The fallout from Pitt women’s basketball’s five losing seasons in the past five years landed on coach Lance White on Friday when he was fired.
White is the first Pitt coach hired by athletic director Heather Lyke to be fired. Lyke has led the department since 2017.
Pitt concluded White’s fifth season Wednesday with a 71-53 loss to Clemson in the first round of the ACC Tournament. Pitt was 10-20 and 3-15 in the conference this season, bringing White’s overall record to 42-99, including 11-74 in ACC regular-season games. White’s Pitt teams were 1-5 in the tournament.
White, who spent 15 seasons as an assistant at Florida State, acknowledged this week the difficulty in rebuilding a program that has enjoyed little recent success. He also pointed to covid-19 restrictions and the introduction of immediate eligibility for athletes who transfer.
Pitt was 10-20 in the season before White was hired and has not participated in the NCAA Tournament since 2015.
“Whenever you’re trying to reinvigorate a program and you don’t have that history behind you and you really have to do it from the ground up, that’s probably been the biggest challenge of keeping that energy up,” he said before the loss to Clemson.
“Coming into it, I knew it would be extremely difficult. You had to start it completely over. Obviously, covid and … the transfer portal really changed so much of the way I thought coming into it. You think about five years ago, you’re going to build it with freshmen and teach those kids and then covid happened and then the transfer portal.
“Immediately in the middle of it, you had to switch course.”
Pitt plays in one of the most challenging conferences in the nation that includes four of the top 18 teams in the Associated Press Top 25 rankings — No. 8 Virginia Tech, No. 10 Notre Dame, No. 13 Duke and No. 18 North Carolina.
“Coach White has been wholeheartedly dedicated to the betterment of his student-athletes and women’s basketball at Pitt,” Lyke said Friday in a statement released by the university. “I’m extremely grateful for his efforts and wish him only the very best moving forward, both personally and professionally.
“In looking to the future of Pitt women’s basketball, our goal is to be a perennial contender in the Atlantic Coast Conference and NCAA Tournament. I am confident that Pitt’s strong combination of people, facilities and institutional excellence will attract some outstanding candidates to be the next leader of our women’s basketball program.”
