After three seasons at the helm of the Arizona State women’s basketball program, head coach Natasha Adair will not return next season, the school announced Saturday morning.
“We appreciate Coach Natasha Adair’s leadership and professionalism in guiding Sun Devil Women’s Basketball over the past three seasons,” ASU athletic director Graham Rossini said in a recent statement. “She and her staff built meaningful connections throughout the Valley, and we respect how she represented ASU during her time in Tempe. A national search for the next leader of our program will begin immediately.”
This past season, the Sun Devils finished with just a 10-22 record, as their season came to an end on Thursday following their 96-88 loss to Iowa State in the Big 12 tournament.
Following many of those losses, Adair expressed a sentiment that her team consistently graced the doorstep of playing winning basketball and simply needed to put it together for a full 40 minutes. Yet, the stats indicated otherwise.
Among the squad’s 22 losses this season, only three of those contests resulted in defeats by six or fewer points. It led to the ASU holding just over a 14-point average margin of defeat and a total scoring margin of -6.6–ranking 290th in the nation in this category.
Part of these struggles can be attributed to a slew of injuries during Big 12 play. The Sun Devils endured injuries to both graduate guard Jazion Jackson and junior Kennedy Fauntleroy, toward the tail end of the regular season. They also lost graduate forward Maggie Besselink to a season-ending injury at the start of conference play.
Nonetheless, another disappointing season capped a substandard three-year stretch for Adair’s Devils and ultimately led to the school parting ways.
Coming into her short coaching tenure, Adair had big shoes to fill. She took over for former ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne, who held a 488-294 record (.624) and took Arizona State to the NCAA tournament 14 times, including the Elite Eight twice, in her 25 seasons in Tempe. Turner Thorne finished as the winningest coach in school history before retiring in 2022.
On the heels of a five-year run at Delaware in which she earned a 95-58 record and took the Blue Hens to their first NCAA tournament in nearly a decade, it seemed as though Adair might be an ideal candidate to head a new era of Sun Devil basketball.
However, the transition from Turner Thorne to Adair proved to be anything but smooth.
Across her three-year stint, Adair totaled a 29-66 record, with the Sun Devils failing to record an above .500 finish in a single season under her watch.
Additionally, Sparky struggled mightily in conference play. In her two seasons in the Pac-12, Adair’s Devils ended with a combined 4-30 record in conference play. The move to the Big 12 didn’t help either, as ASU managed just a 3-15 tally en route to a second-to-last finish in the Big 12 regular season standings.
In spite of the program’s overall sub-par performance, Adair did manage to bring in some top talent in the recruiting space. Graduate senior guard Tyi Skinner followed her coach from Delaware to Tempe and served as the ringmaster for Adair’s operation throughout two of the past three seasons.
Sidelined for the entirety of the 2023-2024 season with an ankle injury, Skinner impressed in her final season in the Maroon and Gold by averaging 16.8 points per game (ppg).
Additionally, her partner in the backcourt, junior guard Jalyn Brown, provided a steady scoring presence for ASU the past few seasons with a career average of 17.5 ppg.
Still, the dynamic backcourt couldn’t save the Devils from a tumultuous three-season run that now culminates with the departure of their head coach.
With the school moving on from Adair, the process of searching for a new coach will begin. The Sun Devils will look to find a leader that can guide them back to the NCAA tournament for the first time in over six years.
Leave a Reply