A Ukrainian women’s basketball star at LSU has called it quits after the Lady Tigers signed a Russian teenage player.
The departure of Kate Koval, a native of Kyiv, Ukraine, whose father is serving in the Ukrainian military, was announced on Tuesday by head coach Kim Mulkey. The move comes ten days after LSU signed 17-year-old Russian center Anna Minaeva.
“Kate came to see me on Sunday and told me that after much consideration, she will be leaving the program for personal reasons,” Mulkey said in a statement. “We will respect her privacy on her decision, but we had a long talk about it, and it was a hard decision for her.”
While the statement did not reveal Koval’s “personal reasons” for leaving the program, it is known that Mulkey took the extraordinary steps of approaching the 6’5 Ukrainian and attempting to assuage her angst over the signing of the Russian player.
“I want you to understand I’m not here to ask you to change how you feel about Russia,” Mulkey told Koval, according to The Advocate. “I’m just here out of respect for your family and out of respect for you to let you know because I know how personal it is for you.
“Know that what I have to do in this business, I cannot make a decision to not recruit somebody that can help our program because of a conflict between two countries.”
Mulkey further shared her vision that Koval and Minaeva would serve as ambassadors, helping to show the possibility of peace between the two warring countries, but that will no longer be the case.