Report: UW women’s basketball coach Mike Neighbors leaving for Arkansas

University of Washington women’s basketball coach Mike Neighbors is leaving Seattle after accepting the head coaching job at the University of Arkansas, according to The Seattle Times.

Neighbors led the Huskies to three NCAA tournaments – two Sweet 16’s and one Final Four appearance – during his four years as head coach at UW. The 47-year-old coach is a Greenwood, Ark. native and broke into college coaching as director of basketball operations with the Razorbacks in 1999, according to the Times.

UW’s 98-41 record under Neighbors is the third-most wins during a four-year period in school history, the Times reports.

710 ESPN Seattle’s Brock Huard said this move was expected.

“This is good news for him, he’s going home,” Huard said Monday. “He was on the record with a lot of people around the team and the program. This comes as no surprise. That vacancy was there, he’s from back there, his daughter goes to school there, he’s gonna double his pay. It’s bad news because you lose continuity in the program and anytime that you’ve had the success that they’ve had, you want to build upon that.”

Co-host Mike Salk sees the move as only bad news, with the team losing Neighbors, plus star seniors Chantel Osahor and 2017 AP Player of the Year Kelsey Plum in a week’s time.

“That’s a lot for any program to handle,” Salk said.

This is the second basketball coach opening at UW in 2017, as Lorenzo Romar was fired on March 16 after leading the men’s team for 15 years. The team hired long-time Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins for that job three days later.

Huard said there does not appear to be an immediate replacement for Neighbors but that it should be an in-demand post.

“I think someone who would come in and look at the women’s programs and go, ‘Wow, volleyball has won and competed for a national title, fastpitch has won a national title, golf has won a national title, women’s basketball has been in the Final Four,'” Huard said. “There’s a lot of attributes that I think, in some ways, makes the women’s basketball job even more desirable than the men’s.”

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