Carlotta Kloppenburg-Pruitt enters her fourth season as Southern Oregon's University's head women's basketball coach in 2024-25, already a two-time Cascade Conference Coach of the Year who has yet to miss the NAIA National Tournament.
On May 20, 2021, Kloppenburg-Pruitt became the 14th head coach in program history after three years as an assistant at San José State University. She has compiled a record of 81-19 in her first three seasons with the Raiders, guiding them to a CCC Tournament championship in 2021-22, regular-season and tournament championships in 2023-24, and appearances in the second round of the national tournament all three years.
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 and fifth in points allowed per game, and fourth, 30th and seventh 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.
