MORGANTOWN — Mark Kellogg was introduced as the seventh women’s basketball coach in WVU history during a ceremony on the court inside the WVU Coliseum Wednesday afternoon.
Kellogg, who spent the last eight seasons as the head coach at Stephen F. Austin, said he was excited by the opportunity WVU presented him.
“The question I’ve gotten so many times already is ‘why WVU, why West Virginia?’” Kellogg said. “My initial quick thought is, why not? I almost took it personal, why are you asking me that? I think this place is so special, I think it’s been so special. There’s been such a history here on both sides of the basketball programs.
“They call this place Almost Heaven. Who wouldn’t want to live in Almost Heaven?”
Kellogg enjoyed great success at SFA, finishing with at least 23 wins in seven straight seasons, making a postseason tournament for six straight seasons and holding the sixth-highest winning percentage among active head coaches (445-120, .788).
Although he had previous opportunities to leave SFA, Kellogg said he was waiting for an opportunity that checked all of the boxes he wanted, and WVU did just that.
“There have been opportunities to leave but I told everybody in recruiting I’m not leaving until it seems perfectly right, betters our family and is the right situation,” Kellogg said. “This checked every one of those boxes for me. It was timing and it was opportunity.”
Last season, the SFA Ladyjacks finished with a 27-7 record (15-3 WAC) and advanced to the second round of the WNIT. While with SFA, Kellogg led the team to two NCAA Tournaments in 2021 and 2022. He has even greater plans for his time in Morgantown.
“We want Big 12 championships,” Kellogg said. “I’ve won championships everywhere that I’ve been. We want to make NCAA tournaments, but that’s not where it ends, we want to advance in NCAA tournaments.
“We want Sweet Sixteens and dreams of a Final Four and a national championship. I don’t know why that can’t be done here in Morgantown.”
Kellogg has never had a losing season as a head coach with stops at Fort Lewis College, Northwest Missouri State and West Texas A&M before joining SFA in 2016. Kellogg started his coaching career as a graduate assistant for the West Texas A&M men’s team, where he coached with Bridgeport, W.Va. native Rick Cooper, who is now the men’s basketball chief of staff at Texas Tech.
Stylistically, Kellogg said WVU fans might be reminded of Bob Huggins’ Press Virginia teams when watching his team play.
“We will play fast,” he said. “I know Press Virginia has been a thing around here on the men’s side, but Press Virginia is probably coming back a little bit on the women’s side. Our teams at SFA have led the nation in turnovers forced a couple of times. We will get after people, we will play hard and we will play fast. I think it’s a fun system to watch teams play.”
Kellogg said he developed his style out of necessity when his very first team at Fort Lewis College lacked both the depth and the talent to defend for an entire shot clock.
“I think we had about seven players on the team and, honestly, we couldn’t guard anybody for 30 seconds,” he said. “How are we going to slow this down was really how it all started…The style has carried over holistically, but there are parts of it that are considerably different than the early D-II days.
“People ask me ‘are you an offensive guy or are you a defensive guy?’ I’m a basketball guy, you’ve got to play both sides. We want to be good on both ends.”
Kellogg’s first job at WVU will be recruiting the players already on the team, including All-Big 12 first-teamer JJ Quinerly. The current Mountaineer logged 19 wins this season and qualified for the NCAA Tournament as a 10-seed.
“The first recruiting job is these girls and we’re going to meet when this is done and then I’ll meet with them individually,” Kellogg said. “They’re number-one, the number-one priority is these guys and then it’s filling in (the roster) and then a (coaching) staff. There’s a 30-day play that I have and that’s kind of the order I have in mind.”
Kellogg said he expects his coaching staff to be a mix of assistants he had at SFA, other coaches he knows or has worked with previously and some newcomers.
Kellogg was joined Wednesday by his wife, Trisha, son (Camden), daughter (Kayli), father (Harold), mother (Jerry) and brother (Derek).
Contract
Kellogg’s contract with WVU is for five years, running through 2028, and $5M. It is the same length and salary that WVU signed Plizuweit to last year. His salary will start at $550,000 in 2024 and will increase by $25,000 annually.
The biggest difference between Kellogg’s and Plizuweit’s contracts is the coach’s buyout structure. For Plizuweit to leave WVU early, she only owed the university 25% of the remaining contract at any time. The penalty for Kellogg to leave early is much steeper.
If Kellogg leaves before April 30, 2024, WVU will be owed 100% of his remaining contract. Before 2025 it is 75% of the remaining contract, 50% of the contract before 2026 and 25% before 2027.
“When you’re on your third coach in three years, we wanted to make sure we have somebody who understood that we expect you to be committed to being here,” WVU athletic director Wren Baker said.
For performance bonuses, Kellogg can make up to $25,000 for a first-place regular season finish in the Big 12 and $25,000 for a conference tournament championship. He will receive $15,000 for making the NCAA Tournament and more for each round the team advances, up to $100,000 for winning the national championship.
He will receive $5,000 for reaching 20 wins in a season and $10,000 for 25 and 30 wins. A conference coach of the year award will net $30,000, national coach of the year will be $50,000.
A team APR rating of 950 or above will be a $10,000 bonus and he will receive $5,000 if more than 1,000 season tickets are sold and $10,000 for more than 2,000 season tickets.
The Search
WVU’s search for a women’s basketball coach began two weeks ago when Dawn Plizuweit announced she would be leaving the program after just one year to become the head coach at Minnesota.
“We wanted someone who would embrace West Virginia values and what WVU is all about,” Baker said. “We wanted someone committed to building championship programs on the court and building leaders off the court.
“We preferred a coach with a demonstrated track record of success at the Division I level, we wanted someone with head coaching experience, we wanted a coach who we knew would pour into and encourages the student-athletes in our program. Finally, we wanted someone who would entrench themselves in West Virginia.”
This was the 19th head coaching search of Baker’s career, but his first since being hired by WVU late last year. Baker was joined on WVU’s search committee by associate athletics directors Michael Fragale (communications), Matt Wells (external affairs) and Natasha Oakes (senior woman administrator) and deputy athletics director Steve Uryasz. WVU also retained the services of search firm Collegiate Sports Associates.
Baker said the interest in this position was more intense than any he had ever hired for before and that he only wanted candidates who wanted to be at WVU.
“I’ve ran searches before where I’ve been willing to convince a candidate here’s why you should be interested in our job,” Baker said. “But because of what we’ve been through here, the first question was going to be ‘why West Virginia’ and the last question is going to be ‘why West Virginia’ and if they can’t come in and passionately articulate that, tell them not to interview. This is not a period of time where I’m trying to convince somebody they want to be here.”
Ironically, this was not the first time Baker has hired Kellogg as a head coach. As the AD at Northwest Missouri State, Baker hired Kellogg away from Fort Lewis College in 2013.
“I tried to recruit him once and he wasn’t quite there yet so I circled back around and went down another path and sold him a little harder the second time,” Baker explained. “He came to Northwest but we really didn’t get to work together for very long. I don’t think I’ve seen him since we left there, which was almost a decade ago.”
Baker said he purposefully took steps to make sure no one thought he was hiring Kellogg due to their previous connection.
“I actually didn’t bring his name to the table, we divided up conferences amongst the search committee and (senior associate athletics director) Matt Wells had his conference,” Baker explained. “I wanted him to come up organically…but once he came up, I told them he would be a great candidate and then he continued to be a part of our process.”
Other Candidates
The clear favorites for the job among WVU fans online were former WVU head coach Mike Carey, who retired after the 2021-22 season but public expressed interest in returning to the job after Plizuwiet’s departure, and Kim Stephens, who led in-state Glenville State to two straight D-II Final Fours and a national championship in 2021-22.
Baker confirmed Wednesday that he spoke to both Carey and Stephens during WVU’s search.
“Everybody who expressed interest and everybody whose name came to us, we vetted out,” Baker said. “I did speak with Coach (Carey) more about the program holistically and what he thought it takes to be successful here. When we, as a committee, started to focus in on finalists, we were just focused on a different group.”
Stephens, meanwhile, accepted the women’s basketball head coaching job at Marshall on March 27.
“She and I had a brief conversation pretty early in our process,” Baker said. “I got the sense from that conversation that there was probably something (else) working. I outlined what our process was going to look like and what our timeline is. I think there was a process at Marshall that was going much faster and she probably opted to get the bird in the hand.”
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