There will almost certainly come a day when the UNLV sports community will be dealt the crippling news that women’s basketball coach Lindy La Rocque has decided to move on to bigger and better things.

This is, perhaps shockingly, not that day.

“I’m really happy, and I don’t like to mess with happy,” La Rocque said in a phone call shortly after posting on social media her intention to stay at UNLV despite rumors to the contrary.

Her joy should make Rebel fans, and the city of Las Vegas as whole, ecstatic. The hometown hero has been everything the school hoped for when hiring her and far more, creating a buzz around a program that quite frankly should be much louder.

It’s no surprise she has generated such speculation about her future that her name appears on just about every candidate list whenever jobs open.

While it’s not a habit of La Rocque to address that yearly speculation, this felt different. The internet was convinced La Rocque was a slam dunk to be named the new coach at Arizona from the moment rumors surfaced that Wildcats coach Adia Barnes was moving on to SMU.

To be fair, I was already mentally composing a farewell column. It just seemed to make so much sense.

Mountain West’s limitations

La Rocque is a rising superstar in the coaching world who is quite constrained by the limitations of a Mountain West that has largely been left behind in the recent national boom in women’s basketball.

She has done an incredible job in compiling a 128-30 record over five seasons in her first head coaching job, including a 79-11 mark in league play. Yet a conference tournament loss snapped the Lady Rebels’ three-year NCAA Tournament run this season, despite a 16-2 mark in the Mountain West, because the league just isn’t strong enough to support a second bid.

La Rocque basically has to be perfect, and she darn near has been.

And while the success of her program has helped generate a loud and loyal following, the community as a whole has been a bit slow to catch on to what’s been happening at Cox Pavilion. That hasn’t helped the effort to take the program to the next level.

So while it’s no surprise major programs have been knocking at La Rocque’s door every year only to get shot down, it seemed like UNLV would be a big underdog in trying to keep her this time. First, Arizona athletic director Desiree Reed-Francois is who hired La Rocque at UNLV and knows just how impressive she has been.

But La Rocque’s connection to Tucson goes far deeper. Her godfather is legendary Wildcats coach Lute Olson, and his Arizona program was a major influence in her basketball development, as was current associate head coach Jack Murphy, who has referred to La Rocque as his “little sister.”

The writing was on the wall at McKale Memorial Center, a historic venue where La Rocque probably literally wrote on the walls as a child.

But she had other plans, even though she admitted this was an opportunity that was more tempting than most.

“There was one conversation (with Reed-Francois on Saturday night). It was short and sweet and that was it,” La Rocque said before explaining her public statement, which didn’t mention Arizona.

“I felt like social media and everyone may have thought that was the job for me, so I kind of felt like I had to make sure everyone knew it wasn’t. I don’t feel like I have to do that for every job, but just for this one in particular with the media coverage and the history and the speculation to just get in front of it.”

Las Vegas is home

Arizona could have offered far more money. The program competes in the Big 12, which provides a much clearer path to the top of the mountain in the sport. There were a lot of reasons to leave.

But Las Vegas is home.

“There’s not a price tag on a lot of the things that brought me here, that have kept me here and are going to keep me here,” she said. “That’s my family. It’s my parents and them now being grandparents. It’s the community that raised me and is now raising my children, even outside the school. Then you add the university and my love for being a Rebel.

“It’s those things you can’t quantify in a contract or a salary or whatever it may be. There’s a lot of those intangibles that have kept me here.”

That’s been good enough so far. It probably won’t be forever. The perfect opportunity is going to present itself at just the right time and La Rocque will be gone, leaving many to lament how good things were while she was around.

Maybe some of those folks should start appreciating the good times while they are still here.

Contact Adam Hill at [email protected]. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on X.