The Athletic has live coverage of LSU vs. Virginia Tech in the Women’s Final Four.
DALLAS — For the decade he was away, Bob Starkey never stopped calling LSU home.
Even when he was at UCF and then Texas A&M, even when he showed up at Auburn in 2021 — telling coach Johnnie Harris he’d work for her for three years so they could “turn this sucker around” and then retire at the beach — home was always Baton Rouge for him. He wasn’t born there, hadn’t even grown up there. But by the time he met his wife, Sherie, in the early 1990s and the two settled in for his two-decade tenure as a forever-assistant (his dream), he had become a decided Louisianian, and specifically a lover of Baton Rouge.
Last year, when LSU hired Kim Mulkey away from Baylor, Starkey told friends and colleagues he believed she’d have the Tigers back in the Final Four within three years. But he never imagined he’d be on the sideline for it.
For LSU’s first five runs to the Final Four, Starkey was a mainstay — the first three under Pokey Chatman, the fourth as an interim head coach and the fifth under Van Chancellor. He could’ve spent his entire career happily roaming the LSU sidelines as an assistant, but it didn’t quite work out that way.
One month after Starkey, Sherie and the Tigers…
