Kelly Rae Finley Says I've Got The Joy, Joy, Joy Down In My Heart

Kelly Rae Finley - Photo By Chris Spears

“I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart; down in my heart to stay” – George William Campbell from the gospel song “Joy in My Heart”

Joy, which is defined in Theopedia as “a state of mind and an orientation of the heart,” follows Kelly Rae Finley wherever she goes. It is ingrained in her DNA and it is infectious and contagious. If you are seeking answers to how Kelly Rae Finley has played the part of miracle worker with the Florida women’s basketball team, then that is the place you start because when athletic director Scott Stricklin named her the interim head coach, this was a team so fractured that an outright mutiny seemed imminent.

Photo By Chris Spears

When Stricklin fired Cam Newbauer last summer for running an abusive, toxic program, he turned to Kelly Rae Finley, not knowing the self-described “girl from Minnesota” was part faith healer, part psychologist and part good friend to a group of young women who were ready to transfer out. When she was hired it was to hold the fort and keep a bad situation from turning worse while Stricklin went searching for a permanent replacement. Needless to say, he’s gotten far more than he bargained for.

Picked to finish dead last in the Southeastern Conference by the league’s coaches in the preseason, the Gators have far exceeded the wildest of expectations. They’ve come from nowheresville to a nationally ranked (15th) somebody that will go down as one of the best teams in school history.

The metamorphosis began almost from the day Kelly Rae was named interim head coach. Players were ready to leave en masse but her calming presence convinced every single one of them that it was worth staying. They were hurting. She understood and that was a good place to begin anew.

What convinced them that they needed to stay were three words – we are enough – and the joy they saw that overflowed.

“When you see doubt, when you see a lack of belief, when you see just those things that just dawned on me – whatever the end result is we are enough,” Finley said. “We can enjoy each other. We can be there for each other. We can challenge each other. We can be honest with each other. We can be hard on each other. We can say hard things. I think that’s something not enough people focus on enough. You can do hard things but you can also say hard things and say it with love and receive it in a good mind. There is a tone and a timing that comes with that. We’re not perfect. We’re far from perfect.”

Nobody expected perfect, but nobody expected this much improvement either, especially from a team that posted five consecutive losing seasons and lost leading scorer Lavender Briggs with a fractured shin 14 games into the season. Then Briggs elected to transfer out and the Gators lost their first two SEC games.

Perhaps that’s when “we are enough” really began to resonate with this team.

“We are really good at facing adversity and overcoming it together,” sophomore forward Jordyn Merritt said. “At the end of the day we know we have each other and we know we can rely on each other to uphold the commitment and just be dedicated and buy into the program. I just think that is what has brought us this far for sure.”

What does “we are enough” mean to senior Kiki Smith, who has assumed the role of team leader and leading scorer?

“To me it just means we can stand with anybody,” Smith said. “Just because of the past that the University of Florida has, that has nothing to do with who we are now. It just says to me, so what, we are enough.”

The Gators have become an extension of the coach. She demands honesty, trust, accountability and ownership.

“You have to connect the dots with them,” Finley said. “How are you individually improving so that makes our team better? There has to be an individual approach to everything which is an accountability, an ownership and a responsibility to your performance, to how you act, how you talk, how you treat others and what you do. We’re not perfect. None of us are, but we have to seek to understand each other.”

That means do your best in everything you do, whether it’s basketball or off the court, and when you’re on the court, be the best possible teammate you can be.

This notion of being the best possible teammate can be traced to the way she was taught the game by her father long before he was her high school coach. There was Kelly Rae and her five best friends. They played other sports, but basketball was their game and what motivated them. From the time they were 10 years old, they were inseparable. The game and her friends were the joy of her life, joy that has never departed. The six of them were motivated by the game, being teammates and most of all, by their friendship.

“We had a different approach from a very young age,” Finley said. “It was always about executing, doing our best, attention to detail. My dad taught us that from a really young age. We always had a high level of accountability. We started playing together when we were ten. We played year-round together. It was amazing. We went to high school together.”

At The Breck School in Edina, Minnesota, the six of them played together. Finley played on the varsity as a seventh grader and went on to earn five letters. Along the way she made All-State three times while helping her school to third place and runner-up finishes in the state tournament before they broke through with a state championship her senior year.

A year later as a freshman at Northwestern, she started eight of 13 games before suffering a leg injury. She was never the same player but that didn’t take away either her joy or approach to the game. It wasn’t about being a star. It was about being the best possible teammate she could be.

When she transferred to Colorado State, she was relegated to a backup role but she never complained. If anything, the love and appreciation for all the things that made basketball special increased.

“I grew up loving being a part of the team,” she said. “I grew up doing my part to make us successful whether it was play or not play. My very best friend in the world was the same person who played my same position at Colorado State. She played all the minutes and I didn’t, but I knew I had an assignment to help make her better, to help make our team better and to lead in that way. I feel like that was what I was able to do but that was how I grew up.”

That is what she has imparted on this Florida team. It isn’t about who plays the most minutes or who scores the most points. It is all about the team and the joy of playing together.

She also reminds the Gators that they should never forget that it is a game and it is supposed to be fun.

Smith says, “Kelly always says to us we gotta have fun on the court. We want to win, but we want to have fun.”

The game is fun. The Gators are a fun team to watch. Are they the most talented or physical team in the SEC? Hardly. Are they the most fun team in the SEC to watch? Probably, because for all their many flaws they never give up and they do indeed play for each other.

By learning to play so well together, Finley has entered the conversation for postseason coaching awards. She is a semifinalist for the Naismith National Coach of the Year. If you ask LSU’s Kim Mulkey or South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, there is no question that Kelly Rae Finley should be the Southeastern Conference Coach of the Year.

Kelly Rae just shrugs off the individual attention.

“It’s not about me, never has been and never will be,” she said. “They play the game. Players make plays. Our job is to put them in the best position to be successful and my hope is that that’s how we feel, that we’re able to do that as a staff.”

She’s right. Players play. Coaches coach. Some coaches do it better than others and it is usually because they understand that a one-size fits all approach rarely works. Successful coaches know how to treat each player individually within the framework of a team.

It has become increasingly obvious as this season has worn on that Kelly Rae Finley has figured out what makes every player on her roster tick and how to blend all those different personalities and skill sets to make a successful basketball team.

“It comes from understanding each other and understanding where each other have been and where each other’s experiences,” Finley said. “So, once you can get that you can figure out how to go forward together. I want to say there’s some magical thing, but there is not. It’s a people-centered business. Sport is fun at its core and we try to keep it that way. It’s not always going to be like that. It’s hard. There are disappointments. There are expectations. There are games that you will lose that you didn’t want to lose but that’s part of it.”

Every time the Gators take the floor, they know there will be a winner and a loser. She won’t blame her players when they don’t play as well as they are capable of playing nor will she take credit when they make all the right plays to win a game.

She knows that as the head coach, she is the one ultimately responsible for the outcome and that means being able to tell the team the truth about their performances but in a way that makes good sense and without pointing fingers.

“We don’t tell lies in our program,” she said. “We just don’t do that. It’s something that we stick with. If you want to be an elite, great team you have to be consistent: consistent in how you prepare, consistent in your mentality, consistent in your approach, all of those things.”

Kelly Rae Finley is who she is. Smart, insightful, thoughtful, driven and yet not in an overbearing way, and always positive, always joyful. Her whole person approach to life and coaching has rubbed off on her players. This same team that was at rock bottom and ready to mutiny last summer is now fully behind their coach.

Photo By Chris Spears

She has their back. They have hers. Along the way they’ve discovered they are enough and they are capable of competing and winning against anybody they play. They believe in themselves individually and as a team. They believe in their coach.

“I’m not sounding arrogant, but we don’t need validation from anybody,” Merritt said. “We believe in ourselves and we just go into every game knowing that we are enough, that we can compete with anybody in the country.”

They do compete and they do it with a joy that’s evident even to the casual observer, joy that emanates from the head coach. She is the interim head coach for now, but that is expected to change very soon. There is no question in any observer’s mind that Kelly Rae Finley has earned a chance to be the permanent head coach of the Florida Gators and that it’s time for Scott Stricklin to remove the interim tag.

Just a few months ago she was the assistant coach of a team in turmoil. Her boss, the head coach, was dismissed. From that moment of uncertainty came opportunity and from opportunity, the joy that makes Kelly Rae Finley who she is has become so contagious that the Florida women’s basketball team has become a legitimate upper division team in the rough and tumble Southeastern Conference.

It amazes her to this day.

“God works in mysterious ways,” she said. “I believe in God with my whole heart and some things are just unexplainable.”