(Photo credit: Maya Diaz/WCSN)
PHOENIX – Arizona State women’s basketball head coach Natasha Adair won’t return to the team next season, as announced by Athletic Director Graham Rossini.
“We appreciate Coach Natasha Adair’s leadership and professionalism in guiding Sun Devils Women’s Basketball over the past three seasons,” Rossini said. “She and her staff build meaningful connections throughout the Valley, and we respect how she represented ASU during her time in Tempe. A national search for the next leader of our program will begin immediately.”
Rossini’s decision to fire Adair comes after the culmination of another disappointing year of Sun Devil basketball and ASU’s 96-88 second-round loss against Iowa State in the Phillips 66 Big 12 Women’s Basketball Championship in Kansas City, Missouri.
Former Athletics Director Ray Anderson brought Adair to Tempe prior to the 2022-23 season. In her three years at the helm, she failed to record a winning season and leaves the Valley of the Sun with a 29-62 record that features just seven conference wins against Pac-12 and Big 12 opponents.
The 2024-25 season got off to a rocky start for Arizona State, going just 6-6 in non-conference play and dropping winnable games. Once conference play rolled around, the Sun Devils started 2-1 against Big 12 opponents. It was a good introduction to ASU’s new conference, but the winning didn’t last.
After the Sun Devils’ 69-60 victory over Houston on the road on Jan. 4, Adair’s squad went on to lose 12 straight games. ASU finally snapped the losing streak on Feb. 22, against BYU in overtime on the road before dropping the final two regular season games to finish only in front of the last-place Houston team it beat nearly two months prior.
Adair’s previous two years in the Pac-12 saw her teams finish second-to-last and last with a combined record of 4-32. Her only win in 2022-23 – a season that saw the team forfeit two games because it didn’t have enough healthy players – came against Oregon State (3-18, 4-14 Pac-12) and her three wins in 2023-24 came against California (19-15, 7-11) and Washington (16-15, 6-12), which ASU beat twice. Adair was never able to rival Arizona.
The initial decision to hire Adair came after the retirement of longtime ASU head coach Charli Turner Thorne, who had a 488-294 record in Tempe with three conference titles. Adair came to Tempe after a successful stint as the head coach of Delaware, where she won the Colonial Athletic Association (now the Coastal Athletic Association) in the 2020-21 season and made the NCAA Tournament following the 2021-22 season.
Adair struggled to keep up with the better Power Five and Power Four competition. Her job wasn’t made any easier by often having to deal with injured rosters, but winning is all that matters at the end of the day, and it’s what forced Rossini’s hand.
