Saluki Women's Basketball: Change Is Here

If there is one thing SIU AD Mario Moccia seems to know, it is change.

When Jerry Kill left McAndrew Stadium and the Saluki football team for the greener pastures of Northern Illinois, Moccia and his Dream Team committee went out and found Dale Lennon.

Gone was the run, run, run some more offense. In came the term "modified spread." Lennon replaced Kill's hard hat (and lunch pail for that matter) with a visor.

So, when SIU women's basketball coach Dana Eikenberg announced her resignation on April 2, should we have expected anything other than the unexpected? Hot names bantied about included Cindy Stein of Mizzou, Kathi Bennett of Wisconsin, Jennifer Roos of Bowling Green and Greg Franklin of Mississippi State. And yet, none of them stood at a podium in Lingle Hall and introduced themself as the new women's basketball coach.

(An aside: OK, southern Illinoisans, I get it. You love Greg Franklin. He's local and you love local. Gotcha. But there's no need to bring down a coach hours into her regime just because she's not "one of us.")

Instead, it was Missy Tiber of Tusculum College, a Division II school in Grenneville, Tenn., a town I couldn't find even if I plugged it into my GPS.

So, what does Tiber bring to the table? Here's a quick rundown:

• An up-tempo offense that averaged 84 points per game last season. That's 24 more points than the Salukis averaged last year. (There's your big change folks, scoring. Remember my saying: You can't win if you don't score!)
• A recruiting map that spans the southeast. (Insert SECspeed reference here.)
• An open-door policy with the media. (As she told The Southern: "I'm not going to make my kids live in a box.")

A fresh face and a new system will likely do wonders for a team that is one year removed from a mass exodus and two years removed from a Missouri Valley Conference regular season championship.

Missy Tiber tabbed as new Saluki women's basketball coach [Daily Egyptian]
Let's see what you got, Missy [Daily Egyptian]