Is UK women’s basketball ‘a sleeping giant’? With Kenny Brooks, we will at last find out.

For the past 50 years, the University of Kentucky has fielded women’s basketball teams. Over almost that entire time, the feeling in the women’s hoops community has been that UK has been the proverbial “sleeping giant” in that sport.

Because of UK’s rich men’s basketball tradition, no less than the venerable Pat Summitt believed any hoops team associated with Kentucky was set up to succeed.

“Because it was Kentucky, I thought that (head coaching) job had a lot of potential,” the late, former Tennessee coaching legend told me in 1998.

Yet, in spite of some stretches of good play across five decades, UK women’s basketball has done more sleeping than acting the part of a giant.

Now, through the hiring of the impressive former Virginia Tech head man Kenny Brooks as Kentucky’s new coach coinciding with an $80 million-plus reinvention of Memorial Coliseum that will give UK women’s hoops a posh new home, we are going to get a definitive answer to whether the Wildcats can become one of the nation’s elite programs.

As he evaluated the possibilities of coaching Kentucky while he pondered leaving the Virginia Tech program he had taken from the ACC’s bottom to both an NCAA Tournament Final Four and an ACC regular season crown, Brooks said he kept coming back to one reality.

“This is going to be a sleeping giant,” Brooks said of UK women’s hoops. “It just needs to be awakened.”

To lure Brooks away from the program he had built in Blacksburg, Virginia, Kentucky signed the 55-year-old coach to a five-year contract worth at least $7.7 million.

Brooks comes to Lexington as the best head coach in the history of two schools. In 14 seasons coaching at his alma mater, James Madison University, Brooks led the Dukes to six NCAA Tournaments and 11 20-win seasons.

In the 10 years before Brooks went to Virginia Tech, the Hokies had six losing seasons and not even one 20-victory campaign.

Over eight seasons, Brooks built Virginia Tech into a team that reached the Final Four (2023) and won the ACC Tournament (2023) and the ACC regular season title (2024). Brooks won at least 20 games in every season he coached at Virginia Tech except the pandemic-impacted 2020-21 season — when Tech went 15-10.

All you need to know about Brooks’ coaching acumen was supplied by his former boss. In speaking with the media Wednesday, Virginia Tech athletics director Whit Babcock said Brooks “was the best developer of players and a teacher of the game that I’ve probably ever seen in any sport.”

With such an accomplished coach on board for 2024-25, Kentucky will also be unveiling what is essentially a brand new arena that will be dedicated to women’s sports.

UK’s investment of in excess of $80 million is going to transform Memorial Coliseum, “the House that Rupp Built,” into an ultra-modern venue for women’s hoops (plus volleyball, gymnastics and STUNT).

“About 6,500, 6,700 seats,” UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart said of the post-renovation Memorial Coliseum. “It’s tight. It’s sweet. The scoreboard coming down from the top. New sound system. Having the fans close to the court. It’s going to be a really special environment. I think Kenny is going to enjoy it.”

Asked about the impact of the “new and improved Memorial” on his decision to come to Kentucky, Brooks said, “Not sure I would be here if it weren’t for (that).”

While emphasizing that one’s ultimate success is determined by the quality of the people playing inside the building, Brooks said, “In this day and age, (arena quality) matters. It really does. It’s an arms race sometimes with facilities. You have to have something really nice to be able to lure (recruits).”

Now employing one of the nation’s most respected coaches and about to debut what is basically a brand new arena, Kentucky still has to prove it can put together the NIL opportunities in women’s basketball necessary to compete at the top of the SEC — where the top-tier programs are perceived to have bountiful resources available for such things.

“You have to be in the ballpark,” Brooks said of Kentucky’s NIL situation. “I don’t know if you have to be a leader in the ballpark — but you have to be in the ballpark.”

In South Carolina (2022) and LSU (2023), the SEC is home to the past two women’s NCAA Tournament champions. Formidable women’s hoops programs at Texas and Oklahoma will join an already-strong league in 2024-25.

“Our expectations are to win,” Brooks said. “I am not going to disrespect the SEC and how powerful it is. We know we have to do a lot of work to get to that point. ... You can’t just get sprinkled with magic dust and say, ‘Hey, we are going to win the national championship.’ A lot of work has to go into that. I — and we — are going to do that work.”

After 50 years, UK seems better-positioned now to awaken the “sleeping giant” that is its women’s basketball program than it has ever been.

“This is a great opportunity,” Kenny Brooks says. “If it weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

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