WBB: Wisconsin certainly hired a new head coach on Tuesday

Robin Pingeton, most recently of Mizzou, is the ninth head coach in Badgers program history.

After what has been described to me by multiple people close to the process as a confusing and disjointed head coaching search, the Wisconsin Badgers women’s basketball team has their ninth leader in program history. On Tuesday, UW announced that Robin Pingeton would be the head coach for the 2025-26 season.

"I am extremely pleased that Robin will be joining the Wisconsin Athletics family," athletic director Chris McIntosh said in a release from UW. "She has accomplished so much as a coach and has produced winners both on the court and in the classroom. Robin has Midwest roots and coaching experience and she and her family will fit right into our local community as well as our state. I am thrilled to welcome Robin, her husband, Rich, and their two sons to Wisconsin."

Courtesy @BadgerWBB on Twitter/Instagram/etc.

Pingeton has 30 years of head coaching experience (33 years overall) under her belt.

• head coach at her alma mater St. Ambrose (NAIA); 1992-2000

• assistant coach at Iowa State; 2000-2003

• head coach at Illinois State; 2003-2010; 144-81 (.640) record

• head coach at Missouri; 2010-2025; 250-218 (.534) record

While her longevity and win totals are impressive, it would appear as though she is on the downward slope of her career. Her final five seasons at Mizzou featured two winning seasons, zero winning records in SEC play, and zero NCAA Tournament bids. Her final two seasons saw the Tigers stumble to a 25-37 overall record and a 5-27 mark in the SEC.

Look, I understand that the SEC is a good conference and winning there is difficult, but these aren’t exactly numbers that are going to fire up the fan base and entice new season ticket purchasers. There is no local connection to hype up either, as Pingeton is from, and attended college in, Iowa and has never coached in Wisconsin.

As far as recruiting goes, Pingeton and her staff have had some success on the trail but nothing of note in the past two years. In 2019, she signed the No. 11 class in the country (per her Mizzou bio) but there are no other years highlighted which leads me to believe that it was the only top-25 class she had in her tenure. To be clear, even a top-50 class would be an improvement for Wisconsin, but it will presumably take Pingeton time to settle in at UW and develop new relationships with AAU/HS coaches and immediate recruiting success shouldn’t be expected.

On her current, er, most recent Missouri roster she had a pair of highly regarded recruits in Grace Slaughter (No. 53 in 2023 class) and Averi Kroenke (No. 74 in 2022 class). It is unclear if either will follow Pingeton to Wisconsin, but I plan on doing a separate post on Mizzou’s roster and potential transfer targets.

Worth noting that Pingeton wasn’t “poached” from Mizzou as she had resigned from her position at the end of the season. As an Extremely Online person I can confidently say that her name was not being bandied about as a candidate for any open head coaching position by insiders.

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That is all of the “on-court” stuff but, as we have become acutely aware over the past season, there is also “off-court” stuff with which we need to concern ourselves.

First: a former player has alleged that Pingeton participated in the same sort of abusive culture that former Wisconsin coach Marisa Moseley allegedly cultivated. On TikTok, using the same meme format that former Badgers player Tessa Towers used to reveal her allegations, Grace Berg posted these slides, among others:

Berg started her college career at Mizzou under Pingeton in the 2018-19 season but transferred to Drake after her freshman year. She graduated from Drake after the 2023-24 season and ended her career as one of the top-10 scorers in school history and a three-time First Team All-MVC member.

These are allegations and haven’t been proven to be true. However, this move is at worst criminally (not in a legal sense, just in HOW bad it is) negligent and obtuse to hire a new coach accused of the same thing your old coach, who resigned under the cloud of an investigation into those accusations, was. At best, it’s an indictment of how little care was put into this coaching search by Chris McIntosh and the firm he hired to help find a new coach.

Speaking of which!

The search firm that UW hired to help is a group named TurnkeyZRG. Per the “About” section on their website, TurnkeyZRG has:

“Over 1500 placements in sports, sports media/tech, music, entertainment & leisure. We are recruiters with deep practitioner experience and more functional specialization than any other firm. In 2021 we became TurnkeyZRG, after being acquired by ZRG, creating the 9th largest firm worldwide.”

How do they work? Well, friend, just let them tell you: “Inclusive, aggressive, data-driven, fast working. Our “Moneyball” approach delivers diverse, targeted slates faster.”

What are their “Core Values?”

• Purpose and Integrity

• Inclusion

• Teamwork and Collaboration

• Ambition

• Accountability

Under the “accountability” section, Turnkey says:

“We honor the fact that good intentions cannot excuse accountability. Each of us is responsible for our words, our actions, and our results. We build trust with our clients and candidates by following through on our commitments and cultivating honest relationships.”

I think that this is the most interesting core value because the leader of Turnkey’s search for UW’s new head coach has quite a potential conflict of interest!

Jocelyn Gates is the Vice President, Coaches, College & Performance at Turnkey and has an impressive resume of experience in collegiate athletics featuring stops at Ohio State, South Florida, and Boston College in high ranking positions. She is also the wife of Dennis Gates.

If you don’t know who he is allow me to shed some light on the matter. Dennis Gates is the head men’s basketball coach at…Missouri! Well, what a crazy coincidence that the recently resigned women’s basketball coach who was not being looked at for any other jobs and wasn’t thought of as a candidate for the Wisconsin job until the day before her hire was announced ALSO worked at Missouri!

Jocelyn Gates and Turnkey helped Mizzou hire Kellie Harper (a much more desirable coach than Pingeton) away from Tennessee and then, in what people able to connect dots might think, threw a friend a bone and got her a new job when no other offers were on the table.

BadgerExtra’s Jim Polzin asked McIntosh about this and was given, to me, an unsatisfying answer about how Gates and Turnkey didn’t really have an outsized influence on the hire. Hmmm, I was led to believe by someone (can’t remember who) that “good intentions cannot excuse accountability.” I’ll have figure out where I read that!

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When a new head coach is hired I’m assuming that the hiring school wants to use the occasion to celebrate a fresh start for the program and get fans excited about the future direction of the team. What has happened, at least among the exceedingly small (and dwindling!) diehard fans online, is the exact opposite!

I haven’t seen a single person, fan of the program or neutral observer, say this is a good hire. The most full-throated endorsement I’ve found is basically “it can’t be worse than the last coach, right?” Lol, that is fucking embarrassing!

While messaging with Skim Milkey (online news breaker for women’s basketball extraordinaire that had the Pingeton news before anyone else) I told her/him (anonymous account) that I was shocked Wisconsin was able to get a P4 and they simply responded “LOL.”

Here is a pull quote from SB Nation’s Mizzou blog, Rock M Nation:

To anyone who has been following Mizzou WBB, this move feels like a real shocker. Pingeton has struggled to make any major strides the past several years, missing the NCAA Tournament the past six years. The thoughts around here would she’d take a year to maybe reset and then go down a level. Instead, she stays firmly in Power 4, destined to be covered forever by former Rock M staffer, Brandon Haynes.

If you think things are bad here, Wisconsin has been in even more dire straits in recent history. The Badgers have failed to make the NCAA Tournament since the 2009-10 season and the athletic department is currently in what has been described online as a “HUGE Title IX hole” which the AD said has led to a “limited NIL and assistant coach pool.” As a result, the job doesn’t look extremely attractive to the majority of head coaching candidates. But from Wisconsin’s perspective, a Midwest coach with large amounts of experience seems like a perfect fit that won’t cost a large amount of money. And who knows, maybe the change of scenery helps Pingeton get back into the swing of things.

Polzin ended his article by saying a Mizzou source he talked to was “shocked” by the news Pingeton got the Wisconsin job. When literally everyone with even remote knowledge of a hire is GOBSMACKED that it happened…that’s good right?

Wisconsin and Chris McIntosh should be embarrassed by this. The lack of investment, both monetarily and otherwise, in women’s basketball at UW is embarrassing. Getting hoodwinked by a fucking search firm that you probably spent six figures on is embarrassing. Not making the NCAA Tournament in 15 seasons is embarrassing. Being the flagship university of your state and being, at best, the second most desirable spot in your university system to play college basketball at is embarrassing.

"I am excited to get to Madison and get to work," Pingeton said in the UW release. "Relationships are very important to me. I appreciate the time I spent with Chris McIntosh and Marcus Sedberry and I can tell my value system aligns with the people at Wisconsin. I learned a lot in almost 15 years in the Southeastern Conference and I am ready to apply that in Madison while also evolving with the changing landscape in college athletics. There is a rich tradition of athletics success at Wisconsin and I can't wait to get started!"

Women’s basketball won’t be the reason McIntosh loses his job, that’ll be if Luke Fickell flames out and the football program is left a husk of its former self (HOPEFULLY THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN!), but it definitely won’t be a positive mark on his resume.