After leading her WSU women’s basketball team to a 17-win season and berth in the WNIT, the first for Washington State since 1991, Head Coach June Daugherty has been rewarded.

WSU Athletic Director Bill Moos announced Monday he has extended Daugherty’s contract through the 2018-19 season.

Terms of the contract were not announced.

“June, her staff and the entire team are to be commended for a truly fine season,” Moos said in a press release. “Reaching the postseason for the first time in 23 years is a notable achievement. I’m looking forward to watching this program continue to improve in the years to come.”

Daugherty recently finished her seventh season with Washington State and has given the program a facelift since arriving in Pullman.

“It is with a great deal of gratitude towards Bill Moos that I accept the extension offered upon my contract as head basketball coach,” Daugherty said in a press release. “I am honored to have the opportunity to build upon the successful foundation that we have put into place. The dedication and hard work of our players is a real credit to their passion to represent the Crimson and Gray in a first class manner on and off the court.”

This is not the first time Moos has opened up his wallet in support of Daugherty.

Prior to the start of the 2011 season, Daugherty agreed with athletic director Bill Moos on a two-year contract extension which carried through the 2015-16 season.

Daugherty said the extension only reaffirmed her belief administration was in her corner and the real impact came in confirming the public of that same notion.

“It showed the rest of the country that they’re behind you and it gave amount of confidence to recruits, AAU coaches, high school coaches to entrust their kids to come to here,” Daugherty said. “That’s where it’s most important. It’s tough when you’re building a program and before not having winning records, but when you get extensions you say ‘oh, the administration believes in the direction of the program and we should too’.”

Daugherty has always admired Moos; he was AD at Montana when she coached at Boise State. The two also found themselves competitors when she was an assistant at Stanford and he was at Oregon.

“To be able to work for him and know that you’re working for an experienced visionary athletic director who cares so much about women’s athletics – I think people would be surprised how much he cares about all women’s programs doing great,” Daugherty said.

Looking back at the program’s transformation throughout the last seven years, Daugherty points to her highly-touted recruiting class as the source of the team’s turnaround, starting with the three nationally-ranked recruiting classes she signed in her first three years as Cougar head coach.

“Our first recruiting class was a turning point for us because we were able to get some very high level kids and people took a look at that nationally and said ‘wow, what’s going on at Washington State? Why are those kids going there?’ because at that point we hadn’t had much success,” she said.

The recruiting classes hinted at the possibility of progress but failure to translate those hints onto the scoreboard made the rebuilding process particularly difficult, said Daugherty.  

“I knew the program was getting better, but it didn’t show up for just the casual fan in the win-loss column,” she said. “Even early on we were playing a nationally competitive preseason and we knew we had to play that competition to get our kids to understand this is the level Washington State needs to be not just playing at but winning at, consistently.”

Now that her team has made some noise not only around the conference but nationally as well, Daugherty is focused on the traditionally difficult task of not only maintaining, but continuing on that positive momentum.

 “It’s hard anywhere. One is, you gotta stay healthy with your players,” Daugherty said.  “You gotta keep recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. We’ve got a top-20 class coming in. We’ve got to keep developing the kids that are here and we gotta keep putting a good product out there so the fan base continues to grow. There’s a lot of work ahead but we don’t want to sustain it, we want to keep improving.”