By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — After her tenure at the University of Florida ended in March, Kelly Rae Finley was unsure what her next step would be. Taking a year off from coaching was an option, and that held some appeal for Finley.
Then her friend Aaron Roussell called.
The University of Virginia was searching for a new head women’s basketball coach, and the position intrigued Roussell, who in 2025-26 had led the Richmond Spiders to their third straight NCAA tournament appearance.
In his conversation with Finley, Roussell recalled recently at John Paul Jones Arena, he sought her counsel on how he could succeed at UVA “while still staying true to my character and ethics and everything. And so I picked her brain a little.”
Virginia hired Roussell on April 7, after which he reached out to Finley again. “She’s always been somebody that I’ve known and I’ve respected,” Roussell said, and this time he was looking for more than advice. He hoped to persuade Finley to join the Cavaliers’ staff as associate head coach.
“It was a little bit more of a recruiting pitch to her,” he said.
Unlike Roussell, who’d been head coach at Division III Chicago, Bucknell and Richmond, Finley had extensive experience in Power 4 hoops. Before being dismissed in March, she spent nearly a decade at Florida, serving as head coach for her final five seasons, and she’d also worked at Arizona and Colorado.
“I thought Kelly was the perfect complement for my gaps,” Roussell said.
And now, some 25 years after they met at the Breck School in Minnesota, where Finley was a student and her father, Ray, was a legendary basketball coach, she and Roussell are colleagues at UVA.
“Things have a crazy way of working out just how they're supposed to,” Finley said. “Timing is always everything.”
At Breck, Roussell recalled, he was a “22-year-old JV coach a little bit in awe of [Ray Finley].” Kelly Finley was one of her father’s players, and “even in high school you could tell she had that ‘it quality’ and she was wired differently,” Roussell said.
Roussell and Finley stayed in touch over the years, each tracking the other’s career. “I just really admired how he goes about his business, how he chooses to treat people,” Finley said. “I think that how you treat people is a choice, and he and his family have always been about the right things.”
Finley played first at Northwestern and then at Colorado State, from which she graduated. She didn’t plan to follow her father into coaching, but then an opportunity arose for Finley to become a volunteer assistant on Kathy Delaney-Smith’s staff at Harvard.
After meeting with Delaney-Smith, who had recruited her as a player, too, Finley called her father to tell him the job didn’t pay anything and that she’d turned it down. “And he said, ‘Well, tell her you’re staying. I’ll ship you your stuff.’ ”
Thus began a coaching journey that’s led Finley from Cambridge, Mass., to Boulder, Colo., to Tucson, Ariz., to Gainesville, Fla., and, now, to Charlottesville.
Asked how a coach with no salary could afford to live in the Boston area, Finley smiled. “Work really hard,” she said.
Finley nannied for four families with special-needs children in addition to assisting Delaney-Smith, and her responsibilities with the Crimson soon grew. Midway through her first year at Harvard, Finley took over as the program’s recruiting coordinator, a job for which she felt wholly unprepared.
One of the assistants on the Harvard men’s team then was Kenny Blakeney, who’s now the head men’s coach at Howard. “I remember going to Kenny and saying, ‘Teach me how to do this job,’ ” Finley said.
“He kind of laid out how they had done everything previously, and so he really was instrumental in teaching me how to recruit. And Kathy was really instrumental in teaching me how to be a good coach and how to focus on the things that really matter.”
Finley remains a relentless recruiter.
“I love the relationship piece of this,” she said. “I love seeing young women grow and achieve their dreams and progress in whatever their aspirations are. I like getting to know people. People make the place, and genuine, real, dynamic people are just really fun to be around.”
Finley’s personality “is full of energy, and she's a tireless worker,” Roussell said. “So I think those are the first two things that jump out. But because she's such a good human being, she has great relationships with others, and so I think her network is massive. She's lived all over the country, she's worked all over the country, so she has connections everywhere. I think that helps at a place like Virginia, where I think we can be a little more national in our recruiting.”
In 2017, Finley left Arizona, where she was an assistant coach, to join the staff at Florida. She spent two seasons as an assistant coach before being promoted to associate head coach in May 2019.
Named the Gators’ interim head coach in July 2021, Finley was elevated to head coach in February 2022. She compiled a 93-75 overall record in her five seasons leading the program.
For three of Finley’s years in Gainesville, her colleagues in the athletic department included Shannon Wells, who’s now the head volleyball coach at UVA, and they’re still close friends.
“She’s the best,” Wells said of Finley.
When Finley arrived in Gainesville, Wells was associate head coach for Florida’s volleyball team. She was also the Gators’ recruiting coordinator and liked to see what tactics her counterparts in football and basketball were using in their pursuit of talent.
“I always felt like they were pretty innovative in what they were doing,” Wells said, “and when Kelly walked in, I introduced myself, and there was just an instant connection. We just really were able to bounce a bunch of ideas off of each other. And so when the opportunity came that she was going to possibly look at UVA, that's exactly where my mind went. I was like, ‘Wow, our recruiting is really going to step up.’ ”