Down the hall from Todd Golden’s office at UF’s Hugh Hathcock Basketball Complex, Florida women’s coach Tammi Reiss has found more than a neighbor. She has found a backer, a sounding board and, in her words, a coach she has long admired from afar.
Golden has become one of Reiss’ strongest supporters as she tries to lift a women’s program that has struggled for years to get traction. The men’s national championship coach and his wife, Megan, even wrote a check to help Reiss’ NIL fundraising efforts.
“For him and his wife to call me and say, ‘Coach, we got you. What do you need?’
And to donate like that,” Reiss told the Orlando Sentinel. “Anything I’ve ever asked, he is so supportive.
‘Coach, just tell me whatever you want, come over.’ To be able to call him and pick his brain when you know he’s got a lot on his plate.
It means the world to me.
“It really does.”
Golden, who became the youngest NCAA Tournament champion since the bracket expanded to 64 teams in 1985, said the admiration runs both ways.
“She has a great personality. She’s really humble.
She operates with no ego,” he told the Orlando Sentinel. “She obviously is a great winner from her playing days, both in college and in the WNBA, and also the great job she did at Rhode Island.
I’ve loved having her here.
“She’s a great partner.”
The two staffs have already built a working relationship. They trade ideas, dig into analytics and talk through coaching philosophies. Reiss’ director of video & analytics, Tyler Lowder, who came with her from Rhode Island, films every men’s practice and prepares cut-ups for Reiss to study.
That crossover will be on display Thursday night when Florida hosts a doubleheader. The women face UCF at 4:30 p.m., then the men open their home schedule against Jacksonville at 8 p.m.
Reiss said she had long viewed Golden and UConn’s Dan Hurley as the sport’s standard-bearers before she ever got to Gainesville.
“Todd for me is God,” she said. “So you get to work with that across the hall every day. I don’t know how you can have it any better.”
Her path to Florida made the fit even more striking. Reiss had already built a reputation as a winner before arriving in Gainesville, leading Rhode Island to its first NCAA Tournament appearance in 30 years after taking over a program that had produced just one winning season in 15 years.
The move to Florida was not an automatic yes. Reiss said she was still weighing whether to leave when Golden called.
“I was on the fence. I was really contemplating,” Reiss recalled.
“I’m happy. They’re trying to get me to stay, will there be something else opening up soon?
Do I really want to move? Life choices, right?
“And then Todd called.”
She still does not know whether athletic director Scott Stricklin or agent Bret Just helped set up that conversation, but the call mattered. So did everything that followed.
“You kind of set yourself up,” Reiss said. “Before I even knew him, I’m watching.
‘God, I love this guy.’ And then you get to meet him, and he’s everything you ever thought he was.
It doesn’t happen very often, but it actually happened when I got here.
“He’s more than I ever thought he was.”
Reiss’ resume helps explain why Golden and others around the program believe in her. She played in three straight Final Fours at Virginia alongside future Hall of Famer Dawn Staley from 1990 through 1992, then joined the Cavaliers’ coaching staff from 1993 to 1996. When the WNBA launched in 1997, she was the fifth overall pick in the league’s inaugural draft by the Utah Starzz.
After two seasons as a starter, she returned to coaching for three years, later owned a nightclub in Salt Lake City called the Manhattan Club and even dabbled in acting. She has been coaching again since joining San Diego State as an assistant in 2011.
That broader life story has resonated with players, including Penn State transfer Moriah Murray, who came to Florida looking for a place to showcase her 3-point shooting.
“Just seeing her doing all these things and still ending up in basketball, just meant something to me,” Murray said. “Knowing that it’s not all about basketball.
You can find a career somewhere else and then come back to basketball. Just the way she thinks, it really got me.”
Reiss’ arrival has also mattered to the people who will help finance the program. Florida has gone through three straight 5-11 seasons in the SEC, a league that sent seven teams into the preseason Top 25, and the Gators are trying to climb in a sport where the program has never won an SEC title.
Longtime booster Ron Young was among two dozen donors Reiss asked to join a webinar shortly after taking the job.
“I thought she worked for a Fortune 500 company,” Young recalled. “She had it all on slides.
What kind of people she was going to get. What her plan was.
What she needed. What her background was.
How she coached. It was one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen.
“She’s a business lady, and she runs a business. That’s what this is.”
That presentation helped generate nearly $500,000 in a week.
“It speaks to her intelligence and her evaluation of what our jobs are now as Division I head coaches,” Golden said. “A lot of people understand it, and still don’t do it.
They don’t want to put the time and effort to do it. They don’t enjoy it.
“It says a lot about her and her will to win and her competitiveness.”
Stricklin said Reiss brings a presence that fits the job.
“Tammi has a dynamic personality,” he said. “You can see that she’s experienced with being in front of people and presenting herself and projecting what she’s about, which is a real gift.”
Reiss is not shy about the challenge in front of her. Florida women’s basketball remains the only Gators program without an SEC title, and the team has often struggled to fill the 10,133-seat O’Connell Center, even at 20% capacity.
Still, Reiss has spent her life doing things the hard way. She came up as a player, a coach, a business owner and a pioneer in the WNBA. Now she is trying to turn that same energy into something lasting in Gainesville.
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