Rhode Island’s Tammi Reiss shares experience of coaching at Olympics, growth of women’s basketball

University of Rhode Island women’s basketball head coach Tammi Reiss recently spoke with Mid-Major Madness’ Jimmy James about the rise in popularity for women’s basketball, her time coaching in the Olympics this summer and the upcoming season at URI, which began with a win over Stonehill Nov. 4.

Below is their conversation:

Jimmy James: Starting with your tenure at Rhode Island, you’ve coached two teams to WNIT appearances in five seasons, and last year you came just one game short of an A-10 championship. How do you look at your years at URI as you head into year six with the program?

Tammi Reiss: Obviously, I’m really thrilled with where the program started when we took over. In 2019, they were one of the worst in the conference. I think they won three games that year. To winning our first A-10 regular season championship in 2022-23 and the history of the program, and then obviously two postseason berths.

But the real goal for us is sustainability, stay atop of the league, compete every year for an A-10 championship. Obviously our ultimate goal is we really want to get to the NCAA Tournament. It’s something that has eluded us for my first five seasons, and that’s the ultimate goal is we always want to go postseason, really NCAA or WBIT (which began in 2024).

We’ve done the WNIT, and now I think it’s really the third tournament, and so we declined last year to go to it. Really it’s NCAAs now or bust. We’re in that phase of our program. Sustainability of being great, staying atop the conference and really propelling our program to multiple NCAAs and multiple A-10 championships.

JJ: As you all start this upcoming season, how do you plan to get Rhode Island back to the top of the conference and ultimately try to win that ever-elusive A-10 championship, which would also bring with it the program’s first NCAA Tournament, as you mentioned, appearance since 1996?

TR: I think this year we lost a lot. We’re really young. We have a lot of new faces. So, I think it’s really engulfing ourselves in the process of getting better every day, filling in who is going to do what, what roles, we’ll see who emerges. And then the chemistry. How quickly can we build this team and get them together and have great chemistry to be able to compete for that A-10 championship and get to postseason.

It’s unlike last year where we’re a favorite, and we returned a lot. This year, we’re kind of not a favorite. We’re young, and so it’s…