A fistful of seasons ago, Lynne Roberts sat in her sweet-and-spacious corner office in the Huntsman Basketball Facility adjacent to the arena in which her current 8th-ranked Utes team plays, where it averages 40-point margins of victory this season, and spoke her words, bore her basketball soul.
It might have been the heartfelt testimony of every head coach, but hers was both truthful and potentially prophetic. She looked up at the ceiling, spread the palms of her hands out, like a rockstar finishing a power ballad, and wrapped up her thoughts with three proclamations:
“The future at Utah is bright.”
She paused, lowered her laser gaze straightforward, focusing now on a Pac-12 championship, and maybe even something greater than just that, intentions that at that time seemed … what’s the word? … preposterous. And she added the second thing:
“I want to do things that have never been done before.”
Is that all? Big ambition is a Roberts theme. Better to aim for the stars and land in the trees than to aim for the trees and land in the mud, right? But better still to aim for the stars and hit the stars. And the third thing:
“Losing sucks. Winning is fun. It’s what we aim to do. It’s what we can do. It’s what we have to do.”
It’s what Utah’s women’s basketball team is doing.
At this writing, Roberts’ Utes are 14-0, ranked among the country’s best college teams, and looking for more, a whole lot more. They’re ranked third nationally in scoring (88.7 points) and scoring margin (30.6), second in field-goal percentage (50.9), fourth in assists (20.1). They beat then-16th-ranked Oklahoma at the Huntsman by 46 points in November. In half of Utah’s games, it has led by 38 points or more.
“We’re playing at a high level,” Roberts says now. “And I’m going to keep pushing our players. I’m dreaming big, thinking big, that’s who I am, trying to be the best.”
She insists the Utes actually could end up being one of the nation’s best teams, “If we stay hungry and don’t get fat and happy.”
Roberts is always that, never that.
Her program’s ascension over the years has come gradually, with undulations mixed in. The coach arrived at Utah in 2015, after more than a decade of head coaching experience at California schools. Once she got her hands on the operation here, the Utes won 18 games, then 16, then 18, then 20, then 14, then 5 (COVID), then 21, and now …?
Roberts has always been a studious tactician. Her office features books and binders across the shelves filled with notes from two decades of coaching, scribblings that include darn near every bit of information, lessons all those years have taught.
“I’m a total nerd,” she says, “a basketball junkie.”
The primary thrust of her coaching education has been this rather basic one: Recruit great players.
But when the Utes suffered through that difficult and disappointing season in 2020-21, Roberts plowed into some research, consulting nearly every hoops expert she could think of, studying the game at its highest level — the NBA, examining everything from shot charts to sustained winning percentages. That focus nudged her in the same direction as the professionals have headed.
It boils down to emphasizing ball movement and scoring from three spots on the floor — the 3-point line, at the rim, and at the charity stripe. That’s pretty much it. And if there’s an open look from any of those places, fire it up, baby. But do not take ill-advised, low-reward 2-point shots from distance. Do that too often and the coach has a special place for you to remain — deep on her bench.
“We call those [long 2-pointers] ‘death shots,’” says Roberts. “Whenever anyone takes one of those in practice, I blast an airhorn. It’s like training dogs.”
At the other end, the Utes are stressing another roundball fundamental, true at Utah, true at Timbuktu U.: D-up. Man-you-ball. Stay in front of your opponent. Read, rotate and rebound. And disallow the ball from moving up the middle of the floor.
“I’m a good thief,” Roberts says, having swiped some defensive strategies from other coaches. “We don’t want the ball to get to the middle. We want to force it to the corners, to get the opposing offense out of comfort, out of rhythm.”
Back to the primary basic. The players.
The Utes have talented ones. They include USC transfer Alissa Pili, two players recruited out of Minnesota, sophomores Gianna Kneepkens and Jenna Johnson, and a few who have been developing inside the program, such as Kenneday McQueen, who came to Utah from North Summit High School.
Roberts says what any decent, non-egocentric coach admits: “Coaches don’t win games and championships, players do.”
“We’ve got legitimate depth,” she says. “That lets you play at a faster pace in games, and it makes for better work in practice.”
McQueen, a sophomore, says despite the competitive jostling for minutes, there’s a sense of “togetherness” among the Utes: “We’re a close-knit group. We’ve built relationships, it’s like playing with your best friends.”
She adds that the level of play achieved thus far has surprised even the players: “If you told me we’d be a top-10 team, I’m not sure I would have believed it. But we’ve earned it, we deserve it. We want to continue to prove we’re deserving of it.”
So it is that the triple-pack of players, players who play for each other, and high-octane offense has put the Utes where they now are — competitively. Roberts says her team is still “in the learning stage of being an elite team.” She obviously wants the learning, the winning to continue, but she also sees this style of basketball as a means to draw more fans to the Huntsman Center, where the echoes of the squeaks of the sneakers have often been louder than the sparse crowds.
She wants to scream: “Hey, all y’all, look at us!”
Even more, she wants the winning to do the shouting, rolling over opponents or nipping them in tight games at the end, either way.
Home attendance thus far has been an average of 1,802, a generous number that seems to include team managers, building custodians, ushers, ticket-takers, maintenance and radio crews, long-departed team family members, and maybe a few herds of rodents who have made the old building their home.
Roberts aims to change that, what she calls the “perception of women’s basketball.”
The draw?
“We’ve got an energy,” she says. “Our players love being and playing in Salt Lake City. They’re purists. They have a passion to wear the Utah jersey. The way they play, how hard they play, shows that.”
The winning does, too.
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