You are supposed to be reading a 2,000-word column about the spectacular basketball season the University of Rhode Island women gave us. The 28 victories, a school record, against 5 losses. The 17-game winning streak. The Atlantic-10 regular-season and tournament championships. Multiple all-conference selections and the A-10 coach of the year. Best of all, a trip to March Madness for the first time in 30 years. It was the best season ever.
Granted, most of those words came from Tammi Reiss, URI’s irrepressible coach who seldom, if ever, is at a loss for words. We spoke for 23 minutes on St. Patrick’s Day eve when she was still riding the high of winning the A-10 title while anticipating URI’s NCAA Tournament date with Alabama.
“Hell, yeah! This season has been the most joyous and fun. I don’t know any other word. Although I’m exhausted, I’m ecstatic. Ecstatic! This is what we dreamed of for our players, for our university, for our state,” she exclaimed.
“Our atmosphere, our culture is so good. It’s a different feeling this year… I wake up in the morning, and I’m counting the days until it ends, and I don’t want it to end. I don’t want the fun to go away. I don’t want my joy to go away, and I don’t want to say goodbye to these kids.”
I think last week she meant a season-ending goodbye, not an I’m-leaving-URI farewell. I’m not sure. I wrote to her last night for a comment. No reply yet.
In any event, scratch that column. Breaking news Monday informed us that only two days after Rhody’s season ended with a 68-55 loss to the Crimson Tide, Tammi Reiss is on her way to the University of Florida and the basketball battles in the Southeastern Conference, better known as the SEC.
Her move should not come as a shock, although the timing – as it does for many coaches who move on hours after the end of their season – raises the question of when Florida officials reached out to her.
Reiss spent seven years at URI, a lifetime in the revolving door world of college coaching these days, and restored respect to a program that had struggled for decades. She finished with a record of 138 wins and 73 losses, two WNIT (Women’s National Invitational Tournament) and one NCAA appearance. She earned A-10 Coach of the Year recognition three times, including this season. Also this season, she is the only mid-major coach among semifinalists for national coach of the year and is a finalist for mid-major coach of the year.
Despite the sting of losing Reiss to Florida, it’s worth lingering on this fantastic season. Much of what Reiss told me last week remains relevant. Here are the highlights:
Did she see this season coming?
“No, you’ll never know exactly what you get,” she answered. “You analyze last season. You saw where you made some errors. and you decided this is the direction we’re going in, these are the changes we need to make, and then you go out and implement them.”
The 2025 season was disappointing, with 17 wins and16 losses. A five-game losing streak early. A quarterfinal exit from the A-10 tournament. This season she wanted players who could play the game as she wants it played.
“We tried to make those changes, especially offensively with the personnel we signed — we sacrificed some defensive rebounding — because I can’t watch 45 points a game any more. You gotta be able to dribble, pass and shoot and have a high IQ, and we wanted to run more of a motion offense,” she said.
“So, we constructed the roster accordingly and then we went out and found leadership and great personalities, connectors, unselfish, a want to win championships. And we threw it in a pot and mixed it with our core players,” she said.
Near the end of summer practices, Reiss said the team started to come together. But it took months for her to see the real potential.
“Right around midseason I said we have a chance of being good,” Reiss said. “Sometimes you get magic in a bottle. But the thing we recruited was great intangibles: character, morality and values. And it worked out. Did I see it coming? No, but we planned it as such.”
What made the difference this year?
This season, Reiss and her staff preached culture, team, family.
“You can’t sacrifice your culture for talent. If you do that, you’re trying to win basketball games, you’re not trying to build your team,” she told me. “Not everybody believes in character and culture and the intangibles, in coachability, leadership, communication, sacrifice, wanting to win championships, no selfishness on the team.
“We knew we needed character. We knew we needed personalities to come here because we were a very quiet basketball team [last year]. We didn’t have the flavor, we didn’t have the juice. And I’ll be honest, last year’s team was nothing like me. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing a lot of kids that were just nothing like me.
“So I went out and got kids that were a lot like me. What I wanted our atmosphere to be in the locker room and on the court was joy and fun. Basketball is supposed to be a good time. You’re supposed to enjoy it. You’re supposed to have the best time of your life and memories with your teammates. So I went out and got that. We did as a staff. You can’t just recruit a bunch of talented basketball players to win basketball games and then pay them. It never works.”
Who made the difference this season?
Reiss worked the transfer portal and found the right combination of talent and personality to mesh with returning players. Who became the difference makers?
“Obviously Brooklyn Gray. First-team A-10 and all-championship team in the A-10 tournament. It’s the progression and development of Sophie Vital, our point guard, who is second team. And then the progression and development of Palmire Mbu, who is third team all-conference, and then the development of Albina Syla, most outstanding player (in the A-10 tournament). A lot of those are core players. You add Brooklyn and add Vanessa Harris, as a freshman who is an offensive juggernaut with Brooklyn. Now you got something. And add the personalities of Tavi (Ta’Viyanna Habib) and Val (Valentina Ojeda), that’s what we were looking for.”
Gray was the key. She transferred to URI after two seasons at Saint Louis and a juco year at Wabash Valley College.
“Brooklyn’s probably the biggest infusion of me because she’s loud, she’s funny, she’s kind and thoughtful, she wants to win and literally can do anything on the basketball court: shoot threes, post-up, pass, make everyone better. She’s given everyone that swagger, that confidence, that attitude you can’t teach. We needed a lot of that, and she brought it. She brought that flavor,” Reiss said.
How important was Name, Image and Likeness/Collective money this season?
Those who follow college sports have heard a lot in recent years about NIL, or Name, Image Likeness – a set of rules allowing college athletes to receive compensation from companies or sponsors.
Allowing NIL was a sea change in college sports, which had for decades touted its amateur core. Now, it’s essentially a must for programs that want to compete.
“Last year we had zero NIL. Not a penny. Not a dime. You’re not going to do anything with zero NIL,” Reiss said. “You cannot win without NIL and investment in resources. It will not happen.”
So Reiss worked with the URI athletic department.
“If you look at the top programs in the country and their operating budgets and NIL, men and women, it’s ridiculous. That’s why they’re picked to win the Final Four, and they’re going to be there. It’s why you hardly see mid-majors at that level any more, correct?
“If you want to win a conference, or at least be in the title running, you have to invest. You need NIL,” Reiss said. “It doesn’t have to be the most. Give me a little, and I can do more with less. And we’ve had to do more with less here. Last year we were able to get some NIL (for this season) and I was able to construct a roster. You’re not getting Brooklyn Gray, you’re not getting Vanessa, you’re not getting Tavi, you’re not getting Val. We would not have had one of those players had we not had NIL, and you will not win.”
Accomplishing all that demands more than strong coaching.
“You have to know how to roster construct – what you want and how you want it, how you want your pieces to fit together. You have to be a GM, basically,” Reiss said.
“I’m the GM of my team. I run the contracts. I run the budget. I have to construct this roster in this amount. I like it that way because I know my dollars. I know how to organize and construct. It’s being fluid. You’re going to lose kids to the (transfer) portal and NIL. Everyone wants what they want now. If you’re successful, hopefully you lose your coaching staff because they want to become head coaches. And everyone will poach great teams. You can’t be mad at it. Let’s go out and find the next-best and keep it rolling. This is our game plan. It’s embracing the portal and NIL and seeing how it can work for you and not against you.”
Reiss would not disclose how much NIL money she received for this season. “We’re not in the Top 5 in the conference. We don’t have 4, or 5, or $6 million. You can’t compete with the SEC. It’s laughable.”
Was URI disrespected in the national rankings?
Despite its record, URI received only a few votes in the national rankings toward the end of the season. Reiss did not feel slighted.
“You only have a few mid-majors that are going to compete with the Power Four. Do you know how many mid-majors didn’t get into the (Women’s Basketball Invitational Tournament, a secondary tournament to March Madness)? They have great records, great strength of schedule, great everything they were supposed to, and they let losing Power Four teams in. This is the new landscape. It is Power Four. It is big-conference. You are going to have to be perfect,” she said.
She added that if you put a top mid-major in the SEC or Big 10, “they’d be lucky to win five games. It’s really hard now as a mid-major. I don’t see that as disrespect. I see it as ’You’re going to have to earn it, you’re going to have to be perfect because you don’t play in a power conference.’ If we were to play South Carolina one night, LSU two days later, Texas two days later, let’s keep going. Tennessee? Ole Miss? And then we play St. Bonnies, La Salle. Is that the same schedule? No! That’s not disrespect by any means. They respect our program by even considering us. We can’t help what conference we’re in. We can compete. We just don’t see that level of competition. It’s getting harder and harder at the mid-major level to do some of the things that mid-majors used to do back in the day.”
What’s next? Is URI’s French Connection finished?
Reiss’s Rams succeeded in her seven seasons in Kingston thanks to a pipeline of French players. Six on the 2026 roster call France home. URI also has one player from Chile and one from Finland.
Associate head coach Adeniyi Amadou deserves a lot of credit. He was born in Paris and maintained ties to France while playing and coaching basketball in the U.S. He has left URI for the head coaching job at New Mexico State. Is the French connection dead?
“No. There are agents now. I used to have a shot with top kids in France. Not any more, not with NIL. Now it’s a free-for-all. No one has a pipeline any more. We’re not getting transfers from Syracuse and Missouri because those kids are making a lot of money,” Reiss said. “We may extend it to different countries now. We’ll still recruit internationally, but now that we’ve won, we have a lot of American kids who want to come here.”
Top recruits, whether from home or abroad, want to talk dollars as well as minutes now. Reiss is okay with that, but in the proper sequence.
“Money should be the last thing you talk about. For me it is. If you lead with it, we’re done. That’s not the most important thing,” she said. “Winning is the most important thing. Competing is the most important thing. It’s ‘I want to be developed. I want to play pro. I want to get a great education.’ Those are the most important things. I want a good culture. Now, if we see eye to eye, we can talk about that component.”
Now, it’s up to new URI Athletics Director Pat Lyons to fill Reiss’s massive sneakers. With positive momentum on the court, it’s a big test for Lyons just two weeks into the job.
Plug in the new coach’s name, and Reiss’s comments still apply. And expect the Reiss approach to work in Gainesville as it did in Kingston.
