As a pigtailed point guard at Louisiana Tech in the early 1980s, Kim Mulkey was a powder-blue blur.

Few players could keep up with Mulkey, whose unequaled quickness allowed her to drive past defenders as if her high-tops had wheels.

“Kim was one of the best penetrating point guards,” said Leon Barmore, her then-coach at Louisiana Tech. “She could get her head and shoulders by you and get to the lane in the blink of an eye.”

And yet Mulkey’s ascension to the top of the coaching profession may be an even more stunning — and rapid — basketball move.

In her 10th year as the head women’s coach at Baylor, Mulkey has won 78 percent of her games and has guided the Lady Bears to eight NCAA tournament appearances. Taking over a program that had never cracked the NCAA tourney and was 7-20 the year before she arrived, Mulkey presided over one of the more stunning turnarounds in basketball history, directing Baylor to the national title in just five short years.

In February, this still newly minted Texan will join nine other Lone Star State legends in being inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame.

However, to get to the essence of Mulkey, 47, one must realize that she’s a Louisiana girl at heart.

About as soon as she could walk, Mulkey grabbed a ball and began playing with it, earning plenty of scratched knees and elbows while exploring every square inch of her hometown of Tickfaw, La.

“For the most part, I was a tomboy,” she said. “But what I really viewed myself as was just a little country girl who played outside all the time.”

Mulkey’s next-door neighbor was her paternal grandmother, Dorothy Booth Mulkey, whom Kim called Maw Maw. When she wasn’t swimming or playing ball, Kim could be found at Maw Maw’s house.

“She worshipped the ground that I walked on,” Mulkey said. “I would walk through the pasture to her house and just sit there on the front porch with her, drink a Barq’s root beer, eat fried chicken, eat a slab of bacon, whatever we wanted to do. That was our own little grandmother-granddaughter time.”

As she grew, Mulkey joined all manner of sports teams, even playing Dixie Youth baseball as the only girl on a team full of boys.

But it was on the basketball court where she truly dazzled. At Hammond High School, just a long outlet pass from Tickfaw, Mulkey emerged as not only one of the best players in Louisiana but the entire nation.

Earning the nickname “the Hammond Honey,” Mulkey propelled her team to a 136-5 record and four state championships, scoring a national-record 4,075 points for her career.

While she played volleyball and softball in high school as well, it became readily ap-parent to Mulkey that her future resided on the basketball court, especially as the recruiting letters and phone calls from college scouts increased.

Kim Mulkey has guided the Lady Bears to eight NCAA tournament appearances, including the 2005 national championship, in only nine full seasons at Baylor. (Rod Aydelotte photo)

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Kim Mulkey played on numerous U.S. national teams while she was at Louisiana Tech, including facing off with 7-foot-2 Russian center Uljana Semjonova. (Louisiana Tech University photo)

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Certainly, Sonja Hogg, then the head coach at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, La., loved what she saw out of Mulkey, envisioning her as an ideal floor general.

“The first time I saw her, she was 14 years old and wearing these purple canvas Chuckie Taylors,” Hogg said. “She was the littlest thing, but she just kept making plays. She was unbelievable.”

Mulkey said she really only considered two schools seriously, LSU and Louisiana Tech, and though Baton Rouge was closer to home, she just couldn’t say no to Hogg.

The collection of talent that Hogg and Barmore stockpiled at Louisiana Tech bordered on unfair.

“I’ve only coached a very few kids that I really considered great competitors,” said Barmore, now an assistant on Mulkey’s staff at Baylor. “From day one, Kim had always been a fiery competitor.”

In Mulkey’s four seasons at Louisiana Tech from 1980-84, the Lady Techsters amassed a record of 130-6, including a then-national record of 54 straight wins, reached four Final Fours and claimed two national championships.

During the summers, Mulkey carried her competitive style into her role on various U.S. national teams.

By the end of her senior season, Mulkey aspired to represent America in the Olympics. Then she feared those dreams had been derailed when she turned in “the worst game of my career” — going 0-for-6 from the field and committing eight turnovers — in her final college game, a 62-57 loss to USC in the national semifinals.

“It was horrible,” she said. “I was so distraught because (Team USA head coach) Pat Summitt was in the stands watching, and we were getting ready to have the Olympic Trials. ”

Summitt didn’t scratch Mulkey from her list. Instead, Mulkey made the Olympic team and helped the United States capture the gold medal at the Summer Games in Los Angeles.

Mulkey figured the gold medal was the perfect ending to her life in basketball. As the recipient of a postgraduate scholarship from the NCAA, she intended to continue her education and then enter the business world.

But Barmore and Louisiana Tech President F. Jay Taylor had other ideas. One afternoon, Mulkey was sitting in class when campus security arrived and informed her that she was needed in Taylor’s office.

Her initial reaction was fear, thinking a family member may have died. Instead, Taylor offered her a job.

Hogg was retiring from coaching, and Barmore had been named the Lady Techsters’ head coach. Taylor told Mulkey she’d make an ideal assistant.

Without expecting it, Mulkey found her calling. She approached coaching in the same relentless manner with which she played.

“I gave her every assignment you could imagine — scouting reports, academics, recruiting, on-the-floor coaching,” Barmore said. “I really gave Kim a lot on her plate, and the reason I did was because I knew the results would be good.”

And they were. With Mulkey at Barmore’s side, Louisiana Tech won 86 percent of its games during the next 15 years, advancing to seven Final Fours and winning one title.

After the 1999-2000 season, Barmore was ready to retire. Mulkey, who had turned down three head-coaching job offers over the years, seemed the natural successor. Mulkey wanted a five-year deal. But contract negotiations between she and school President Dan Reneau broke down when Reneau refused to budge off his offer of a four-year contract, Mulkey said.

At the same time, then-Baylor athletic director Tom Stanton was wooing Mulkey to come to Waco as the Lady Bears’ new head coach. Louisiana Tech’s loss ended up as Baylor’s gain, as a spurned Mulkey accepted the Baylor job.

“Her background of winning and her tenacity really stood out,” Stanton said.

Initially, Mulkey said she endured “many sleepless nights” wondering if she’d made the right decision, but once Baylor’s first basketball season arrived, she fell into the rhythm of the job.

At the time, Mulkey was known as Kim Mulkey-Robertson, having married Randy Robertson, a former Louisiana Tech quarterback, a dozen years prior. A couple of months after Kim moved to Waco, Randy and the couple’s two children, daughter Makenzie and son Kramer, joined the coach in Waco, and the family began to settle into their new home.

It was a city that soon experienced an outbreak of Lady Bear fever, as Mulkey quickly established Baylor as a force in women’s basketball. That rise culminated with the 2004-05 season, when the Lady Bears, fueled by a Sweet 16 loss to Tennessee on a controversial last-second foul call the year before, charged their way to the national championship, beating three No. 1 seeds along the way.

Mulkey enjoyed bringing such a landmark victory to the long-suffering Baylor fans. But she said she also needed the championship for her own mental well-being, to avoid becoming a victim of coaching burnout.

“It wasn’t that I needed a national championship; I had tons of those,” Mulkey said. “I needed it for Kim to learn how to stay in the business for a long time. Otherwise, you’re going to be a head coach nobody wants to play for.”

Yet while Mulkey had found peace as a coach, her personal life took a hit in the months after the championship when Randy filed for divorce. Mulkey said she was “blindsided” by his decision, and though the couple attempted counseling, divorce proceedings progressed, becoming final in 2006.

“I’ve had so many great moments in my life, and so much success, but I failed at marriage,” Mulkey said. “That’s something that will bug me until the day I die.”

Despite her busy schedule, Mulkey is a regular attendee at the sporting events of Makenzie, a senior at Midway, and Kramer, a freshman. She said she finds genuine joy in just being a mom.

“My kids will say, ‘Mom, our friends are scared of you.’ ” Mulkey said. “And so they come to the house, and I’ll say things, funny things and real things and ugly things, and they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, she is alright!’ It’s like they have this perception of me because of what I do on the sideline, the intensity in my face. I don’t smile a whole lot, I have all this passion for my job. Then when they see me at home, cutting up and loving all the kids, or ’rasslin’ on the floor with the kids, and it’s like, ‘We’re sorry. You’re really not that way.’ ”

The passion for the job still remains. She loves the challenge of trying to sustain Baylor’s newfound status as a national power. Mulkey said she’d be “miserable” if she hadn’t found coaching, as it seems to be the perfect outlet for her competitive zeal.

“The people in Waco and at Baylor University, I’m sure they realize and I hope they realize what they have in Kim,” Barmore said. “Because she did something for this community and this school that never ever dreamed they’d have, never thought they’d have. I certainly didn’t think she could pull it off that quick.

“I knew they’d be successful, I knew they were going to win at some point and time, but to put Baylor on the map as quickly as she did in women’s basketball, that is one remarkable story in our game.”

bcherry@wacotrib.com

757-5714

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