Louisville women's basketball head coach Jeff Walz has agreed to a revised contract that includes an extension through the 2028-29 season, the university announced Friday, hours before the Cardinals open their NCAA tournament run.
Walz in the winningest coach in program history, averaging 27.3 victories per season and compiling a 410-112 record overall since arriving at Louisville in 2007.
"I'm extremely excited about the direction of our athletic department and I am just as excited about our program as I was when I first got here. I am blessed to be surrounded by an amazing staff and to coach wonderful young women who represent their families, our program, the University and the city of Louisville with class and pride," Walz said in a release. "It is the players who have made this a perennially elite women's basketball program. And it's the relationships developed with those players, both past and present, that is most important to me. It's been 15 years of hard work, doing things the right way, that have made this extension possible. My wife, children and I love the University and we can't thank the city of Louisville enough for their support of women's basketball."
Under Walz, a program that previously had never advanced to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament has made it to the Sweet 16 10 times, the Elite Eight six times, the Final Four three times (2009, 2013, 2018) and the national title games twice (2009, 2013), where it fell both times. Louisville also won four consecutive ACC regular season titles from 2018 to 2021 and the conference tournament crown in 2018.
Last season, Walz had agreed to a contract extension that ran through 2028. According to multiple reports, the revised terms of the contract include a bump in his base salary starting at $1.7 million for 2022-23 and increasing each year by $50,000, hitting $2 million in the final year of the contract. In his previous contract, Walz was never to be paid more than $1.625 million in base salary a single season.
Walz's previous stops prior to Louisville included Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska and Western Kentucky.
Louisville, a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament for the third time in program history, hosts No. 16 seed Albany at 6 p.m. ET at the KFC Yum! Center. The Cardinals are seeking to return to the Final Four for the first time since 2018.