A bit surprising to me. She finished 4th in the conference this year with a winning
record and was perhaps poised to finally turn the program around. I would have
thought they might wait until she regressed ( if she regressed) to fire her.
Are we sure that it is a firing and not a voluntary departure? I believe that this season was the best in her tenure, at least in terms of wins and losses.
1) Back in 2012, Jemelle Elliott signed a contract extension to remain at the helm of Cincinnati's program through 2017-2018. It was a
three-year extension of her previous deal, for a total of six years (again, though this season).
2) Elliott has been at Cincinnati for nine seasons - four in the Big East, five in the AAC. This year, her team went 19-12 and 10-6 in conference play, by far her best numbers (her teams had never won more than 16 games overall in the prior six seasons and had never had a winning record in conference play in the eight prior years). But her teams never made the NCAA Tournament and only made the WNIT twice. Her overall record was 113-162 (.4109) and her conference record was 46-104 (.307). And Cincinnati loses two of its top three players to graduation.
I think it was a combination of timing (the end of her contract) and the university's dissatisfaction with the direction of the program).
As an aside, one has to look around at the conference -- for example, UCF just made a coaching change, hiring Katie Abrahamson-Henderson two years ago. In two seasons, she took UCF to the WNIT and finished in the top four of the AAC, something her predecessor had not done in the previous five seasons. Given how quickly she is turning that program around, plus Jose Fernandez making USF a perennial top-two AAC finisher and NCAA Tournament participant, perhaps Cincinnati thinks a new coach could engineer a quick turnaround.
Then again, who can Cincinnati hire that has the coaching pedigree equivalent to that of Jemelle Elliott, not to mention the
well-documented issue with the Bearcats' facilities?
