Kentucky women’s basketball coach Kenny Brooks focused on daily improvement rather than setting specific goals for his first season in Lexington.
Brooks led Kentucky to a 22-6 regular-season record, with 11 wins in SEC play, setting a program record for league victories by a first-year coach.
The team’s success marks a significant turnaround from the two previous seasons, where Kentucky struggled with a combined 24-39 record, losing 26 of 32 conference contests.
Brooks emphasizes appreciating the journey and celebrating accomplishments while remaining focused on the ultimate goal: leading UK to its first Final Four appearance.
LEXINGTON — Prior to the first game of the Kentucky women’s basketball program’s 2024-25 season, which doubled as the first game of the Kenny Brooks coaching era, the team never sat down and laid out specific goals. No discussion of beating in-state rival Louisville. Or toppling longtime power (and border rival) Tennessee. Not even talk of reaching the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2022 surfaced.
Instead, the aims were more abstract.
“We’ve really done a good job of just letting the kids win the day,” Brooks told The Courier Journal during a sit-down interview in February. “(We tell them), ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow until you take care of today.’ They really bought into that. They didn’t listen to the outside noise. We didn’t really talk about outside expectations. We just said, ‘Let’s just get better today.’”
Don’t get Brooks wrong: When he assembled his first roster with the Wildcats, he and his staff believed they “would be a legitimate top-10, top-15 team.”
Then, adversity hit before the season even tipped off.
Jordan Obi went down with what Brooks called “a freak injury.” Weeks later, Dominika Paurová tore her ACL.
Gone was Obi, who Brooks said could have been the team’s “second- or third-leading scorer” in 2024-25. Gone was Paurová, a versatile piece who was part of Oregon State’s run to the Elite Eight last season.
“So, at that point, we had to try to reinvent ourselves from what we anticipated we were going to be,” said Brooks, before noting a number of “wonderful things” came to pass he never could have predicted.
Amelia Hassett, an Australian who starred at Eastern Florida (a junior college in Melbourne, Florida) and wasted no time adapting to the SEC, providing consistent scoring and rebounding;
Teonni Key, a rarely used forward in three seasons at North Carolina who has blossomed into a force in the low post — offensively and defensively;
Dazia Lawrence, a gifted scorer at her former school, Charlotte, who has carried that form with her to Lexington;
Clara Strack, the backup center to an All-American (Elizabeth Kitley) at Brooks’ former employer (Virginia Tech), who has developed into one of the nation’s most promising young players;
And Georgia Amoore, Brooks’ All-American point guard with the Hokies who followed him from Blacksburg, Virginia; it’s not that Brooks ever doubted her ability. But in her lone season at UK, Amoore had to immediately become the team’s unquestioned leader, a responsibility she had once been able to share with Kitley
Watching that quintet — that aforementioned five has served as the Wildcats’ starting lineup every game this season — jell together, along with the rest of the roster, has been humbling for Brooks to behold.
“The one thing you can’t just really measure is, ‘How willing are they to sacrifice a little bit of themselves for the betterment of the team?’” he said. “And this group, they don’t care who gets the glory. Any given night, one of them will step up and get 20 (points) in a game. And if they feel that, then they will pass it on. They don’t care who gets it long as we win.”
And the Wildcats have won. A lot.
They started Brooks’ tenure 7-0, which included an overtime victory at Memorial Coliseum over U of L, snapping a seven-game win streak in the series for coach Jeff Walz and the Cardinals. They routed the Vols, 82-58, posting their largest margin of victory against the winningest program in women’s college hoops. They finished 14-2 at home. They finished the regular season 22-6, as Brooks set a program record for SEC victories (11) by a first-year coach.
All this on the heels of two miserable, desultory seasons.
In the final two campaigns of Kyra Elzy’s time at the helm, Kentucky combined to go 24-39, dropping 26 of its 32 regular-season SEC matchups in that span. Last season, UK went 12-20; 17 of those defeats were by double digits, with seven setbacks by 25-plus points. Superpower South Carolina, which went on to win the national championship, kicked in UK’s teeth twice: It won by 62 points (the second-largest margin of defeat in school history) at home and then spanked the hosts by 48 in Lexington.
One season was all it took for Brooks to steer the program back in the right direction.
Others in his position avoid celebrating in-season achievements at all costs.
Pick the cliché.
“One game at a time.”
“The next game is the most important game.”
Brooks once armed himself with that tunnel-vision mentality, too.
That changed during his time at Virginia Tech. When fans would approach him and ask about teams of his past, he couldn’t recall specific details, too wrapped up in his current team alone. But it bothered him that he was giving short shrift to his past — and the players who sacrificed to help him get to where he is today
