Can JR Payne Take CU’s Women’s Basketball Team Deeper Into March Madness?

JR Payne got her first coaching gig when she was in fifth grade. This was the late 1980s, an era in which kids played sports for fun and camaraderie and to learn a thing or two—like, in this case, how to properly shoot a jump shot or set a screen. Parents would cheer for both teams.

The problem was that the coach of this particular team, at Payne’s elementary school in North Vancouver, British Columbia, had little experience with basketball, even though she was the physical education instructor. Fortunately, she had Payne, who at the time was all of 11 years old. “She asked me if I could help coach the team,” Payne says. “It was like, ‘Can you tell me some drills we can do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing!’ ”

Except that Payne did know what she was doing. She started by teaching the coach how to run drills she’d learned from her older brother, like the one where you walk down the court bouncing the ball between your legs with alternating hands, and ended up helping out the entire season. “I’m sure JR chose what position she wanted to play,” Molly Payne, JR’s mom, says with a laugh. (She did: point guard.) “But I’m sure she never made the coach feel like she didn’t know what she was doing or made her feel uncomfortable. That’s truly a trait that JR has: making people feel like they’re important.”

Today, Payne is the head coach of the University of Colorado Boulder’s women’s basketball team, but her philosophy toward leadership hasn’t changed. “She’s got three children of her own and then 14 other ones, and she does a great, great job,” says Ceal Barry, who led the CU women’s basketball team from 1983 to 2005 and was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2018. “I can tell you: It can be tiresome to be emotionally available to that many people. And she’s got a tremendous capacity to be available. She’s got a lot of love to give.” Jaylyn Sherrod, who played at CU under Payne from 2019 to 2024 and is now a backup point guard for the WNBA’s New York Liberty, says, “She’s like a second mom for me.”

So, no, Payne did not graduate from the Bobby Knight Institute of Basketball Coaching. She’s not even from the Kim Mulkey School of Hoops. But the Buffs’ impressive results over the past three seasons—three trips to the NCAA Tournament, including two Sweet 16 appearances, a 71-28 overall record, and a 32-19 record in the Pac-12—show her philosophy can be fruitful. The question is whether that success can endure.

Kelly Graves still remembers Payne’s high school highlight tape. The flashy passing and slashing style reminded him of Jason Williams, the NBA point guard who went by the nickname White Chocolate. Graves ended up coaching Payne at St. Mary’s College of California in the Bay Area, where she proved to be smart, coachable, and difficult to defend because of her quickness and six-foot-tall stature. During her senior season, she helped the Gaels earn the first NCAA Tournament berth in school history.

After graduation, Payne gave up the game to pursue a master’s degree in French—until Graves reached out in 2000. He’d taken the top job at Gonzaga University and wanted Payne to join his staff. She landed her first head coaching position at tiny Southern Utah University, 250 miles south of Salt Lake City, in 2009. Payne led the Thunderbirds to their first Women’s National Invitation Tournament (WNIT) in her fifth year there, then moved to California’s Santa Clara University, where she engineered a 12-win turnaround in two seasons, warranting another WNIT berth in 2016. That’s when the Buffs came calling.

CU had mostly struggled since Barry’s retirement and went 7-23 overall and 2-16 in the Pac-12 the season before Payne was named head coach. In Boulder, she immediately got to work reforming the culture. “Changing the mindset was a really, really big thing,” Payne, 47, says. “I think in our first couple of years, everyone wanted to win. But I never felt like we had any real expectation of winning. No one really believed that we were going to go in and win at Oregon or win at Stanford.”

The Buffs finished 44-50 overall in Payne’s first three years. Graves, now the coach at the University of Oregon, says Payne remained patient, even when her teams weren’t winning. “Other [athletic directors] would have panicked and maybe made premature moves,” Graves says. “Rick George didn’t. He stuck with her, and it paid off.”

It was in 2019-’20, Payne’s fourth season at CU, that the cultural shift started to translate to wins. One of Payne’s top recruits that year was Sherrod, a point guard from Birmingham, Alabama, who’d missed most of her senior season in high school due to a hip injury. “They didn’t know if I was going to be 100 percent healthy, if I was still going to be dealing with the injury, but they still believed in me, and they still took a chance on me,” Sherrod says. “The loyalty they showed me throughout the recruiting process really still holds a special place in my heart.” CU was the only Power 5 school to offer Sherrod a scholarship, but she was everything Payne wanted the program to be: tough, hardworking, and disciplined.

Payne continued recruiting and developing talent that wasn’t necessarily at the top of prospect rankings but that, like Sherrod and Sirena “Peanut” Tuitele, had the characteristics she coveted. Tuitele, a six-foot forward from Chico, California, was both a strong scorer and rebounder and helped take Pleasant Valley High School to the state championship in 2018. Six games into her freshman year at CU, she became a starter.

Tuitele also struggled with depression, anxiety, and PTSD (which she wrote about at length for the Players’ Tribune in 2023). “It’s not easy to ask for help, especially [from] a head coach,” says Tuitele, who’s currently playing basketball professionally in Spain. “But Coach J and the staff helped me get into therapy because they saw that I was struggling. She helped me willingly. She saw me not just as Peanut, her player, but as Peanut, the human being.”

By her sixth season, Payne had led CU women’s basketball to a 22-9 record and its first NCAA Tournament in nine years. Creighton upset the Buffs in the first round, but it was the start of a run that saw the school reach as high as number three in the 2023-’24 AP rankings and make back-to-back Sweet 16 appearances the past two seasons. Both times, however, Payne and the Buffs ran into a tourney-ending buzz saw named Caitlin Clark.

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Even the most casual sports fans know that women’s basketball is having a moment. Last year’s NCAA Tournament championship tilt, which featured the nation’s best team (the University of South Carolina) and the nation’s best player (Clark, playing in her final game for the University of Iowa), drew an average combined audience of 18.9 million on ABC and ESPN, according to the Associated Press. By contrast, the men’s championship averaged 14.8 million viewers.

When Clark moved to the WNBA this season, several teams had to relocate from their home courts to larger facilities to meet the demand for tickets. In June, the WNBA reported that, year over year, merchandise sales were up 236 percent; sellouts had increased by 156 percent; and, across four networks, viewership was three times higher.

Much of the attention has centered on Clark, who set the all-time record for scoring in Division I women’s basketball at Iowa and then set WNBA rookie records for points and assists. But a group of young stars has also caught the attention of fans at both levels: players like Angel Reese (Louisiana State University and the Chicago Sky), Cameron Brink (Stanford University and the LA Sparks), Paige Bueckers (University of Connecticut), JuJu Watkins (University of Southern California), and Hannah Hidalgo (University of Notre Dame). “It’s been an amazing ride to see this explosion of growth over the past couple of years,” says Brenda VanLengen, an analyst who calls women’s college basketball for ESPN. “It’s been remarkable and satisfying and, in some ways, emotional, because I know how hard so many people have worked for so many years to get to this point.”

Although Payne may not be a marquee coach like LSU’s Mulkey or South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, there are indications that the women’s basketball popularity surge has reached Boulder. This past season, the Buffs recorded their first home sellout—against UCLA—in almost 30 years. The increased attention to the program leads to, among other things, the sale of more player jerseys, money that is funneled directly to the student athletes through a name, image, and likeness deal. “The more of our players’ gear we sell, the more money we bring in,” Payne says, “and the better it is for our department.”

Of course, winning creates its own virtuous cycle, and few teams are coming off of repeat Sweet 16 appearances like the Buffs. Maintaining that level of excellence isn’t easy for any program, but CU should face a softer schedule this year after the school moved from the Pac-12 to the Big 12. When asked about her goals for the program, Payne offers a very coachlike response: “We don’t really talk a lot about, like, We want to go to the Final Four this year, or We want to win this many games. We just focus on being excellent every day in everything we do.”

She does admit, though, that after two Sweet 16 appearances, she would like for the team to take home a conference championship. With so many new players on the roster, Payne says she worked during the summer to develop relationships, trust, and unity. “When you can combine talent with cohesiveness, regardless of how many new players you have, it gives you a chance to really do something special,” Payne says. “So right now, we’re focused on today and tomorrow. And in the end, hopefully that will carry us to a championship and a deep run in March.” Well, that, and the absence of Caitlin Clark.