Carlotta Kloppenburg-Pruitt enters her fifth season as the head women’s basketball coach at Southern Oregon University in 2025-26 with a 115-20 overall record, months after being named the NAIA Coach of the Year by the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association.
Kloppenburg-Pruitt is already a three-time Cascade Conference Coach of the Year, a three-time CCC Tournament champion and a two-time CCC regular-season champion. Her teams have yet to miss an NAIA National Tournament.
She became the 14th head coach in program history on May 20, 2021, after serving for three years as an assistant at San José State University. She led the Raiders to at least one NAIA Tournament victory in each of her first four seasons.
Her 2024-25 team went down as one of the best in program history after winning its first 34 games consecutively to set a new team wins record. The Raiders were ranked No. 2 in the final NAIA Top 25 poll with the longest winning streak in the country at any level and went 22-0 in the conference while repeating as regular-season and tournament champions. After winning their first three national tournament games to advance to the quarterfinals, they lost a double-digit lead in their fourth when CCC Player of the Year Morgan Baird went out with an injury.
Kloppenburg-Pruitt's first SOU team was picked to finish fifth in the 2021-22 conference preseason poll but went on to take second with an 18-4 record before sweeping through the CCC Tournament -- a run punctuated by a 56-34 upset at No. 19 Lewis-Clark State (Idaho), where the Raiders held the Warriors to their lowest point total in over 20 years. The Raiders later upset Georgetown (Ky.) in a 10-7 seed NAIA Round of 64 game.
In her second season, the Raiders again went 18-4 in CCC play but saved their most memorable performance for the first round of the NAIA Tournament. Against Wayland Baptist (Texas), they completed the biggest comeback in team history by rallying back from a 29-point deficit for a 68-66 win.
The 2023-24 Raiders earned NAIA Tournament hosting rights for the first time by finishing No. 18 in the Top 25 poll. They ended the regular season on a 14-game winning streak -- clinching the CCC title on the final day with a win over No. 6 Lewis-Clark State, with whom they entered the matchup tied in the standings -- then won their second CCC Tournament championship in three years by defeating the Warriors again. Their winning streak extended to 18 games before a loss to Menlo (Calif.) in the NAIA Round of 32.
Kloppenburg-Pruitt's team have perennially been among the best nationally on the defensive end. In consecutive seasons, they've finished ninth, 15th, fifth and fourth in points allowed per game, and fourth, 30th, seventh and fifth in defensive efficiency. They've also been sharp in the classroom, earning NAIA Scholar Team status every year and ranking ninth on the WBCA Academic Top 25 list in 2023-24.
Kloppenburg-Pruitt – a 2014 graduate of Point Loma Nazarene (Calif.), where she competed for two seasons and earned a bachelor's degree in exercise and sports science – made a few stops on her quick ascent to SJSU. Her coaching career started in the WNBA, where she was a basketball operations intern with the Tulsa Shock in 2012 and '13 and a coaching intern for the Los Angeles Sparks and Indiana Fever in '14 and '15.
At SJSU, Kloppenburg-Pruitt served as recruiting coordinator and was responsible for implementing defensive schemes, developing post players, and composing scouting reports. In 2019-20, her second season on staff, the Spartans had the greatest single-season win turnaround in the country, going from 6-24 to 19-12.
At Winthrop University (S.C.), where she obtained a master's degree in sports fitness and administration, she was a graduate assistant/video coordinator (2014-15) before being elevated to assistant coach (2015-16). From 2016-18, she joined Arizona State's staff as the assistant director of basketball operations and assistant recruiting coordinator.
Kloppenburg-Pruitt was a two-time Academic All-PacWest honoree at PLNU. She competed in her first two seasons at Ventura College (Calif.), where she was the school's Scholar Athlete of the Year in 2012.
She's also part of an impressive basketball lineage. Her father, Gary Kloppenburg, has been an assistant in the WNBA since 2000 and was the interim head coach for the 2020 Seattle Storm team that won the WNBA championship. Her grandfather, Bob Kloppenburg, was a coach in the NBA for 17 years.
Kloppenburg-Pruitt and her husband, Carter (an athletic trainer at SOU), reside in Medford with their daughter, Karstyn.