Stephen R. Sylvanie-USA TODAY Sports
Oregon women's basketball coach Kelly Graves over a map of the United States
Oregon’s women’s basketball team isn’t the kind of program that needs to fly across the country for games against a mid-major. However, the Ducks are doing exactly that this week as head coach Kelly Graves continues to check off destinations in his quest to do something no one else at the college level has ever achieved.
It’s been close to three decades since Kelly Graves landed his first gig as the head coach of a women’s college basketball team before kicking off his inaugural season at St. Mary’s in 1997. He spent three years with the Bulldogs while posting the 66-26 record that led to him being poached by Gonzaga, where he remained for 14 seasons.
The 2026-27 campaign marks Graves’ 30th year as the head coach of a college program and his 13th at the helm at Oregon.
The Ducks have punched their ticket to the NCAA Tournament eight times during his tenure (peaking with an appearance in the Final Four during Sabrina Ionescu’s junior year in 2019), and he’ll be hoping to see that number rise to nine in the wake of back-to-back March Madness appearances (both of which ended in the second round).
As a member of the Big Ten, Oregon largely has the power to call its own shots when it comes to its out-of-conference schedule, and it could definitely avoid flying across the country to play against a couple of programs that can’t match its pedigree.
However, Graves has a pretty cool reason for doing exactly that this week.
Kelly Graves scheduled games against Vermont and Maine to get closer to his goal of coaching a contest in all 50 states in America
Oregon opened up its season at 2-0 with wins over Hawaii and Washington State, and the Ducks will be looking to bounce back after getting handed their first loss of the year after falling to Grand Canyon on Monday.
They’ll get the chance to do so against Vermont on Wednesday, November 10th, which is an out-of-conference game for an Oregon squad that will be facing off against the Catamounts in a gym that’s located around 2,450 miles from their campus in Eugene.
According to The Burlington Free Press, Graves went out of his way to schedule the game as part of his ongoing mission to coach at least one college basketball game in every state in America. He’ll get two steps closer this week, as he’ll also coach his first game in Maine when Oregon faces off against the Black Bears in Orono on Friday night.
Graves said his quest stemmed back to a map he has hanging in his office, telling the outlet:
“I have always been fascinated with maps and atlases. I put up a big cork map in my office and started thinking that I should put pins down for all the places I have coached as a head coach.”
The 63-year-old still has some work to do while angling to seemingly become the first coach to achieve this feat, as Maryland, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Nebraska are among the seven states he’s yet to visit while doing his job.