Lauren Aldridge has already heard all of your KU jokes. She knows that people say the only good thing to come out of Lawrence is I-70, and that they have plenty of ideas about what KU really stands for. She’s heard every joke and every line since she stepped onto Mizzou’s campus in the spring of 2016.

But for the Kansas transfer, it’s time to get serious. After sitting out last season per NCAA transfer rules, Aldridge, a 5-foot-7 point guard, is at long last eligible to play for the black and gold. “One of the most incredible things is being able to compete with people you love, and love playing for and with,” Aldridge says. “After not being on the court last year, I’ve been able to focus on creating those deeper relationships with my teammates. I’m excited to get back on the court with them.”

As a sophomore at Kansas in 2015-16, Aldridge started all 31 games and led the Jayhawks in scoring, averaging 11.1 points per game. She also led the team in field goals, three-pointers, assists and minutes. And although she won’t go into detail about why she transferred, she calls it a “prayerful” decision.

What she does say is that she was drawn by the opportunity to learn from Coach Robin Pingeton, who recruited her at Marshfield (Mo.) High School. In the time since Aldridge arrived on campus, Pingeton has risen from basketball coach to life coach. The relationship is made even more significant because the basketball court isn’t the only court in Aldridge’s life. She’s a first-year law school student, and, early in the semester she was struggling. She sought out Pingeton.

“I went into her all teary-eyed and said, ‘I don’t know what to do, this is so stressful,’” Aldridge says. “She took a minute to calm me down, create a game plan and ask me about how life is outside of law school. I walked away thinking this is such an opportunity. What coach would let one of her players go to law school and play basketball at the same time?”

Aldridge began thinking about law school when she learned she was on track to graduate from Mizzou in three years. And because she wasn’t allowed to travel she had more time to devote to her academic work. Aldridge majored in political science and graduated summa cum laude in May. She’s no stranger to studying, but law school is a different beast altogether. If there’s a player who can handle it, Pingeton knows it’s Aldridge.

“You know you have someone special when they can balance all that,” Pingeton says. “That first year of law school, that’s probably the toughest year out of any of them, and she’s done a great job balancing it. On the court, I think she’s going to be a great addition for us. She gives us an anchor at that point guard position; she’s a quarterback, a great facilitator and has a great basketball IQ.”

When Aldridge met with Pingeton that first week, she left feeling as though the struggle was not only hers, but the team’s. She spends her early mornings reading dozens of pages for her torts class and late nights writing papers, but her teammates make sure she’s not in it alone. They’ve offered to bring her lunch, help quiz her and provide moral support when she feels like she’s losing her focus. “They embrace the challenge,” Aldridge says. “It makes it so fun to be a part of and rewarding at the end of the day. You’re not just getting a W in the win column or just the accolades at the end of the year. It’s your family.”

She’s also found family in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — she helped start a chapter at Kansas and was pleased to find such a large community involved in the organization at Mizzou, even leading a small group with some of her teammates. And when the stress starts to build, Aldridge has another outlet: turkey hunting. She comes from a hunting family and learned the art from her brother, Tyler. He’s the one who initiates the wild turkey call, who places the gun in his sister’s hands and who tells her when to shoot.

“We get to have life conversations,” Aldridge says. “During the season, I don’t get much time to connect with him. It’s always in the spring, so that’s my time to go home and hang out with him. It’s a great adrenaline rush.” In the meantime, Aldridge will continue to endure jokes from her teammates about how coming to Mizzou means she finally “saw the light.” It’s all been worth it. When she arrived at Mizzou, a feeling consumed her. She knows that feeling will only intensify as she settles into the season. It’s the feeling that she’s right where she’s supposed to be. The feeling of being home.

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Jordan Frericks comeback season crucial to Mizzou's success

Jordan Frericks heard a  “pop.”

It was a non-contact injury, one the star forward for the Missouri women’s basketball team suffered in September 2016 while completing a mundane layup in a workout before preseason practices had even begun. It changed everything. One moment, Frericks was preparing for a senior season as a leader on a team with all the momentum in the world — the Tigers were coming off their first NCAA Tournament berth in a decade and setting their sights on even more.

The next moment … pop. A torn anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee.

“I honestly can’t even remember the pain,” Frericks says. “I was just so emotionally in shock and mad and upset. That kind of took over.” Even though Frericks had never suffered a serious injury, she knew what this one entailed: surgery, a year of rehabilitation, a deferred final punctuation mark to an illustrious career in black and gold. She watched from the bench as her teammates advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament without her.

“I hate to say she had a redshirt senior year, but that’s what she did,” says Eric Orne, Frericks’ high school coach at Quincy (Illinois) Notre Dame. “And she came out of it a lot stronger mentally.”

After the initial shock of the injury — Frericks tore her meniscus as well — wore off, though, she started to see the silver lining. Frericks had a redshirt to burn, so she would be eligible for her senior season in 2017-18. She suffered the setback early enough in the season that she would have a full year of recovery time to be ready for preseason practice. She had the built-in desire and competitive fire not only to endure the rehab program set out for her by the Missouri training staff, but also attack it.

Now she’s right back where she was before the pop: a senior playing an integral part on another Missouri squad challenging for a top spot in the  NCAA Tournament. “When she tore her ACL, she was at such a high place. She was playing so well,” coach Robin Pingeton says. “With her drive and determination, I don’t think any of us are surprised with the level she’s playing at. And I think there’s still more. I think she’s still getting comfortable out there.”

The Road Back

Everyone in the house had at least one. Bri Porter had five. Like some sort of physical rite of passage, Frericks, her roommate, Kayla Michael, and their housemates Bri and Cierra Porter all bore scars from ACL surgeries. Frericks was the latest to join the club.

“We had some bad mojo going on,” Michael, who tore her ACL during the 2014-15 season, says with a laugh. With that mojo, though, came a readymade support system for Frericks. Not only were three of her teammates constantly around to support her, but they also could provide guidance on what to expect on the road to recovery. And help her with more practical matters in the first three weeks following the surgery, when she couldn’t put any weight on her right leg.

“I mostly helped her with getting food and stuff,” Michael says. “I didn’t have to bathe her or anything.”

On the day of the injury, Jay and Carol Frericks drove from Quincy to be with their daughter. After the surgery, Carol stayed in Columbia for a week or so. This was the toughest period for Jay. He coached Jordan in soccer and basketball through grade school and had seen her thrive athletically her entire life. But now she couldn’t walk without the help of crutches. “I still get emotional even talking about it because I know how much time and energy she puts into it,” Jay says. “We turned it around real quick. We kind of went on from there, trying to keep her head up, trying to keep Mom and Dad’s heads up.”

Jacob Linn, the director of athletic performance for the team, worked in partnership with athletic trainer Alison Mosel and a physical therapist to plot Frericks’s recovery from all angles.

The first six weeks focused on regaining full range of motion in the knee as well as keeping her right quadriceps from losing too much mass through limited use. They used a blood-flow restriction device donated by the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute to help increase flow to the injured leg and speed up the healing process.

For two months after that, they added weight training on the upper body and the muscles around the knee. Then it was on to basic knee and hip movement exercises — step-ups, lunges and squats. “Everyone was on the same page all the time,” Linn says. “The magic came from the synergy of all the professionals and just the kind of person Jordan is. She’s a super-high-attention-to-detail person, very meticulous in everything she does. Anything we asked her to do, she would do it to the max.”

By the spring, she was running, skipping, hopping and jumping. By the summer, she was working out with the team. By the fall, she was ready to go.

At first, Michael would get nervous when she saw Frericks take a tumble during preseason practices. She would hold her breath until Frericks got up, shook it off and went about her business. That feeling didn’t last long. Frericks was back.

“From the very beginning, I was going to do everything possible the right way to make sure that this wasn’t something that was going to hold me back from where I wanted to go,” Frericks says. “I just knew that if I kept feeding myself the ‘what ifs,’ nothing good would come. I just had to make sure I had the right perspective every day.”

Back Where She Belongs

Jay and Carol have gone to every Tigers home game and almost all of their road games this season. They want to cherish every moment they can during their daughter’s final season in Columbia.

So of course they were in attendance on Nov. 2, 2017, for Missouri’s exhibition win over Southwest Baptist, Frericks’s first game in more than 19 months. “I thought my heart was going to blow up,” Jay says. “I could hardly stand it. But after I saw that she was back to herself, I’ve never looked back. We’re tickled pink that she’s out there playing at the level she was prior.”

Just like before the injury, Frericks is a tireless rebounder, a tenacious defender and a highly efficient scorer in the post. She helped the Tigers to a 13-game win streak, took part in their second straight home win against national power South Carolina and had 16 points and seven rebounds in a recent victory over Tennessee, which drew a program-record crowd of 11,092. Frericks also reached a major milestone this year, becoming just the third Tiger ever to reach 1,000 career points and 1,000 rebounds.

Back on Dec. 22, Orne brought his current batch of basketball players to Columbia to see Missouri beat Illinois. Frericks scored 10 points in 19 minutes. She spent at least that much time hanging out with the 55 girls from Quincy after the game. “She’s always willing to give back,” says Orne. “That just tells you the quality kid she is. You have a kid that was in your program, had a lot of success, but she’s grounded, balanced and someone our kids can look up to.”

Frericks’s year away served a couple of valuable purposes. She was able to watch and learn from the bench, which honed her basketball IQ. And she focused on her schoolwork so she could lessen her class load this year and focus fully on her senior season.

It was a bit of a blessing in disguise. Not that she’d ever want to go through it again.

“Just knowing that I have no pain and don’t think about my knee, it’s so refreshing,” Frericks says. “I didn’t know that’s how it would be coming back. Just knowing that it’s not even something that affects me now, it makes me realize that what I did, and the people who helped me throughout my training and rehab process, we did it the right way. I’m just enjoying the moment with my team — and not having to think about my knee.”

Photos by Nick Mebruer

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Tour Mizzou Women's Basketball Weight Room

With Robin Pingeton

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Why everyone’s talking about Robin Pingeton’s ‘Blue-Collar Basketball’

Robin Pingeton’s vision was to build a lasting basketball program at Missouri. Now that the task is accomplished, she and her Tigers want more.

No impression of Robin Pingeton is complete without her arms spread wide, her knees bent, her feet pumping furiously and a look of sheer intensity knitted across her face. This is how the coach of seven years would like her charges on the Missouri women’s basketball team to play defense. If they’re not living up to this standard, she’s surely taking a second out of practice to show them exactly how she wants it done.

“She’ll be getting after someone and drop down in a stance and be like, ‘If I can still do it, you guys can do it. We kind of give her trouble. I think she’s still got it.” That’s senior guard Lindsey Cunningham talking about “it.”

If that “it” refers to the athletic prowess to match up with today’s Division-I athletes, nearly 30 years after the close of her playing career, Pingeton would have to disagree.

“Even though my mind is younger than, maybe, my body, I don’t think any of our girls are expecting me to come out and dominate a game of one-on-one,” she says, laughing. “I stick to the treadmill, where it’s safe.”

If Cunningham was referring to the passion and grittiness that have gotten Pingeton this far, well, then she certainly does still have “it.”

Last season, every day before practice, Pingeton and guard Carrie Shephard teamed up for a series of two-on-two games against guard Juanita Robinson and forward Cierra Porter.

Senior guard Lianna Doty has seen Pingeton dive on the floor for a loose ball — this one was during a half-court game of four-on-four starring coaches and members of the Tigers’ staff. If you’re going to preach “blue-collar basketball” as Pingeton does, you had better practice it as well.

She’s been preaching — and practicing — for her entire 21-year coaching career.

“She’s all about something so much bigger than herself,” Doty says. “She wants to build something special here, and she wants to do it the right way, based on a foundation of relationships and hard work and a family that’s real.”

After nearly seven years at Missouri, Pingeton and the Tigers are on the cusp of greatness. It began with losing seasons in her first two years at the helm. That was followed by three straight Women’s NIT berths. All were stepping stones toward last season, when the Tigers posted a 22-10 record — their most wins since 2000-01 — and beat BYU to post the team’s first NCAA Tournament win in 15 years.

As the playbook would show, Pingeton wasn’t interested in quick fixes. She took the job ahead of the 2010-11 season focused on digging in, working hard and building something that would last — just as she was at Illinois State for seven years prior to coming to Columbia; just as she was at her alma mater, St. Ambrose, as a 23-year-old, first-time head coach in the early ’90s; just as she was when she played as an undersized post for the university’s Fighting Bees, setting program career records in points and rebounds; and just as she was pitching around her family’s farm and salvage yard growing up.

Pingeton has never known any other way: show before you tell. Set the example, and everything else will fall into place.

“Players don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” Pingeton says. “My goals are to compete for championships, but my passion is to impact people’s lives and make a positive influence. It goes way beyond the sport.

“Sooner or later, the ball’s going to stop bouncing. What’s going to last are the relationships.”
 

College coaches came to the Becker house in Atkins, Iowa, a town of less than 1,000 people about 20 miles west of Cedar Rapids, to see Lisa, the best female high school basketball player in the Hawkeye State. Robin, three years her junior, would make sure she was putting up shots in the driveway as the coaches made house calls.

Just in case one of them wanted to give her a look.

“There was a lot of attention around me at that time, and I think she took that personally,” her sister, Lisa (Becker) Porter says. “She knew what she was capable of as a player, and she was always striving to show me that she was better than me. Now we look back at it and laugh at some of the situations in which we found ourselves.”

So the sisters were a little competitive with each other. They also had a close bond and the desire to push each other to be their best — sound familiar? It’s the same competitive/loving nature as some of the sister duos Pingeton coaches today.

Arlo and Judy Becker didn’t give their four children a choice other than to earn everything they received. They put them to work after school and on the weekends. Tractor pulls, demolition derbies, stock-car races — everyone did their part.

“We did everything: pit passes, entry fees, concession stands, selling trophies, presenting trophies. My brother was the PA announcer,” Pingeton says. “We actually provided some of the cars, too, from the salvage yard.”

The only times the four weren’t expected to help out around the house or at Becker Auto Salvage were when they were active in sports. That’s where Pingeton’s true passion lies: in athletics. Even with her impromptu driveway shooting displays, she didn’t get the same major-college attention as 6-foot, 4-inch Lisa. A 5-foot, 10-inch post player like her sister, Pingeton got her name out there largely through highlight tapes her mother compiled and circulated. She chose St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, in part because she could be a two-sport athlete. Pingeton also played softball, and by the end of her college career, she was an NAIA All-American in both sports.

“She was arguably the best player we were able to recruit,” says Lisa Bluder, head basketball coach at the University of Iowa, who coached Pingeton at St. Ambrose. Bluder is now the winningest women’s basketball coach in Iowa Hawkeyes history. “She was the hardest worker I had. That’s what you always want, is when your best player is your hardest worker. She definitely was.”

Pingeton — or “Robin Becker,” as notated all over the St. Ambrose record book — finished her career with 2,502 points and 1,261 rebounds. During her time on campus, the Fighting Bees posted a record of 127-11, including a 68-3 mark over her final two seasons.

The Missouri players who know about Pingeton’s collegiate greatness have probably pieced it together through the grapevine. She never brings it up.

“She actually gets a little bit awkward when it’s about her,” Cunningham says. “I heard she was a pretty good ballplayer, but she wants none of the glory from it. She wants us to enjoy the experience.”

When the final horn blew on her playing career, it “ripped out (her) heart.” Coaching wasn’t on her radar until that point, only playing ball and finishing her business degree, but it was time for the next phase.

Lisa knew how her sister would approach it. “From the very get-go, she was a go-getter,” Porter says. “I think it made her have that edge a little more. Like, ‘I have something to prove here.’”
 

 
St. Ambrose wasn’t much of a consideration for Jenny DeSmet. She was from nearby Moline, Illinois, and wanted to get out of the Quad Cities for collegiate ball. At the very least though, she wanted to give sixth-year St. Ambrose head coach Robin Becker the courtesy of listening to the pitch.

“I was almost going to turn her down immediately. But, just listening to her, she had me sold with her vision, her passion,” says Jenny (DeSmet) Putnam, who played for Pingeton 1997-2000.

Putnam has been with Pingeton as an assistant coach for the past 14 years, through her tenures at Illinois State (2003-10) and now Missouri.

Although Pingeton has never been afraid to adapt with the times, she has also stayed true to the core tenets she sold Putnam on nearly 20 years ago.

“There’s so much more to people in life, [those who] have had to do all the little things, [who] are not afraid to do the dirty work,” Putnam says. “Nothing’s above her. Nothing’s below her. She’s just been self-made, and she has worked her tail off.”
Bluder gave Pingeton her first shot as an assistant straight out of college, working with the post players and helping recruit at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. After only two years, before the 1992-93 season, Pingeton got her first head coaching job back at St. Ambrose.

She had the unenviable task of continuing the winning tradition laid down by previous coaches, Bluder included. She also had to serve as head coach to players who, just two years prior, had been following her lead as a senior.

“Someone gave me great advice. They said at such a young age, it’s always better to come in maybe a little stricter and tougher, because you can always lighten up a bit,” Pingeton says. “That’s versus coming in trying to be their buddy and then, a couple years later, trying to shore things up and get them to toe the line.

“I’m still not a good loser, but I was a really, really bad loser back then,” she adds, with a laugh. “And my poor players had to get in my van on those long road trips.”

Because, you see, she drove the team van as well. And served as the equipment manager. And the strength and conditioning coach. All because St. Ambrose was such a streamlined operation that she was basically — outside of a couple of graduate assistants — the coaching staff.

Her players still see that ethos at work in her today. On road trips, she’ll send the players from the bus into the hotel while she unloads their luggage.

“It’s just built so much character,” Doty says. “She has not gone away from that. She has the perspective of being able to succeed with whatever you have.”

Pingeton went 192-76 over eight seasons at St. Ambrose, advancing to the NAIA quarterfinals twice. After three seasons assisting coach Bill Fennelly at Iowa State in Ames, Iowa — years during which the Cyclones made two NCAA Tournaments and won the 2001 Big 12 Tournament — she got her first crack as a Division-I head coach at Illinois State in Normal, Illinois. After two losing seasons in her first three years, the Redbirds ripped off four straight 20-win campaigns.

As her two college coaching mentors, Bluder and Fennelly, headed established major-conference programs in her home state, Pingeton was positioning herself to start one of her own.

“All Robin needed was an opportunity, and she was going to run with it,” Bluder says.

As the 2009-10 season wound down, then-Missouri athletic director Mike Alden made it clear to Pingeton that she was on his short list for the Show Me State job. She, in turn, made it clear to him that, although flattered by the attention, she had a WNIT to coach. They’d talk after.

So Alden sent spies from the athletic department to Illinois State’s games. They didn’t wear Missouri gear, didn’t identify themselves as representatives from Columbia. They were there to monitor Pingeton in her natural habitat.

They found two things. One: all the good things they’d heard about Pingeton were absolutely true. Two: she was costing Missouri an awful lot in travel expenses. The Redbirds didn’t stop winning until the WNIT semifinals.

Alden and the rest of the search committee met with Pingeton in a hotel near the St. Louis airport and listened to her talk about building a program based on hard work, selflessness, respect and positivity. She was reading straight from Alden’s handbook, and she didn’t even know it.

“She set a foundation that has an opportunity to have long-term success,” Alden says. “That’s exactly — exactly — what she talked about in that interview all those years ago.”
 

 
Porter has had the opportunity to view Pingeton’s time at Missouri through a number of different lenses. They’re sisters, of course.

And until May, Lisa’s husband, Michael, was employed as a director of operations, then assistant coach, on Pingeton’s staff at Missouri. But the Porter family moved to Washington, where Michael was hired as an assistant men’s basketball coach.

Except, here’s the thing, daughters Bri and Cierra still play for their aunt at Missouri. Bri is a junior. Cierra is a sophomore. Both are post players, like their mother and aunt.

“I’m hearing things from my girls, my husband and my sister, and there is so much that goes into building a program like what Robin has done and continues to do,” Lisa Porter says. “The cool thing about seeing this come to fruition is seeing that it’s not just talk, that her priority is the people. The same way she strives to be the best version of herself, she’s striving to help them become the best versions of themselves.”

Pingeton keeps two families in balance: her biological one and her basketball one.

She transfers the brand of love that she’s learned from the former to the latter. That everything is earned, not given. That a job’s not worth doing unless it’s done right.

“It’s about planting your feet, rolling up your sleeves and going to work,” Pingeton says. “Every step along the way has impacted me greatly as a coach and person, just to be surrounded by the people I have.”

Her players can expect some vitriol out of her. If they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, she’ll let them know. If the freshmen aren’t grasping something, she’ll make sure they get where she’s coming from, like she did during a recent individual workout session. Doty and Cunningham shot each other knowing glances. They’d been there before.

“She demands so much from you, but she loves so hard too,” Doty says. “It’s one of those relationships where you know she’s going to get the absolute best out of you because she cares so much about you. She has a really soft side, a really understanding side and she has a really hard, ‘let’s get our nose to the grindstone and go to work’ side.”

Doty and Cunningham can’t get anything by her at this point, and Pingeton can tell by their body language if something is troubling them. She knows, without prompting, when to push, when to console, when to encourage, when to motivate.

During the 2014-15 season, before a road game at Florida, Cunningham got a call from the front desk at the team hotel. Someone had left her something.

She came down and found a two-page, handwritten note from Pingeton telling her how proud she was of her and how she had developed as a point guard that season, how encouraged she was by the way Cunningham had rebounded from the early season adversity that beset the team.

Pingeton knows her team. She knows her players’ rhythms. But she’s not naive enough to think she knows it all. That’s why, Cunningham says, Pingeton has meetings with players and staff members on this theme: “What can I do to be better for you?”

“I want to keep learning and growing until the day I die,” Pingeton says. “So every day I wake up and think, ‘How can I be better today?’ Every day I’m trying to grow and get better. Hopefully, I’ve gotten wiser with my years.”

At Missouri, that philosophy has translated into a program that has posted four straight winning seasons for the first time since 1986-90. It has led to a Tigers team on the rise, with upperclassmen including Cunningham, Doty, Sierra Michaelis and Jordan Frericks (out for the season with a torn ACL) mixing with talented sophomores Cierra Porter and Lindsey’s younger sister, Sophie, who was last year’s SEC Freshman of the Year.

Missouri has reached a peak, but also wants to keep climbing. And a Becker knows her work is never truly done.

“Every year we’ve taken the program in the right direction, when you look at what we’ve been able to accomplish,” Pingeton says. “But under no circumstances are we satisfied.

Very driven, very hungry. “We want more.”

Photos: Travis Smith | ContentAllStars.com

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