Dani Busboom Kelly Leaves Louisville, Dan Meske Takes Over
While I was hoping for a calm and peaceful Wednesday night where I could scout SMU women's basketball some, life decided to make it a chaotic middle of the week. We got some pretty big breaking news last night as Dani Busboom Kelly stepped down as head coach of Louisville volleyball to take the head coach position at Nebraska following John Cook's sudden retirement.
The announcement happened quite suddenly about 6:00pm last night and I haven't had time to sit and process this yet so we'll see how sporadic and 'pinballish' my thoughts will be here.
John Cook spent the last 25 years leading Nebraska and led the Huskers to four national championships. While Cook had recently extended his contract through 2029, he decided it was time to ride off into the sunset.
With the head coach vacancy at Nebraska, there was no doubt that the top choice would be Dani Busboom Kelly. DBK won national championships as both a player and a coach under Cook during her time at Nebraska.
Dani Busboom Kelly came to Louisville in 2017 and coached the Cards for eight seasons. During her tenure, she posted a 203-44 record that included four ACC Championships, eight NCAA Tournament appearances, three Final Fours, and two National Runner-Up finishes. Prior to the arrival of DBK, Louisville had never advanced beyond the Sweet Sixteen.
Under the leadership of DBK, several Louisville players earned All-American honors including Anna DeBeer, Elena Scott, Charitie Luper, Anna Stevenson, Tori Dilfer, Aiko Jones, Raquel Lazaro, Amaya Tillman, and Claire Chaussee.
With Busboom Kelly headed back home to Nebraska, Louisville plans to elevate Dan Meske to head coach at Louisville. Meske joined DBK's staff from day one at Louisville as an associate head coach after previous stints as an assistant coach at Nebraska and a head coach at Augustana.
We will let our Volleyball guru Jeff McAdams provide a much more thorough breakdown of what this means for Louisville in a few days. He will also provide any updates that we may have on Dan Meske's staff (Todd Chamberlain is expected to stay but unconfirmed) and any possible player transfers.
We do wish Dani Busboom Kelly the best at Nebraska.
Women's Basketball Visits SMU
Onto our regularly scheduled happenings, we have Louisville women's basketball set to face off against SMU tonight. The Cards and Mustangs will tip off at 8:00pm ET (7:00pm SMU time) and will air on ACC Network.
Louisville enters the game 14-6 on the year with a 7-2 ACC record. Most recently, the Cards survived a scare at Virginia to earn a road win after falling at Virginia Tech before that. The Cards sit at fourth in the conference, currently.
SMU is 10-11 this season and boasts a 2-7 conference mark. The Mustangs have lost five straight with their most recent loss coming at Miami. Their losing streak began on the road to Pitt in a game that will go down in the NCAA history books. That game saw SMU up by a large a margin before surrendering a 31-0 run including a 28-0 third quarter. Pitt went on a 54-10 extended run to win. The Mustangs' non-conference schedule isn't great and they went 1-3 against 'Power Five' opponents.
SMU averages 65.8 points per game while surrendering 67.4 ppg. They shoot a solid .375 from the field but have been poor from three-point range, shooting .284. The Mustangs have been outrebounding opponents by two rebounds per game.
Nya Robertson (19.0 ppg) is a dangerous scorer and has had plenty of offensive support from Chantae Embry (11.7 ppg) and Jessica Peterson (9.6 ppg). Peterson has been nearly unstoppable in the paint and brings in 12.3 rebounds per game. The senior center also has 25 blocks on the year.
SMU's team and individual stats are better than their record shows but they have struggled against the competition.
Louisville is 2-1 all-time against SMU. The Mustangs won the inaugural meeting back in 1996 but the Cards took the win in the other two meetings during the 2013-2014 AAC season.
Walz
Coach Jeff Walz had his pre-contest presser Wednesday before the Cards WBB squad travels to Dallas to face SMU tonite. Hear it below:
*All photos by Jared*
Happy Thursday and Go Cards!
Jared
I may be wrong on this but it looked like Meske ran this team, not DBK. And. what did Whitman do...except walk around the huddle and look goofy? Onto a new era. Good luck in Nebraska, Dani...I doubt you'll be missed...
ReplyDeleteNck O.
I think you're not completely wrong on the comparison between DBK and Dan. I don't know that I would say that Dan ran the team and DBK didn't, but he has been *very* integral into the running of the team and fully stepping into the position of fully running it won't be much of a stretch.
DeleteAs for Whitman...dude is a genius. He basically ran just about anything and everything technical for the team. Stats-keeping, video processing, data analysis, and probably still a lot of stuff that I'm not aware of. All a lot of behind the scenes stuff, but he's amazing at it all and will be a big asset to wherever he finds himself. The Vanderbilt position is particularly great for him because he is a Nashville native.
Didn't I see somewhere that Whitman was going to Nebraska too?
ReplyDeleteCurtis "sometimes buried in the avalanche of information" Franklin
Nope, he started with the spring semester at Vanderbilt. Again, the guy in charge of all things technical, while he works on his Ph.D.
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