‘I believe I’m gonna be back here.’ UK’s Elzy addresses job status after latest ugly loss.

After Kentucky women’s basketball’s 75-45 loss to Ole Miss on Thursday night, UK’s Kyra Elzy responded to a question regarding the future of her job as head coach.

“Well, I believe I’m gonna be back here,” Elzy said. “No one’s told me any different. And so, until then, my job is to continue to coach this team and get us ready. Heading into postseason, that’s where my mind is. I’m sure that I’ll meet with the administration after the season, but right now I am the head coach here and I’m gonna put my head down and grind and continue to work.”

With only a road trip to LSU on Sunday left on the regular season schedule, the Wildcats (11-18 overall, 4-11 SEC) are closing in on the end of Elzy’s fourth season at the helm — and fourth straight season with fewer than 10 wins in SEC play. Following the 2022-23 season’s 12-19 finish (2-14 SEC), this year’s roster doubled the previous year’s league performance with upset victories against Arkansas and at Mississippi State, and found ways to win against Missouri and Florida.

Elzy is 60-58 as Kentucky’s head coach with an SEC record of 23-39. The Wildcats are 6-25 in league play over the past two seasons.

With the only path to this year’s NCAA Tournament an uphill battle to an unlikely SEC Tournament championship — not entirely unlike the program’s magical 2022 title — the Wildcats’ struggles on both ends of the floor have made it difficult to strike up any momentum as the competition only gets stiffer.

UK’s final three games of the regular season — a 103-55 loss to No. 1 South Carolina on Sunday, Thursday’s 30-point loss to Ole Miss and the upcoming trip to No. 9 LSU — pit the Wildcats against the top three teams in the league standings. Kentucky, which finished tied for last with Texas A&M a year ago, currently ranks 12th ahead of Georgia and Missouri, respectively. UK is 10-7 at home, 1-9 on the road and 0-3 in neutral games.

Elzy said the team isn’t where it wants to be on either offense or defense, and said the Cats’ difficulties converting in situations they can control — layup opportunities, smart passes and protecting the ball — hurt their offensive production, highlighting those struggles in their game against the Rebels.

“Obviously, we’re not where we want to be,” Elzy said. “We always want to protect home and obviously we haven’t done that. You know, offensively when we’re getting layups, we have to make people pay. We were downhill, we were at the rim. We got to finish some of those. ... We shot 29%. But also taking care of the ball. We talked about short pass, meet the pass. Seventeen turnovers, they scored 32 points, so offensively, you know, better spacing, timing, and then we just have to be able to knock down shots. We shot 29%, we’re not going to beat many people with that.”

Kentucky is shooting 39.98 percent this season, ranking it 204th out of 349 NCAA Division I teams. The Wildcats rank No. 248 from 3-point range (29.03 percent). They are one of the nation’s worst free throw shooting teams — No. 333 at 63.60 percent.

UK’s defense has been similarly worrisome.

Kentucky has suffered all but two of its conference losses by double digits, and allowed at least 90 points in four of them. Six of the 11 SEC losses were by at least 22 points. When speaking of defense, Elzy echoed her previous sentiments of her team lacking intensity. Elzy also noted the team’s rebounding.

“Defensively, we just have to have a better intensity,” Elzy said. “So it might not be the first shot that gets you, we can’t let people continue to drive downhill, but the offensive rebounds are really hurting us.”

UK ranks last in the SEC in rebounding, pulling in an average of 34 per game; LSU, the conference’s leader in rebounding and second in the nation overall, averages 47.4 per game.

Kentucky ranks 281st in the nation in rebounds per game. The Wildcats are No. 348 — second-worst in the country — in field goal percentage defense (46.6).

Finishing strong isn’t out of the question for the Wildcats, who last season tied their number of regular season SEC wins in the conference tournament. But, according to Elzy, in order for the team to win, everybody needs to give maximum effort every step of the way.

“We want to win,” Elzy said. “And to finish strong you need some wins, but you know, I want to make sure that we are giving max effort offensively and defensively, you know, selling out. Pride for this program, which we have shown that we can do, so we need to get back to that, obviously. We’re going into a tough environment at LSU but it’s another game and another opportunity before we head into the SEC Tournament, and then you always want to make a run in March.”

Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart addressed the struggles of the women’s basketball program after a UK Board of Trustees athletics committee meeting last week.

“Women’s basketball is struggling to find a way to get to the top half of the league,” Barnhart said. “There’s no mystery in that. You can look at the record and see that. We’ve got a little bit of time left to do some things in the regular season, and then you get to the (SEC) tournament.

“Kyra has always had some success in the tournament. But at the end of the day, Kyra is one of ours and she has worked diligently hard to represent this program the right way, and we’ll just keep battling with her and our women on our team.”

Elzy was awarded a raise and one-year contract extension after the 2022 SEC Tournament title. Her contract now runs through the 2026-27 season. UK would owe her more than $2.5 million if it fired her after this season.

Shooting woes

Against the Rebels, only two Kentucky players reached double figures in the Wildcats’ 29% showing. Sophomore guards Amiya Jenkins and Saniah Tyler each finished with 10 points. Leading scorer Ajae Petty added eight points and three rebounds.

The Wildcats trailed 20-7 after the first quarter but played a more even second period, scoring 15 points to Ole Miss’s 17. Tyler said the team needed time to “settle in” against the Rebels.

“We just had to kind of settle in a little bit,” Tyler said. “Our shots weren’t falling. Terrible on transition defense. So we just had to like, find ourselves and that’s kind of why we had a slow start a little bit.”

The Rebels would go on to outscore the Wildcats 38-23 in the second half, but Ole Miss head coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin, who picked up her 100th career coaching victory Thursday night years after earning her first-ever SEC win in January 2019 against the Wildcats, praised UK for its continued fight throughout the game.

“I do want to say this,” McPhee-McCuin said. “I know Kentucky has not been winning a lot of games, but we’ve played teams that have laid down. I didn’t see them do that, and that calls for something. So I just wanted to mention I was really impressed that there was no quit in her team. After, you know, the season they’ve been having, they could have just packed it up. I felt like they played hard for 40 minutes.”

Elzy, who has spoken throughout the season about her players’ confidence impacting their ability to find the basket, said she challenged the team to make 800 shots in practice ahead of the game in hopes of instilling the right mentality.

“Eight hundred makes, trying to give them confidence in seeing the ball go through the net,” Elzy said. “And actually, in practice, we shot the ball relatively well against our practice team who was pressuring us. I think one of the things is when we miss a few shots, we got to think that ‘next play’ mentality. You know, shoot when you’re on, shoot when you’re off, shoot until you come back on. You have to have a short-term memory when you miss a few and keep the confidence that you have worked on it and that they will go in.”

Herald-Leader Staff Writer Jon Hale contributed to this article.

Next game

Kentucky at No. 9 LSU

When: 2 p.m. Sunday

TV: SEC Network

Radio: WLAP-AM 630

Records: Kentucky 11-18 (4-11 SEC), LSU (25-4, 12-3)

Series: LSU leads 36-18

Last meeting: LSU won 67-48 on Jan. 8, 2023, at Rupp Arena