ESPN Women's Basketball

On Friday, a gentleman named Ron wrote in with some kind words about a column on Tennessee basketball coach Pat Summitt's 1,000th victory. This was particularly noteworthy to me, as Ron mentioned he'd been a Louisiana Tech fan since the inception of the women's program there, although he joked he now lives in "exile" in North Carolina.

I felt a twinge of guilt. I knew Louisiana Tech was struggling this season but hadn't paid much attention. There was a time, of course, when I scoured every Tech box score. Now, I didn't even know the team's record.

That same day, Louisiana Tech was shown on national television twice, as part of ESPN Classic's tribute to Summitt. Tennessee won its first NCAA title in 1987 and its sixth in 1998 with victories over Louisiana Tech.

I had to wonder what Tech fans such as Ron were thinking if they'd watched either of those rebroadcast games. How much it must have felt as if that was, unfortunately, a very long time ago compared to where Tech is now.

On Monday, Louisiana Tech fired coach Chris Long, who had a 12-11 record this season. The Lady Techsters elevated All-American former player Teresa Weatherspoon to interim head coach.

It's an understatement to say you don't see midseason job terminations based on performance very often in women's basketball. Long was 71-44 in his 3½ seasons as a head coach. Tech made the NCAA tournament in 2006, his first year at the helm, but not the past two seasons.

The firing might seem harsh, especially considering how many coaches have kept their jobs in this sport for what seems like eons with little success at all. But this is Louisiana Tech, which won an Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women title and two NCAA titles. Which went to 13 Final Fours, 10 in the NCAA era.

The 2007 NCAA tournament was the first time the school was not in the field; Tech and Tennessee had been the only programs to make it for the first 25 tournaments.

Still, can it be considered right to pull the plug on Long?

"These decisions are very difficult to make and are not made without careful consideration of all the facts and implications," Tech athletic director Derek Dooley said in a statement.

Make of that what you will.

Weatherspoon, 43, had no previous college coaching experience before joining the Tech staff this season. She was a point guard for the program's 1988 NCAA championship team and for the '88 and '92 U.S. Olympic teams. She spent several seasons as a popular WNBA player with the New York Liberty before finishing her playing career with the Los Angeles Sparks.

Her name and her energy make people recall what Louisiana Tech once was in women's basketball. But is she really ready to be a Division I head coach, even on an interim basis? Was this the best way for the school to handle its dismay over the program's fall from a perennial national contender to a team in fifth place in the Western Athletic Conference?

Doesn't just the ridiculous fact that Tech is in the WAC -- unless this were the "West" of the early 1800s -- tell you part of the problem? All of the conference's realignment during the past 20 years has been done because of football, a once-a-week sport in which geographical proximity of schools always has mattered less in terms of developing/maintaining rivalries than it has in basketball.

Terry Bradshaw and Karl Malone -- NFL and NBA legends, respectively -- are the two most famous athletic alums from Tech to emerge from the revenue sports of the college world. But the women's basketball program was the school's crown jewel in athletics, the thing that consistently kept Tech in the national sports picture.

Tech's being in the WAC has hurt women's basketball. But it just added to the mounting difficulties of a program's attempt to maintain something that no longer seems very realistic.

---

In the first two decades after Title IX was enacted, successful women's hoops programs developed mostly because a charismatic and/or talented coach settled in a certain place and built them. Sometimes there was good administrative support from the start, and other times it developed only after the program took off.

But it still, generally, went back to coaching ability in an era when most schools were not going to spend any more money on women's basketball than the bare minimum.

That meant a school such as Louisiana Tech -- thanks to both Sonja Hogg, the program's first coach, and Leon Barmore, a tactical wizard who eventually took over as head coach -- could become a national powerhouse in the sport.

Indeed, that's what Tech did. There's no way to overstate the importance of this program in the history of women's college basketball. It churned out All-Americans, became a coaching cradle and had a fan base that cared passionately.

It's ironic that the growth of women's basketball's importance in schools nationwide has contributed to the downfall of programs that had spurred that growth.

As it came to matter more to be successful in this sport, the schools that had greater resources started to take advantage of that in ways most of them hadn't before. So-called "mid-majors" such as Louisiana Tech, Old Dominion, Western Kentucky and Long Beach State were fated to lose ground almost no matter what they did.

Long Beach State made the Final Four in 1987 and '88 but hasn't even made the NCAA tournament field since 1992. That was the year Western Kentucky went to the national championship game -- but that program has made the tournament just three times in the past decade, never advancing past the second round.

Old Dominion played in the NCAA title game in 1997 and made it to the Elite Eight in 2002. ODU has been to the NCAA tournament every season except 1986 and '91. Among the advantages that ODU has over some other mid-majors is the school's location in a very large East Coast population base and its still-like-new arena. Even so, a return trip to the Final Four seems a significantly taller mountain today for ODU than it once was.

Louisiana Tech's last Final Four appearance was a decade ago, in 1999. And the last mid-major to make the Final Four was Southwest Missouri State -- now called Missouri State -- in 2001.

Louisiana Tech's furthest venture in the NCAA tournament in recent seasons was a Sweet 16 trip in 2003 under coach Kurt Budke, who's now with Oklahoma State.

The Big 12, in fact, is one of the power conferences whose formation and rise has hurt the mid-majors. Missouri State went to that 2001 Final Four behind the amazing Jackie Stiles -- but remember, she signed to go to that school the same fall the Big 12 began.

Stiles, a Kansas native, has acknowledged that as much as she loved her time and experience in Springfield, Mo., had she been just a couple of years younger, she might not have resisted the lure of playing in the Big 12, which quickly reached a prominence the Big Eight never quite did.

---

The Big 12 is also the power conference most strongly linked to the most historically successful mid-major, Louisiana Tech.

Baylor got that program's first taste of the postseason -- two WNIT appearances during Hogg's six seasons there -- then truly stepped to the forefront when Kim Mulkey took over for the 2000-01 season.

Texas A&M coach Gary Blair and Texas Tech coach Kristy Curry are both former Louisiana Tech assistants. Mickie DeMoss, an assistant to Gail Goestenkors at Texas, played at Louisiana Tech.

And now even the patriarch himself -- Barmore, who retired in 2000, came back for two years and retired again -- coaches in the Big 12 as an assistant to Mulkey at Baylor.

On Tuesday during the Big 12 teleconference, I asked Mulkey, Curry, Budke and Blair about their thoughts on Louisiana Tech's coaching change.

Budke, for whom Long had been an assistant, was obviously upset with what happened. (Some Tech fans are still hot at Budke for leaving, I should point out.)

"I feel for Chris and his family; I know he gave everything he had for the program," Budke said. "There's unrealistic expectations, and I'll leave it at that."

Curry echoed the same sentiments, saying the changes in the financial landscape of women's basketball also had changed what was reasonable to expect at Louisiana Tech.

Blair, it will not surprise you, had a funny story to tell about Weatherspoon -- how he'd gotten a speeding ticket returning from a recruiting trip to see her during her prep days in Texas. Blair said that the officer who pulled him over was named Pigg. Blair had tried to joke about how he worked for someone named Hogg (although it's pronounced "Hohg") … and, well, he still got the ticket.

Anyway, in a more serious vein, Blair said that the mid-majors' biggest dreams probably can't be what they once were, such as during his time as head coach at Stephen F. Austin from 1985 to 1993. Those programs can still have winning records, he said, but it would take something extraordinary to make a Final Four.

"Sometimes," Blair said, "life's not fair."

And then there is Mulkey, who many people thought would take over the Louisiana Tech program when Barmore first retired.

I was in Ruston, La., in 2000 the day Barmore said he was stepping aside before the start of the NCAA tournament. I couldn't imagine anyone else would even be considered to replace him except Mulkey, the former star point guard who'd been his assistant for 15 years.

But there was weird talk about a national search -- which, understandably, was insulting to Mulkey -- and then an apparent battle of wills between her and Louisiana Tech president Dan Reneau over whether she would be given a five-year contract.

Mulkey told her side of the story in her book, "Won't Back Down," and reiterated it in the conference call Tuesday. She said that if Tech had guaranteed her five years as head coach, she would have stayed.

Some Tech fans totally believe that, and some don't. But the fact that she spent 15 years there and turned down several offers before Baylor's gives her a ton of credibility.

Mulkey, who has since won an NCAA title at Baylor, is certainly not getting any satisfaction over Tech's troubles. Quite the opposite.

"When you spend 19 years of your life in a program, and put blood, sweat and tears into it, you do hurt," she said of seeing what has happened at Louisiana Tech.

As for Weatherspoon, whom she coached in college, Mulkey said, "I think [she's] one of the toughest, physical-specimen point guards I ever coached or saw play. … She knows where that program was at its highest point. And she's at the school now, where she has seen things that I'm sure have shocked her.

"If I could talk to her every day and help her in any capacity, I would. Because I just love her."

Weatherspoon will coach her first game for Tech on Friday, when Hawaii visits Ruston. And again, I think of fans such as Ron, people who have cared so much and for long about this program. Whose knowledge of women's basketball history has such depth. They are a treasured part of the sport.

I e-mailed Ron back, wondering how he felt about the success of coaches like Mulkey at other schools. He said that "true Tech fans" are proud for her, and one of the things he mentioned was his gratitude to Mulkey for "providing wonderful entertainment to my then-elderly parents as a player."

I thought that was a touching answer, one from the heart. It would be nice to think that Weatherspoon could recapture past glory and give Tech fans the same kind of thrills in the coming years that they experienced in the past.

Honestly, though, it doesn't seem realistic. But sports is sometimes about believing when it seems the hardest thing to do.

And besides … most people adjust to reality. If the program works hard to be the best it can -- whatever that is -- those who love it will continue to do just that.

Mechelle Voepel, a regular contributor to ESPN.com, can be reached at mvoepel123@yahoo.com. Read her blog at http://voepel.wordpress.com/.