Washington Post (different writer) wrote article on Kim Mulkey 3 months ago (paywall link)

I'm good

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Sometimes Mulkey can talk more old school than a one-room schoolmarm. She’s country blunt, occasionally to the point of ignorance or rudeness. A couple of weeks ago she came to a presser sniffling. “I ain’t a sissy. I don’t have allergies,” Mulkey said. “I’ve got some kind of cold. It might be covid, but I ain’t testing. It’s sinuses. I don’t know what you call it — allergies, flu, I don’t know. So, if y’all get the flu, blame me during Thanksgiving.”

With her players, she calls herself a “mother hen” and likens them to her own children. It’s language that might not land well with 21-year-olds feeling their new powers as women, as earners and as influencers. And Mulkey knows it.

“Maybe I’m too old,” she said before the Virginia Tech game. “Maybe I need to get out. [But] you get realness with me.”

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For some real insight into Mulkey’s actual dealings with her players, disciplinary and otherwise, a good source would seem to be last year’s championship point guard, Alexis Morris. Mulkey recruited Morris at Baylor, only to dismiss her for an off-court arrest. “I had sleepless nights over it because I loved Alexis,” Mulkey said. “It was for the sake of the locker room and the sake of making a tough decision to not lose your team. Those decisions, a lot of coaches don’t want to make.” After Morris did stints at Rutgers and Texas A&M, she rejoined Mulkey at LSU. During the Reese controversy, Morris wrote on X, “You can’t pay me to bash Kim.”

Mulkey is not an easy figure. Her high emoting makes other coaches look asleep. During games she’s so overwrought that sometimes when she tears at her collar you think, “Is this the night she actually rips her bodice?” She is inconstant with the media, one day heavily made up in finery and the next utterly without vanity or makeup, pale as an onion in disheveled sweats. One second she is snappish, the next plaintive for understanding.

In a 2021 ESPN profile that is perhaps the only really penetrating insight into her, she said: “My gut is what I go by. … It may not come across as politically correct, but my heart is in the right place. It’s sometimes taken the wrong way. And, you know, that’s fair. I don’t want to hurt anybody. We all have our badness. But my good, I hope, will always far outweigh my bad.”

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Perhaps the answer is that Mulkey engages with her players with far more emotional intelligence than the press or basketball audience may imagine. Much of her reputation for hardheartedness stems from tension with Brittney Griner, who revealed she felt pressure to closet her sexuality at Baylor, the Baptist school where Mulkey won three titles. The press ran with the implication and etched Mulkey as an uncaring bigot. This is overdrawn, and Griner has since acknowledged it. In fact, in March 2013 Mulkey gave an interview to OutSports while Griner was still on the team. She remarked that Griner had had “to endure more than any player I’ve ever had to coach” in the way of ugliness from crowds and asserted that she cared not at all if a player was gay and would never even ask the question.

“So it doesn’t matter to you?” the reporter asked.?“No,” Mulkey said.