Hoops, horses and a renewed love of both: How ridi…

COLUMBIA, Mo. — It’s game day for the Missouri women’s college basketball team. In about eight hours, Kellie Harper, on the sideline in a winter-white suit and sparkling gold shoes, will coach the Tigers to a victory.

But this cloudy morning, she’s in gray riding pants and tall boots, sitting atop a horse named Roger. Someone else is coaching.

Crystal Kendrick instructs Harper as she rides on the soft dirt of the training ring. Harper admonishes herself for a mistake as she and Roger work on their timing for jumps.

“You know what happened there,” Kendrick tells her. “You wanted it so bad, you got in your own way.”

Harper smiles, knowing how familiar that sounds.

“I’ve been riding since I was 5 years old, but I never had lessons,” she says. “It was all self-taught, and now I’m learning about everything I do wrong. You’ve gotta be patient. You’ve gotta learn to trust yourself. Not overthink things.

“How many times do we coaches tell our kids that? Now, I have to apply it to myself. Getting coached is making me a better coach.”

Harper is now in her 21th season as a Division I head coach, and her first at Mizzou. But after a painful dismissal in April 2024 from her dream job at Tennessee — where Harper won three straight NCAA championships as a player for the legendary Pat Summitt — she spent a year away from coaching.

“I poured everything in,” Harper, 48, told ESPN. “I couldn’t love a school more than that school. There was shock, but then also just this feeling of, ‘I don’t know what’s next.'”

For what felt like the first time in Harper’s life, things slowed down. She spent more time with her son, Jackson, 12, and daughter, Kiley, 7. She worked as an analyst for the SEC Network. And she deeply reconnected with a lifelong love of horses.

“Throughout last year, I talked to a lot of coaching friends who were miserable,” Harper said. “Dealing with NIL and the transfer portal, the losses, everything. And it hit me so hard. I was like, ‘I tell you what, if I coach again, I’m not going to be miserable. I’m going to find more joy.'”

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TENNESSEE HIRED HARPER in 2019, and she intended to spend the rest of her career there.

Under Harper, the Lady Vols went 108-52 and didn’t finish below a tie for fourth in the SEC, perennially the toughest league in women’s college basketball. They made two trips to the Sweet 16. But it wasn’t enough for a fan base hungry to return to the Final Four for the first time since 2008, when Summitt won the program’s eighth national championship.

After Tennessee, Harper wasn’t ready to quickly return to coaching elsewhere. She and her husband, Jon, decided their family needed to move away.

“When you have no particular reason to go anywhere, where do you go? We had no idea,” Harper said.

They landed in Florida.

“I was literally at the barn at about five days a week,” Harper said. “Jon and I talked about it, and he said, ‘Regardless of if you coach again or not, you need to keep doing this.’ He just saw how happy it made me.”

She added with a laugh, “I think it was a kind way of him saying, ‘You’re a nicer person when you do this.'”

In the 1990s, Kellie Harper (nee Jolly) was the Lady Vols’ point guard and Jon was a multi-sport athlete who had become a practice player to help the women’s team at Auburn while he was a student there. They met when he came to Tennessee to work at a summer camp, then married in 1999. Jon has been an assistant on Kellie’s staff at her previous coaching stops, although he isn’t this season at Missouri. The couple decided with their children growing and into multiple activities, it was helpful for one of them not to be coaching.

Golf is Jon’s non-hoops passion, not horses, but he knows how much they mean to Kellie.

“I swear, if you told her the only thing she could do out at the barn all day was shovel up manure, she would still want to go,” Jon said, laughing.

Kellie said, “It might sound crazy, but it’s the physical labor that I love. It’s one of the things Pat and I could always relate about. She was a country girl; she knew what it was like to work really hard outdoors. Pat worked hard at everything.

“But when I got into coaching, she told me that you can’t be consumed with work every minute, every day. You’ll get worn out and burnt out.”

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CRYSTAL KENDRICK DIDN’T know the woman on the other end of the phone. She remembers “a nice lady with a southern accent” who said she had just moved to Missouri and had ridden horses since childhood, and for the first time wanted to take lessons.

But Kendrick, owner of Mid-Mo Riding Center in Columbia, was booked up. Still, the more they talked during that phone call in May 2025, Kendrick could hear how much the lessons meant to Harper.

“I have to make room for this one,” Kendrick realized.

Harper had always ridden for fun, but learning to ride as an equestrian is on her bucket list.

“So English riding, eventually jumping, eventing,” Harper said. “If you book a lesson, you’re more likely not to cancel. Otherwise, you can easily tell yourself you’ve got more important things to do. I’m gonna make sure that this is a priority for me.”

Mike Neighbors knows what she means. He resigned last March after eight seasons coaching at his alma mater, Arkansas. He joined the Los Angeles Sparks as an assistant during the WNBA season. Now he’s spending this college season much like Harper did last year: working as an SEC Network analyst, enjoying time with his children and preparing to return to coaching.

But interests outside of basketball, such as sitting in with a local band playing guitar, remain a must for him. As he thinks it should for all coaches.

“It’s therapeutic; it’s needed,” Neighbors told ESPN. “I would have burned out years ago if I didn’t have the guitar, or live music, or trying to complete some random collection I have by going to vintage stores.

“But it’s what some coaches are afraid to try. We all grew up with that idea if you’re not working 24/7, someone else is and they will beat you. I just think it’s wrong, and I’m mad at myself for having believed that for so long. A lot of times if you feel like you’re grinding to watch an extra game film, it’s probably to the point of diminishing returns anyway.

“I’m glad Kellie has found this, and I wish more coaches would. I think you’re seeing coaches, across men’s and women’s basketball, either do that — or they get out.”

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HARPER’S FIRST HEAD COACHING job was at Western Carolina in 2004. She went to NC State in 2009, following Hall of Famer Kay Yow. Replaced there after four seasons by an athletic director who came in the year after Harper, she went to Missouri State in 2013.

Her Lady Bears made the Sweet 16 in 2019, putting Harper on the perfect trajectory toward Tennessee. She replaced another former Lady Vol, Holly Warlick, a longtime Tennessee assistant who had taken over when Summitt retired in 2012.

At Missouri, Harper has no national championship legacy to constantly be measured against. The Tigers’ only NCAA appearances of the last 19 seasons came in 2016-19, when current WNBA player Sophie Cunningham starred for Mizzou. The Tigers haven’t advanced to the Sweet 16 since 2001. They are currently 14-9 overall and 2-6 in the SEC, coming off a victory Sunday over Texas A&M.

Junior Grace Slaughter, the Tigers’ leading scorer (19.3 PPG) and rebounder (7.4 RPG), said when she heard Harper was Missouri’s coaching choice, she was excited because of what stood out to her when the Tigers had played Tennessee under Harper.

“Her demeanor, the way she carries herself, the energy she coaches with,” Slaughter told ESPN. “And that’s what we’ve seen from her here, too. You want to do well for her. You want to make her proud.”

Harper knows that there will be many questions about the Lady Vols going into Missouri’s game at Tennessee on Feb. 12. She said she will prepare her Tigers for that, but she’s not worried about it being a distraction for her. She has had the time to process it.

“I’m a person that, whatever is in front of me, that’s what I’m going to focus on and enjoy it and make it work,” Harper said. “And, I’ve heard this, too, and it makes sense: If you’ve done this job long enough, it’s not so much about where you are, but the people you’re with.”

Harper had no shortage of coaching offers, but liked the advantage of having lived and recruited in the Show-Me State — where both her children were born — for six years while at Missouri State. It was a chance to be in the SEC again, and Harper felt sure she would be able to hire a high-quality staff. Plus, things just clicked when she talked to Missouri athletic director Laird Veatch.

“Other jobs I’ve taken had this long-standing icon,” Harper said of Yow and Summitt, who died in 2009 and 2016, respectively. “And in particular at Tennessee, because we sound alike, Pat and I. We have that accent. So many times, people would come up and tell me how much I reminded them of her.

“Whether I really did or not wasn’t the point. They just wanted Pat back. And I did, too. I still want Pat back. But the expectation that I was her? That was there every single night. And I dealt with it. It was not anything that I didn’t expect or wasn’t willing to handle. But you’re always going to be compared.”

There is a different hill to climb at Mizzou: rebuilding confidence and competitiveness.

“I think that’s what I’m good at: Taking things and moving them in the right direction,” Harper said. “I like the puzzle, trying to figure out what we need to do. We have to overachieve. Get kids that find a way to fight and win and have a little chip on their shoulder. I feel like we’re going to be able to build this with that mentality.”

It will take patience and hard work. But the time when she’s at the Mid-Mo barn will also help. Harper has washed and brushed Roger after their lesson, put away his tack and given carrots to one of her own horses, Saint, who is boarded there. Soon she will head home in her pickup truck and then to Mizzou Arena for shootaround. The morning, surrounded by the sweet smells of hay and horses, Teddy the friendly dog and Sparky the mildly mischievous goat, has invigorated her.

“I really do think Pat would love that I was doing this,” Harper said. “I remember her telling me when I was a really young coach, ‘Kellie, I’m heading to the beach for two weeks. You better find something that gets you away from this.’

“At that point, I didn’t think I needed it. Yet here was one of the most respected coaches in the history of coaching telling me this. She was so wise to know it was important.”