GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Hawaii is for doing nothing. A vacation spent at a friend’s oceanfront house on Oahu’s North Shore isn’t for profound reflections or making plans. It is Kelly Rae Finley’s ritual disconnect. Her Pipeline lifeline, revisited almost every summer for the past 15 years or so. Her family is there, too, because they’re important to her, and because they have to fit in somewhere in the overstuffed calendar of a college basketball coach, and making up for lost time is a definite to-do.
But otherwise?
Mostly nothing. A whole lot of nothing. A zone of pure contentment, letting clouds and thoughts pass by, with absolutely zero inclination to climb aboard a board and join the masses in the Pacific waters. “Come on, I’m from Minnesota,” Finley notes with a laugh, a few minutes before diving into another meeting in the Florida women’s basketball offices. “Where the heck would I learn to surf?”
Besides: Better to watch everyone else ride some pretty gnarly waves, for once.
The 2021-22 college basketball season ended with the Florida Gators participating in the women’s NCAA Tournament for the first time in six years. It’s not how most people guessed things would end six months prior, when the whole operation sagged under the resignation of a head…
