CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Jacqui Kalin led the University of Northern Iowa women’s basketball program to many firsts – the first Missouri Valley Conference regular season title, the first MVC tournament title, the first MVC Player of the Year.
So, as head coach Tanya Warren pointed out, it’s only fitting that Kalin’s No. 10 be the first UNI women’s basketball jersey to be retired.
With her family, friends and former teammates and coaches on hand, Kalin watched as her No. 10 was raised to the rafters during a pre-game ceremony Feb. 28 at the McCleod Center before the Panthers defeated UIC, 82-68.
“It takes a village for something like this to happen,” Kalin said during the ceremony. “How special it is to call this place a forever home.”
Kalin began her collegiate career as UNI’s point guard in 2007, culminating her rookie season as MVC Freshman of the Year. After two season-ending injuries throughout the six-year span of her career, she left UNI in 2013 as the Panthers’ all-time leader in scoring (2,081), three-pointers made (265), free throws made (484), free-throw percentage (92%), assists (491), games played and started (136), and minutes played (4,352).
Despite playing just four seasons, Kalin remains the program’s leading scorer and UNI women’s basketball’s lone 2,000-point scorer. She holds the NCAA Division I single-season record for free-throw percentage as a senior (95.5%), and her 92% career free-throw percentage is ranked second in NCAA Division I women’s basketball history.
Saturday’s ceremony was the the third of 19 planned jersey retirements for UNI Athletics in 2026, following the announcement of the department’s jersey retirement program as part of UNI’s sesquicentennial celebration. Kalin’s jersey is the first to be retired for the women’s basketball program.
While she was individually inducted into the UNI Hall of Fame in 2017 and the 2010-11 team was inducted in 2023, Kalin was still surprised when Warren called and told her about the jersey retirement.
“It’s not uncommon for Coach Warren and I to catch up from time to time,” Kalin told The IX Basketball. “So, I answered the phone, and we started chatting about one of their recent games, and I don’t think anything of it. And then she’s like, ‘well, I have to tell you another reason I’m calling.’ And she went ahead and shared the news, and it was very unexpected and extremely meaningful, especially to receive that news directly from her.”
Warren was equally appreciative of making the call.
“It was one of the greatest joys in my life to make that phone call because she has meant so much to our program. Jacqui and I share a special bond; we always have. We’ve stayed in very good contact,” Warren told reporters Saturday. “So to be able to finally make that call was extremely rewarding for me, and just to hear how appreciative she was on the other side of that conversation, and then to be able to be here to witness it.”
A honor well-deserved
Friends and family at a pre-ceremony gathering in the Alumni Suite overlooking the UNI basketball court all had a story to tell about Kalin.
Her sister, Jenna Kalin, spoke of her competitive nature, even at a young age growing up with three siblings in Sioux City, Iowa.
“We had a very competitive family. It didn’t matter if it was UNO or basketball or anything in between. We never liked to lose. There was a lot of intensity on the game front, growing up in a fun way,” Jenna Kalin told The IX Basketball. “We were actually teammates in high school for two years. I’m two years older; I remember when I was a senior and she was a sophomore. That was about the point where she was certainly surpassing me.”
Their mom, Linda Kalin, also recalled everything being a contest.
“I remember at one point the four were playing downstairs in our basement, and I said, ‘dinner’s ready.’ And Jacqui goes zooming up the stairs and said, ‘I won.’ And the other three said, ‘we weren’t racing.’ And she goes, ‘I won, I won and I won,’” Linda Kalin told The IX.
Brittni Donaldson, assistant coach and assistant general manager of WNBA expansion team Portland Fire, also played at Kalin’s alma mater Sioux City North High School and at UNI. She flew in from Portland to attend the ceremony.
“We missed each other by one year in high school, but when we got to UNI, we got two years together because she ended up playing six years here. I was lucky enough to get two years with her,” Donaldson told The IX Basketball. “She is the epitome of what a leader is in every way – vocal leader, leading by example. Jacqui taught me a lot about basketball. She taught me even more about life, and I just cherish our friendship so much. Like even to this day, she’s been a mentor, a guiding light, somebody to look up to, and just a fantastic friend.”
Katelin (Oney) Vandevender, currently an assistant coach at UNI and former teammate of Kalin, agreed the honor is well-deserved.
“I love Jackie. She’s one of my most favorite people. We’re still best friends. We’re family now,” she told the IX Basketball. “She’s one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, super detailed and disciplined and competitive, and just her leadership and all that was incredible. It’s really special just for all this to be happening while I’m still a coach here.”
“There’s nobody more deserving than Jacqui Kalin,” Vandevender added. “I don’t know if anybody will be better than what she did and what she did for this program, and her commitment to this program is unbelievable.”
Everything happens for a reason
Although with COVID rules and the transfer portal it is not that uncommon for student-athletes to play five or six years at college these days, it was pretty much unheard of in the late 2000s.
After suffering her second season-ending injury right before her fifth year began, Kalin made the difficult decision to use her sixth year of eligibility.
“There was that moment, especially because mine, it wasn’t traditional in the sense of I didn’t come in and redshirt my freshman year. I played my freshman year,” she said. “So, then my first season-ending injury came shortly into my second year at UNI and my sophomore season. And that one, you’re still young, you deal with injuries, you keep going. There wasn’t a lot of thought to that one.”
The second season-ending knee injury came off the 2010-11 season – the best season in UNI history. Because she missed her sophomore season, she had one season of eligibility remaining.
“I had probably one of the best summers of my life in terms of strength and conditioning and getting prepared for my fifth and final season. And then I tore my ACL the night before official practice started,” she said. “We had just decided to get in and do a little scrimmage, just to make sure that we were all feeling good and ready to start the season. I had what I felt like was a great preseason, and I was feeling in tip-top shape. So, that one was a different experience; that one was challenging.”
“It was extremely rare to have a sixth year, and it was still only four years of eligibility. But to be a student-athlete for that sixth year, the application process and the waiver process was really, really different than what it is now,” she added. “I remember after tearing my ACL, maybe even before getting surgery, all of these questions coming like ‘are you going to come back for your sixth year? You don’t have to. You’ve had an incredible career.’”
The decision to return wasn’t based on academics as she had already graduated in December 2010 and started a master’s program. So, along with her master’s degree, she decided to write a thesis about the dynamics of male versus female head coaches and how that impacts female student athletes.
“As far as making the decision to stay, it wasn’t school related, because I was already graduating with my master’s in the fifth year,” she said. “I think it was just a matter of I had more. I had more to give. At that point in time, my thought was to continue in the coaching world, if not playing overseas first, then I knew that I wanted to stay around the game.”
“I thought that at the end of the day, no matter what happened, if I came back, I would have an experience and a story that would only help me in life, whether it’s coaching or something else, being able to help others or pass along the experience that I had,” she said. “There’s been other people I know who’ve gone through injuries, and I’ve been able to chat with them, one just less than two weeks ago, as somebody went down with an injury. I was able to reach out and just talk about how you don’t have to know why now, but you will know why one day.
Still has a hand in the game
She won her second MVC Player of the Year her sixth season in 2013 and played a couple years overseas before acknowledging her knees and body were breaking down.
“I don’t want to play to the point where I can’t walk anymore, because the quality of my life in the future is still very important to me,” she said. “I want to be able to hike.”
In 2015, she was given the opportunity to step into a vacant assistant coach position at Drake under head coach Jennie Baranczyk, who is now coach at Oklahoma.
“I really, really appreciated the opportunity she gave me,” Kain said. “When I went through that experience, I had some hesitations in general of reaching the point where basketball had been my entire life. Was I ready to really jump right back into just 24/7? I was just struggling with some of my own things related to mental health.”
“I had realized that at that point in my life, I felt like basketball was starting to take away from me more things than it was giving me, in terms of missing family stuff, and just having the ability to breathe a little bit outside of the game,” she added. “I knew at that point in time in my life, I just needed to take a step back and develop a healthier relationship with basketball.”
She began working at a coffee shop in Des Moines and now lives in Siren, Wisconsin, where she owns a coffee and gift shop, Crosshatch Coffee Co., with her wife, Sarah Kalin.
“About 90% of what we sell in our shop, we make. I roast the coffee. From the food side, we make everything from scratch in-house. That’s what we do all week long,” she said. “Sarah is one of the most talented people I’ve ever met in the artist world. She makes all of our leather goods, all of our pottery. She designs and screen prints, all of our apparel, and then she’s one of a few artists who do the cards and prints and other art that’s in our shop.”
The shop closes down from January-March as Kalin continues to be involved with MVC women’s basketball as a TV broadcast analyst for The Valley On ESPN.
“We have some flexibility, especially being in a small town and sort of creating our yearly calendar, which essentially became built around me, wanting to stay around the game in the capacity that I am through being a color analyst,” she said.
While Kalin is looking forward to returning to Iowa in a few weeks to cover the 2026 MVC Women’s Basketball Tournament from March 12-15 at XTream Arena in Coralville, she enjoys the small-town life away from the game she has built with her wife.
“Never in a million years is this where I thought I’d end up or what I’d be doing,” she said.
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