kyra Elzy for just her incredible love for this institution and the effort that she put forth to try and move our basketball program along. And I think back to the SEC championship down in Nashville (in 2022) and we celebrated that and just struggled to build on that just a bit and felt like we needed to do something a little bit different. But I want to thank her and have so much respect for her as a person, and think that she will continue to do amazing things somewhere in her journey. And we wish her all the best and her and her family.” Barnhart went on to say that the athletics department is already receiving interest in the opening, with “a lot of people” having called Monday. “What we have found is that this is a good destination for someone,” Barnhart said. “There’s a lot of interest. We’ve had a lot of people call today. We’re going to take a broad look at it and national look at it. I’ve got a couple staff members that are working with me, and so we’re, we’ve got a lot to offer at the University of Kentucky. And I think that’s really, really important. So when you think about the things that have been built over the last 15 years in our women’s basketball program, we’ve had some incredible wins. We’ve had an opportunity to win a conference championship, a regular season title and a tournament title, and there’s not a lot of schools that have done that. And clearly we want to build on that.” Barnhart also expressed the desire to “get back in that conversation” about SEC women’s basketball, which boasts the past two seasons’ national champions in LSU (2023) and South Carolina (2022). At the time of the writing of this article, ESPN’s Charlie Creme predicts nine SEC programs will make the NCAA Tournament field of 68.
