Braking: Clemson signs new head coach.

Clemson has officially hired its next women’s basketball coach. The addition of former UT Chattanooga coach Shawn Poppie, who led the Mocs to back-to-back conference tournament championships and NCAA Tournament appearances in his two seasons there, was unanimously approved Tuesday afternoon by the Clemson University board of trustees compensation committee. Poppie, 38, will be the eighth Clemson women’s basketball coach in program history. He replaces Amanda Butler, who was fired March 13 after six seasons.

Poppie will join Clemson on a six-year contract worth $3.375 million in total with an annual average pay of $562,500, according to his contract approved Tuesday. He will make $500,000 in 2023-24, with his annual salary increasing $25,000 annually and topping out at $625,000 in 2029-30, the last year of the deal. Butler, the former coach, was making $475,000 in total salary in 2023-24, according to her contract. That was the lowest annual salary among the eight ACC coaches at public schools who had publicly available contracts,

Poppie was 48-18 in his two seasons leading Chattanooga and directed the Mocs to consecutive Southern Conference Tournament championships and NCAA appearances. Chattanooga was a No. 14 seed in the tournament this year and lost its first round game to No. 3 N.C. State on Saturday. Poppie said in a news release he was “beyond excited” to join Clemson. “It truly has been a humbling experience getting to know why Clemson is so special – it’s the people,” Poppie said. “With the resources in place and everyone moving in synergy together, I believe we can compete in the ACC, the best women’s basketball conference in the country.” Before serving as UTC’s coach, Poppie was a well-regarded assistant for Kenny Brooks at Virginia Tech. He worked there from 2016 to 2022 and spent his last three seasons as an associate head coach as the Hokies emerged as one of the ACC’s top programs under Brooks (who accepted Kentucky’s head coaching job Tuesday).

Poppie is an Illinois native, but he has plenty of ties to the state of South Carolina and the Upstate in particular. He’s a 2007 graduate of Limestone College in Gaffney, where he was an all-conference point guard and set the school record for career assists, and has worked as an assistant at Limestone, USC Upstate and Furman. Poppie will be the program’s first male coach since Jim Davis, Clemson’s all-time winningest coach, stepped down in 2005. He also takes over a Tigers program that’s been struggling since the turn of the century. Over the last 22 years, Clemson women’s basketball has just one NCAA appearance, one NCAA win and one winning season in ACC play while employing five different head coaches.

All of those accolades came during the 2018-19 season, Butler’s first as coach. A former coach at Charlotte and Florida, Butler was fired earlier this month after going 81-106 and 32-73 in the ACC across six seasons. Clemson was 12-19 overall and 5-13 in ACC play in 2023-24 and lost in the opening round of the ACC Tournament to Boston College.

Poppie’s hiring drew praise from various college women’s basketball analysts, including former Clemson player and current ACC Network analyst Kelly Gramlich. Poppie is considered a rising star in the business and reportedly would have been near the top of Virginia Tech’s candidates list to replace Brooks (his former boss) had he not accepted the Clemson job. Poppie also resembles one of the more prominent hires made so far by third-year Clemson athletic director Graham Neff, who said in a statement after Butler’s firing that Clemson would complete a “national search” to find its next women’s basketball coach and that he believed Clemson was “resourced and supported in a way to make this one of the top teams in the nation every year.”

In a news release announcing Poppie’s hiring Tuesday, Neff said: “As we worked through our search process, his name kept coming up in several circles, and the on-court results speak for themselves. He’s coached and recruited at a high level, has experience in the ACC and in the upstate, and we are confident in his ability to get our program to the next level.”