The long, winding, uncharted and unprecedented road that has been the offseason for University of Cincinnati women's basketball coach Michelle Clark-Heard will finally come to an end Wednesday night.
Clark-Heard and the Bearcats will tip off their 2020-21 season against Northern Kentucky University at 6 p.m. at Fifth Third Arena. The game will air on ESPN+.
It will mark the official start of Clark-Heard's third season at the helm at Cincinnati.
Year No. 3 comes after Clark-Heard led the Bearcats to back-to-back 20-win seasons and an appearance in a conference (American Athletic Conference) tournament final, both of which hadn't happened since the 2002-03 season.
That year, the head coach was Laurie Pirtle, a woman to whom Clark-Heard credits a lot of her success.
"Without Laurie, I'm not here," Clark-Heard told The Enquirer.
Winning at a high level simply didn't happen at Cincinnati before Pirtle. There were no NCAA tournament wins or even appearances for the women's program. But Pirtle, who took over the program in 1986 after winning 84% of her games over a four-year span at Division III Capital University, even struggled to get off the ground at UC.
Pirtle's Bearcats had eight losing records in her first 10 seasons.
"My first team bought their own shoes and they were called Kangaroos," Pirtle said in 2007. "I slept in rest stops to recruit. We played in the (Armory) Fieldhouse and I had a $5,000 recruiting budget."
But then that all changed.
Beginning in 1996-97, Pirtle’s team had seven straight winning seasons, advancing to the NCAA tournament three times and receiving four invitations to the women’s NIT.
In 2002, Pirtle took a chance on a young, relatively inexperienced coach from Louisville, Kentucky.
Her name: Michelle Clark. (Clark-Heard married her husband, Luther Heard, on Aug. 16, 2003.)
"Laurie was a phenomenal, phenomenal Xs and Os coach," Clark-Heard said. "She had the program in the top 25 in the country. I was so grateful. It was just a great opportunity."
Clark-Heard was a standout basketball player at Louisville Atherton High School, earning Kentucky High School State Player of the Year in 1986. She also was a part of four NCAA tournament teams at Western Kentucky University and played professionally for the Kentucky Marauders of the Women’s Basketball Association.
But Clark-Heard hadn't coached much at the college ranks. She was the head junior varsity girls' coach for a season at Louisville DuPont Manual High School and worked for several years within Kentucky's recreational scene.
"I think she coached at the YMCA or something like that," Pirtle told The Enquirer.
But Pirtle and Clark-Heard had a mutual connection: Paul Sanderford.
Sanderford coached Clark-Heard at Western Kentucky, and she later joined Sanderford's staff at Nebraska as an assistant for a stint before he resigned due to health reasons.
"Michelle had sent her resume in because we had an opening," Pirtle said. "So I called Paul, and I trust Paul, and told him the kind of person with whom I'd like to work, and he just raved about her. Even though she was young, in the sense of coaching, he just said, 'She would work great with you.' So I brought her in and interviewed her, and we just clicked."
With Clark-Heard now on her staff for the 2002-03 season, Pirtle saw three of her players earn a first-team All-Conference USA selection: K.B. Sharp, Valerie King and Debbie Merrill. Sharp was the first Cincinnati player ever to play in the WNBA.
"It was just amazing to be a part of that," Clark-Heard said. "(Pirtle's) one of the best teachers I've ever been around. She just knew the game. She taught me so much."
Clark-Heard left Cincinnati to become the head coach at Kentucky State in 2005. After two years, she moved on to her alma mater, Western Kentucky.
In six seasons at WKU, Clark-Heard reached four NCAA tournaments, won four conference tournament championships and two regular-season conference titles while posting 154 wins. She became the second-fastest Western Kentucky women's coach to reach 100 victories.
Clark-Heard took over a WKU program that had a 9-21 record in 2011-12 and led the team to a 22-11 mark in her first season (2012-13). The 13-win improvement was the largest in the history of the Sun Belt Conference.
In March 2018, Clark-Heard decided to leave her alma mater and return to Cincinnati to become the program's newest head coach.
She received a congratulatory text from Pirtle.
"A lot of people wondered, 'Why Cincinnati?' Well, Cincinnati was like a second home to me because I felt like Laurie Pirtle had taken me in like one of her own when I was here," Clark-Heard said. "And when you start out fresh in your career, you remember those people that gave you that opportunity and that chance."
Pirtle retired in 2007 as the winningest coach in UC women's basketball history. Pirtle won more than 300 games and had four NCAA tournament appearances in 21 seasons at Cincinnati.
Pirtle has stopped by Clark-Heard's practices to talk with her players and has even made it to a few of her former assistant's games at Fifth Third Arena.
"I saw a little bit of me, to some level, in her while she was coaching," Pirtle said. "I told her that. She felt OK with me saying that."
Pirtle, who also was a three-year starter at Ohio State, was inducted into the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012. But perhaps her greatest accomplishment was changing the perception and trajectory of women's basketball at Cincinnati.
"Without Laurie Pirtle, I'm not sitting here as the head coach because I would have never thought to think that Cincinnati women's basketball could be where it's going now and where it's going to be in the future," Clark-Heard said. "But she showed me that. All those years we were winning, we were top-25. We were winning big in Conference USA. She showed me that it could be done here."