UNLV Lady Rebels head coach Lindy La Rocque talks with players in the second half of an NCAA women’s semifinal game during the Mountain West Championships at the Thomas & Mack Center Tuesday, March 12, 2024.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Coach Lindy La Rocque is greeted with a text message when she picks up her phone after every UNLV women’s basketball game.
The message is from her dad, Al La Rocque, and usually reads: “Nice win, coach.”
Al La Rocque has sent that exact message 102 times over the past three seasons as his daughter has transformed the Lady Rebels into a Mountain West power. She’s posted a 102-21 mark through three seasons, winning the league and tournament titles each year.
Starting this weekend, Al La Rocque is hoping to send another congratulatory text — or two.
UNLV is playing Creighton at 4 p.m. Saturday in Los Angeles in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The Lady Rebels are looking to take the next step as a program by winning a tournament game. They have been eliminated in the initial game the past two seasons.
This year appears to be different.
The Lady Rebels enter the tournament with a 30-2 record, including a 12-game winning streak, and are led by a pair of veteran players. Senior post Desi-Rae Young, the Mountain West Player of the Year, and junior forward Alyssa Brown, the MVP of the Mountain West tournament, each have experience from the past two NCAA Tournament games.
“I think we have a different energy and edge about us coming into this tournament,” Lindy La Rocque said Sunday after her squad was picked as a No. 10 seed in the Albany 2 region. “Obviously we’ve been here a couple of times. We were really high and really low at different points. I think the group is mature and really determined to get the job done, and balance the excitement with the preparation and the commitment to knowing what it takes to come out with a win.”
Lindy La Rocque learned winning at a young age from her father. Al La Rocque is a high school basketball coaching legend in Nevada, where hecoached relatively unknown Durango High School to state championships in 1995 and 1996 in the school’s second and third years of existence.
Dad fostered competitive nature
Durango High School girls basketball coach Al La Rocque cheers for his team during their game against Bishop Gorman High School.
Al La Rocque had one rule for people sitting at the end of his Durango High bench: Don’t get a technical foul.
Lindy La Rocque spent her childhood in the Durango gym, where on game days she was a fixture on the bench — and she once came close to getting a technical, her dad jokingly said.
She learned about keeping calm with the game on the line, managing a lineup and advocating for players. More importantly, she learned the value of being a good educator — just like both of her school-teaching parents.
A coach, after all, is first and foremost a teacher.
“She was raised in the gym,” her dad said. “Short version, I thought she would (find a career) where she somehow got to stay in the gym. But you could have never anticipated what materialized.”
A question is frequently asked of Al La Rocque: Who is better coach, father or daughter?
“I’ve been asked that 1,000 times,” Al La Rocque said. “It’s not even close. She left me in the dust a long time ago.”
And, Al La Rocque stresses, his daughter’s feats are no way connected to his coaching tenure. Rather, Lindy La Rocque learned from the best while playing at Stanford, where coach Tara VanDerveer had the Cardinal in the Final Four all four of La Rocque’s seasons in Northern California.
Where Al La Rocque will take some credit is helping foster his daughter’s competitive nature. Lindy La Rocque, as witnessed by her impact at UNLV, hates to lose. That started at a young age.
“The competitive instinct is a learned trait, and not just for her. She’s passed that on to her players,” Al La Rocque said. “You learned to compete at a young age. As a family, we established that. We weren’t going to a game to pick flowers, we were going to compete.”
Her team to run
Lindy La Rocque responds to those congratulatory text messages with a short line about how UNLV played, whether that’s pointing out adjustments made on defense or a specific player having a strong game.
But the basketball talk stops there, dad says. It’s her team to run and he gives zero input. He’s perfectly happy being a superfan, even traveling to most road games.
“Most of my friends find that hard to believe,” Al Rocque said about not advising his daughter. “She has a wonderful staff that she trusts for those talks. I’ve really embraced and enjoyed my role as a fan. Those are fun teams to cheer for.”
Lindy La Rocque, 34, broke into the coaching business in 2014 as a graduate assistant at Oklahoma. She worked at Belmont and Stanford before returning to Las Vegas.
You could not have scripted a better homecoming — well, with one exception. All that’s missing is a memorable run in the NCAA Tournament.
The general consensus is that run will come this year. UNLV, despite being the lower-seeded team and a 3 1/2-point betting underdog, believes in itself as it prepares to take on Creighton, the No. 7 seed. UNLV’s players aren’t lacking any confidence.
“I think we’ve got it in the bag,” Young said. “I think this is a good team that we can really play well and really put our name in and get past the first round.”
This is certain: Coach La Rocque will have the team prepared. Her dad is sure of that.
“She has always watched the game with such passion and knowledge. Just an analytical brain for the game,” he said.
