Western Kentucky could still be playing basketball this week.

Although neither the men’s or women’s basketball teams earned bids to the NCAA Tournament or the second tier of postseason play — the NIT for the men’s team, the WBIT for the women — there were pay-to-play possibilities for both programs had the school chosen to pursue them.

Instead, as in past years WKU declined to extend seasons simply to keep playing.

In the case of the Lady Toppers, who finished 23-9 overall and third in Conference USA before falling in the CUSA Tournament semifinals last week, that reasoning was put to the test by a team that enjoyed plenty of success this season. But the NCAA Tournament only took one CUSA team, automatic qualifier Liberty, and the NCAA-run WBIT only took CUSA Tournament runner-up Middle Tennessee.

Two teams behind the Lady Toppers in the standings are in the WNIT field — Louisiana Tech and New Mexico State.

“Historically if you look at all of our sports, we have never played in the third-best postseason tournament,” WKU athletic director Todd Stewart said during a news conference Tuesday at E.A. Diddle Arena. “Not just in women’s basketball — basketball has never played in the CIT or the CBI and across the board historically we have just not done that. Also specifically to women’s basketball, that’s a program that has always competed at the highest level and it’s a program that’s been to 20 NCAA Tournaments and a program that’s been to three Final Fours. The goal every year in the NCAA Tournament and 68 teams go to that.

“And then the No. 2 tournament now for women’s basketball is the WBIT. If we had been offered a bid to the WBIT, we definitely would have accepted that. That’s 32 teams. So you take the top 100 teams off the table and then you get into the WNIT. And if you look at the WNIT — and this isn’t meant to disparage any individual team, everybody does what they feel they need to do, but there’s teams in there with losing records, there’s teams in there that are barely .500 and I just don’t think that’s competing at the highest level. I just don’t think that’s what our program has always done. I know that some people probably wish that we had done it, but I also know there are a lot of people that are glad we didn’t so that was really the reasoning behind that.”

WKU likely could have pursued alternative postseason tournament spots in similar pay-to-play events for men’s basketball, but the 17-15 Hilltoppers are also done after losing in the opening round of the CUSA Tournament last week in Huntsville, Alabama.

“That’s another component — obviously if you go to the NCAA Tournament or the NIT on the men’s side or the WBIT on the women’s side, there are a lot of things that are reimbursed and a lot of things that are taken care of,” Stewart said. “With the WNIT, there are not — you have to pay to host a game, and obviously if you go on the road you have expenses. We’ve just got to be smart with our resources too. I mean, we’re in the bottom 25% in the nation among all FBS schools in budget, so we don’t have stacks of cash sitting around here. We have to be smart with what we do and that certainly plays into it.”

While the Lady Toppers put together a strong season, WKU’s men’s program didn’t replicate the success of the previous campaign when the Tops won the CUSA Tournament and reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 11 years since under first-year coach Steve Lutz, who left after one season to become the head coach at Oklahoma State.

Hank Plona, who served a Lutz’s top assistant, was soon elevated to head coach and retained a significant chunk of the previous year’s roster. Injuries ravaged the year’s squad, with key performers Teagan Moore, Babacar Faye and Julius Thedford among those the Tops lost to injury during the season.

“If you look at Steve Lutz’s season, going into the tournament we had won 19 games, but our nonconference schedule — we had played three non-D1 teams and we didn’t play any power conference teams,” Stewart said. “Then if you look this year with Hank we won 17 games, but we only played two non-D1s and we played Kentucky and Michigan on the road. And I think Conference USA this year top to bottom was the best it’s been since I’ve been the athletic director.”

HISTORIC START ON DIAMOND

Stewart touched on a number of different topics during Tuesday’s news conference, with WKU’s base season high on that list.

The Hilltoppers are off to best start in program history winning 19 of their first 20 games heading into Wednesday’s road matchup against Eastern Kentucky. The Tops, winners of 14 straight games, are 18-0 at Nick Denes Field this season. All this, despite the disruption to the program of not having a permanent home this season after the baseball fieldhouse and hitting facility were demolished to make way for the Hilltopper Fieldhouse construction, with the baseball team taking up temporary residence inside Diddle Arena.

Stewart described the program’s success this season as “utterly remarkable,” but said third-year coach Marc Rardin had mapped out this rise when he was interviewing for the job to take over a team that had finished 18-36 and last in CUSA the season before.

“That was a real red flag for some people, but not for Marc,” Stewart said of the planned baseball clubhouse demolition. “Marc never blinked. When I was talking to him and shared our vision for baseball and where I hoped that we could go and what the goals were, he embraced the challenges. It was amazing — he almost welcomed them.”

Despite the on-field success, the Tops have been hard to catch unless fans have been at the ballpark this season. No home games have been broadcast so far, with WKU’s home series against Sam Houston (March 28-30) slated for broadcast on ESPN+.

“Our television arrangement with Conference USA requires us to televise every football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball game that is not part of the conference’s TV package,” Stewart said. ” … So after the football, men and women’s basketball games are selected, then we see what we have left and then we make the decisions on how many games we’re going to do with volleyball, soccer, baseball and softball. Those are usually about the same number of games for each sport and the coaches are given the number games they have and them they choose them.

“In the case of baseball, Marc wanted to do primarily conference games — the Kentucky game we’re doing also, I know, but primarily conference games. We would love to do more. The games that we do aren’t free. WKYU-TV, which is our on-campus production group, they charge us over $600,000 a year to do that games that we’re doing, so again there’s a cost associated with everything. Hopefully we can do more in the future, but that’s why we do what we do right now and how it’s decided.”

FIELDHOUSE UPDATE

Stewart said construction on the new Hilltopper Fieldhouse is on pace for completion with a tentative time frame between September and October.

The $50 million structure will house the football and baseball programs, along with numerous other programs at the school.

In addition to the upgraded facilities for the athletic programs and a permanent indoor workout space for the entire department, Stewart said the Fieldhouse offers opportunities to enhance the game-day experience for fans.

“I think as soon as we’re able to use it in any format at all, we will, and it will get heavy use,” Stewart said. “I don’t know to what extent that this will be the case through the 2025 football season, but certainly moving forward that will be a part of game day. I think that will be a fan-interactive area for football game day. It would be crazy not to utilize that space.”

HELTON’S EXTENSION

WKU and head football coach Tyson Helton agreed on a four-year contract extension after this past season.

The Hilltoppers reached the CUSA Championship game and played in a bowl game for the sixth straight season under Helton.

“Other people were noticing — he had three different schools contact him about openings that they had this past offseason,” Stewart said. “There was a time that I thought we might lose him and that’s just the reality of the business. We look at it like this — if we had lost Tyson, if he had taken another job somewhere else and we opened our job up and we interviewed people and ultimately we announced somebody as our new head coach who had six years of Group of Five head coaching experience, who had been to a bowl game all six years, had won the bowl game four years, had played for a conference championship twice, everybody would probably say ‘Wow, that’s a really good coach. If you can hire somebody like that, you should.’ Well, that’s Tyson Helton. That’s who we have, so that’s why we did the extension.”