UAB can't stop hemorrhaging staff. One day after athletics director Mark Ingram was shown the door, women's soccer head coach Lisa Mann has been confirmed "currently out" — two games into the 2026 season, with a third scheduled for Thursday.
An athletics department representative told AL.com exactly that much and nothing more. No explanation. No interim coach named. No timeline. Just: "We will share more when appropriate." Which, at an institution that fired its softball coach in July following abuse allegations and now can't keep its AD for 11 years, apparently means whenever the fire gets hot enough to require a statement.
A program already in crisis mode
This isn't a one-off. UAB softball coach Taylor Smartt was placed on administrative leave for three months before being fired in July, following allegations of abuse and inappropriate relationships within that program. Ingram, who was overseeing all of this, lasted long enough to handle Smartt's exit before being nudged out himself Tuesday — replaced on an interim basis by men's basketball coach Andy Kennedy, which is its own kind of statement about how thin the leadership bench has become.
Mann is four years into her tenure at UAB, having arrived in 2023 after becoming the first-ever head coach in West Virginia State's women's soccer history. The Blazers sit 1-1 this season — beat Georgia State to open, then lost to Mississippi State on Sunday in Starkville. Not a crisis record, but the timing of her absence couldn't be worse for a squad that now doesn't know who's running training sessions ahead of Thursday's fixture.
For anyone following UAB across any sport right now, the picture is the same: an athletics department mid-collapse, conducting a "national search" for a new AD while its programs operate in varying states of uncertainty. The school can search all it wants — but the harder job is convincing quality candidates this is a place worth inheriting.
"I leave with tremendous pride in what we accomplished together," Ingram said in his exit statement. With a football coach fired during the 2025 season at 9-21, a softball program imploding, and now a soccer coach "currently out" with no explanation given, it's unclear what that pride is pinned to.
