As announced earlier Friday, Iowa women's basketball head coach Lisa Bluder signed a contract extension keeping her at Iowa through the 2028-2029 season. The extension will allow Bluder to widen her career win lead over the rest of the Big Ten — and to make a serious run at becoming only the seventh women's college basketball coach ever to reach the legendary milestone of 1,000 career wins.

The current members of the 1,000-win club are effectively the highest echelon of WBB coaches, with names like all-time wins leader Tara VanDerveer of Stanford, Geno Auriemma of UConn, the late, great Pat Summitt at Tennessee, and C. Vivian Stringer of Rutgers and (of course) Iowa. These are the college basketball lifers, the elder statespeople of excellence, the highest standards by which coaches' careers are judged.

Here's why Bluder has a chance to not only join those legends of the game, but perhaps even clear the 1K mark with (relative) ease.

LISA BLUDER: 850-391 (363-202)
St. Ambrose, 1984-1990: 169-36
Drake, 1990-2000: 187-106 (116-60 Missouri Valley)
Iowa, 2000-present: 494-249 (247-142 Big Ten)

Bluder is 150 wins away from 1,000, or exactly 25 wins per year for the next six years, which is the duration of Friday's announced extension. Bluder has averaged approximately 26 wins per year over the last five seasons at Iowa.

Iowa has become a bit of a unicorn among Power 5 schools in its ability and willingness to retain head coaches, effectively shielding the athletic department from the churn of head coaching failures and rebuilds that plague so many big-time athletic programs.

Of the five* biggest sports at Iowa, the head coaches have been in Iowa City for an average of nearly 17 years; the (relative) newcomer, baseball head coach Rick Heller, has coached nine years at Iowa but 36 overall as a head coach; his job is as safe as anyone's in that list.

*Football, both basketball programs, men's wrestling and baseball; no disrespect to Iowa softball, but it hasn't made the WCWS since 2001 and hasn't made the NCAA tourney since 2009.

Head coaches do have to sustain some level of success at Iowa, of course; noted man of integrity Todd Lickliter only got three years at the helm of the men's basketball program from 2007-2010 before his 38-58 (15-39 Big Ten) record became too much for fans and donors to stomach, even after the embarrassments of the previous head coach's tenure. Similarly, Angie Lee only lasted five years coaching women's basketball between the Iowa tenures of Stringer and Bluder, averaging just 17 wins per season before stepping down.

But those are the exceptions that prove the rule at Iowa, where major-sport coaches have the means to compete for the postseason on a regular basis, and when they do they're rewarded with a level of job security normally reserved for Supreme Court justices and Dalai Lamas.

There, Bluder perfectly fits this athletic department's M.O., now and moving forward, and there is no reason to suspect her tenure in Iowa City will end even one day before she wants it to.

Alongside Iowa's reputation as a destination job for head coaches is its (arguably) equally impressive record of assistant coach retention. Iowa football head coach Kirk Ferentz famously, publicly does not fire coordinators — not that defensive geniuses Norm Parker and Phil Parker ever had to worry about job security. Iowa men's basketball head coach Fran McCaffery has retained Sherman Dillard since being hired at Iowa, and fellow day-one hire Kirk Speraw stayed on staff until his retirement after the 2022 season.

For Iowa's broad legacy as a destination for assistants, though, women's associate head coach Jan Jensen may top the entire list.

Jensen has not only been on Bluder's staff for all 23+ years at Iowa, she was on staff for Bluder's last eight years at Drake (Jensen's alma mater, one of two women to have her jersey retired there). Jensen is widely regarded as one of the top assistants in college basketball, and has recently been cited for her work with post stars Megan Gustafson and Monika Czinano, two lightly recruited and "undersized" bigs who developed into All-Americans at center. Jensen also serves as recruiting coordinator for the program, and was instrumental in landing superstar guard Caitlin Clark as well.

Holistically, Jensen is the perfect complement to Bluder, borne out by their 31 years (and counting) working together. Jensen reinforces Bluder's program culture of togetherness and ownership of success, serves as a well-polished (yet sincere) public face for the program with the press, and appears to be having the time of her life in this role.

This arrangement is crucial to the program's success (how could it not be?) and again, there's little reason to expect it to change now or any time soon.

If the Hawkeyes are going to be a perennial 25-win program after Caitlin Clark's departure, they'll need to keep attracting and developing superstars. Bluder should be as well set up to do that as she's been in her 39 years as a head coach.

Let's assume Clark uses her WNBA Draft eligibility after 2023-24, her first year available to do so. While Iowa fans may not be keen to see her leave a COVID year of collegiate eligibility on the table, Clark's clearly ready for the highest level of competition, and her name recognition/endorsement-earning power shouldn't diminish on the biggest stage — even as NIL certainly helps level the financial disparity between NCAA amateurism and going pro.

While Clark declaring for the WNBA Draft may have a short-term negative effect on Iowa's success (and thus Bluder's chase for 1,000 wins), having Clark in the pros and acting as an ambassador for the Hawkeye program is the sort of endorsement most coaches can only dream of.

It's one thing to land a recruit of Clark's caliber. It's another to harness her limitless energy and determination and help her grow as a leader, teammate, and competitor. When the next great prospect evaluates Iowa, she'll be able to see Clark's close connection with the staff, an athletic department that leverages her star power as well as anybody in women's sports, and an all-time great collegiate career without compromising any of the aspects of Clark's personality that made her singularly great to begin with.

Great players want to stay true to themselves as they pursue the most ambitious goals in their sports. Bluder and Jensen have provided ample proof of their ability to accommodate a force of nature like Clark, even with the close-knit nature of the Hawkeye basketball program.

Lisa Bluder is only 62 years old, and this contract extension will bring her to the brink of her 68th birthday when the 2028-29 season ends. Women's basketball is not yet the domain of younger coaches; VanDerveer is now 70 years old with little sign of slowing down, and Auriemma is 69. Fellow long-timer Bill Fennelly of Iowa State just celebrated his 66th birthday in May, and even LSU's Kim Mulkey is just a year younger than Bluder.

Of course, nobody's health is a guarantee in their 60s; Summitt was just 59 when early-onset Alzheimer's derailed her record-breaking career at Tennessee. Fate holds no bias between kindness and cruelty. But Bluder has been coaching for essentially her entire post-collegiate life (as has Jensen); six more years don't sound as daunting when you've done the job for over 30 already.

As mentioned earlier, VanDerveer is the all-time career leader in women's college basketball wins; she's got 1,186. Auriemma is scarcely behind at 1,180. And while they're eight and seven years older than Bluder, respectively, they're also 336 and 330 wins ahead of her too. Even if Bluder's teams went 40-0 for the next eight years straight (ambitious but unlikely), she'll still be behind pace to catch either coach.

And that's okay.

Bluder deserves immense praise for what she has already accomplished — 850 career wins, good for 15th all-time and 4th among active D-I coaches — while coaching her entire career inside the state lines of her native Iowa, bearing witness from the best seat in the house to the methodical, undeniable rise of women's basketball from sideshow novelty to a titan of college sports with nearly 10 million sets of eyes on the championship game. All without even a mere suggestion of impropriety or embarrassment. If Bluder's career ended tomorrow, it would already be one of the best, most compelling success stories in the sport.

But milestones are great too, and one thousand career wins would be enough to put Bluder right alongside Stringer as not only one of the best basketball coaches in Iowa history, but Big Ten history — and among the 10 best to ever, ever coach D-1/AIAW* ball.

*The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which effectively operated women's basketball from 1971-1982, since the NCAA wasn't yet interested.

Nothing is guaranteed, of course. But the path is most certainly there for Bluder to reach that milestone, and if she gets there it will be a richly deserved celebration.

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