Hiring Jan Jensen was the easy — and right — choice for Iowa women’s basketball

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Only a handful of hours after the Iowa women’s basketball team landed home from its summer trip to Croatia last year, the coaches had barely dropped off their luggage at home before returning to Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

As then-interim athletics director Beth Goetz shared her short-term vision for the department, then-women’s basketball coach Lisa Bluder and then-associate coach Jan Jensen stood bleary-eyed in the back of the room, offering unwavering support. In retrospect, the reason sounds, well, reasonable.

“How do you show that this is our person?” Jensen told The Athletic two months later. “When you show up. It wasn’t even a question.”

Goetz was hired as Iowa’s full-time athletics director in January. This week, she had the chance to reciprocate that faith in her by naming Jensen as Bluder’s replacement as women’s basketball head coach.

“How amazing is it when the easy choice is the right choice and in Caitlin Clark’s words, the only choice?” Goetz said Wednesday.

On the surface level, Jensen’s hiring appears almost a formality. Jensen, 55, worked alongside Bluder for 32 years, first as an assistant at Drake, then the last 24 as the associate head coach at Iowa. The Hawkeyes…