BLOOMINGTON – Tom Crean gave Teri Moren the plaque that sits on the table at one end of her sprawling office inside Cook Hall, Indiana’s basketball practice facility. From her desk, Moren can see it right in front of her, a reminder both of where she’s been, and where she’s taking the program that’s never done what it’s doing right now.

Embossed on the footlong plate is a simple message: “Climbing is easier than hanging on.”

“It’s so hard to put yourself in a position like we have right now, but guess what?” Moren said, asking rhetorically but speaking literally. “At the conclusion of this year, and if things go the way we want and we’re lucky enough to play in another tournament, lucky enough to have another 20-win season, we’re lucky enough to advance in the NCAA tournament how far we don’t know yet, then we’ll return back here and guess what? The stakes get higher.”

Moren’s team enters the Big Ten tournament the No. 4 seed, with a double bye to Friday in Indianapolis. There, the Hoosiers begin the postseason of a winter that has been by almost any measure their most successful in generations. The kind of year other programs in the Big Ten — not least Purdue — have made routine in the past 25 years but Indiana struggled for so long even to imagine.

What this season is not, though, is by accident.

It’s the product of five-plus years of painstaking, not-without-setbacks program building from a coach hired under the most unorthodox circumstances and already more successful than almost anyone else that’s ever held her job.

Tailor-suited for the job

Teri Moren was the coach IU fans dream of, hired into one of the most difficult and unusual situations imaginable.

An Indiana All-Star at Seymour High School, Moren played for Lin Dunn at Purdue, winning a Big Ten title and twice advancing to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament as part of the group that helped Dunn build the Boilermakers into a powerhouse.

She represented so much of what IU women’s basketball should have been, but too rarely was. There might not be a program in Indiana’s athletic department that’s underachieved more, historically, with Notre Dame and Purdue keeping their thumb on the scale in a state and a region loaded with high school talent. The Hoosiers have wandered, frustrated, from one coach to another.

Former IU Athletic Director Rick Greenspan even tried the same approach once, hiring Sharon Versyp, another Dunn disciple, to IU in 2005. She left a year later. For Purdue.

Moren came to Bloomington from Indiana State, and before that from UIndy. Across 20 years at the college level, she has never been a head coach outside the state.

“She played in state. She graduated from a local, regional high school here, having a great reputation in the state of Indiana,” former Indiana State athletic director Ron Prettyman said. “I talked to a lot of people before I hired her at Indiana State. She just had a stellar reputation.”

Moren did it the hard way, inheriting a program in Terre Haute that had lost more games than it had won for three-straight seasons, before its previous coach, her predecessor, was fired midway through the fourth.

After two years at or below .500 in the Missouri Valley Conference, Moren took the Sycamores to back-to-back WNIT appearances.

“She was a hard worker,” Prettyman said. “She cared about her student-athletes. She battled for her program as hard as any other coach I had on staff. I love that in a coach. She was supportive when I had to tell her, not yet, and her response to some of those kinds of things made me want to work all the harder to make her program be successful. …

“Ironically, the week IU called her, she was on a trip to Costa Rica, on a foreign trip, the first one the women had taken in a long time. That was one she battled for.”

Giving IU room to grow

The email announcing Curt Miller’s resignation arrived just before 9 a.m., July 25, 2014. An attached letter from Miller, preparing for his third season in Bloomington, cited “personal health and family reasons.”

Nothing more specific would ever be offered.

Miller looked poised to turn a corner in year three, having increased the Hoosiers’ win total from 11 in his first season to 21 in his second. He’d signed and enrolled a recruiting class that included Miss Basketball runners-up from Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, and the reigning two-time Miss Basketball in Illinois, Tyra Buss.

And in late July, he was gone. His players left for their customary late-summer break without a coach.

Glass hustled for a replacement. Cam Newbauer, then at Belmont and now at Florida, was rumored to be a candidate. So was current Vanderbilt coach Stephanie White, then with the Indiana Fever.

But he settled on a former Purdue guard down State Road 46, one Glass insists now “should” have been a Hoosier long before she was.

Teri Moren represented the potential Glass saw in his women’s basketball program — recruit the state, hard, use that talent as the foundation of a program that could compete at the top of the Big Ten, attracting more and more good players, coaches and results on its way up.

Moren was laying over with Indiana State in Miami on the first leg of that foreign tour when Glass called and offered her the job.

“That whole first year is a little bit of a blur,” Moren says now. “We got here and (players) arrived a week later. You’re trying to get into your workouts and evaluate our skill set, who we have out there, the skill sets they’re going to bring, what we can run, what we can do.”

Moren inherited a roster built around Miller’s emphasis on court spacing and jump shooting. She brought with her the same commitment to defensive fundamentals and toughness she’d learned from Dunn.

Styles clashed. Players found themselves in a system they didn’t sign up for. Coaches tried on the fly to fit their principles around a roster they didn’t construct.

“Where I messed up was, I put the cart before the horse in realizing and failing at the fact that those relationships we weren’t able to develop in the summer, that needed to be done,” Moren said, “and I needed to worry less about offensive schemes, defensive philosophy, and just worry about trying to develop that relationship with those guys in the locker room.”

The result was a 15-16 season, with more instability to follow.

Over the next two years, seven players on Moren’s first Indiana team would transfer or otherwise fail to exhaust their eligibility while in Bloomington. Other arrivals didn’t stick, as Moren and her staff tried to upgrade their roster where their system demanded it.

In her first few offseasons at Indiana, Moren brought in Dunn, a WNBA champion coach with the Fever, to give her old point guard thoughts on her program. For years, an old edict of Dunn’s — “great players make great coaches” — stuck with Moren. Now, her mentor delivered the same message again.

“She would constantly keep saying, ‘You need better players. You need better players. You need better players. That’s how you get this thing to where you want it to be,” Moren said. “We didn’t have the horses quite yet to get in the thick of things.”

Moren also tinkered with her staff, prioritizing assistants who could help her close that talent gap both in recruiting, and in development.

In her second season, IU went to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 14 years, beating Georgia before losing to Notre Dame. In her fourth, the Hoosiers narrowly missed the field but won the WNIT, hosting six home games and playing for a championship against Virginia Tech in front of more than 13,000 fans.

The path wasn’t always smooth. The swathes of transfers engendered public criticism. The two years out of it afterward made the one season in the NCAA tournament look like an aberration. But taking those hits paid off, because they gave Indiana room to grow.

“It ultimately was, I think, a good thing for this program,” Moren said. “Not all of them, but several of the kids we were able to get in here have been why we’ve had the success.”

WNIT run was bittersweet

One of Moren’s greatest regrets remains wrapped inside the pride of that WNIT run.

That season’s roster was anchored by two senior captains, the lone remaining players Moren had inherited when she arrived in 2014.

Amanda Cahill, once a runner up for Miss Basketball in Ohio, would finish her career fourth all-time at Indiana in points scored, first in 3-point field goal percentage, second in rebounds, third in 3s made, fifth in 3s attempted, eighth in steals and 10th in assists. Tyra Buss, her classmate, broke the program’s 34-year-old scoring record, finishing her career with 2,364 points.

“Amanda Cahill and Tyra Buss felt like, ‘Look, I can really latch onto what coach Moren and her staff want to do here,’” Moren said. “I felt like after that first year, they understood the vision and they understood what we were trying to accomplish, and they believed in me, and therefore they stayed, which was a terrific thing for our program.”

Not ending their senior seasons with another NCAA tournament berth still bothers Moren today, but the WNIT run rallied Indiana’s fan base to a rapidly improving program.

The Hoosiers’ first NCAA bid under Moren acted as a recruiting springboard. The buy-in from Buss and Cahill showed other talented players IU could develop and showcase their talents. And the WNIT title gave fans something tangible to attach to the project.

Buss, like her classmates, hadn’t come to Indiana to play for Moren. But during that first season, she tried to put herself in Moren’s shoes.

She’d just left her team too. She’d taken up an immense challenge. These weren’t players she’d recruited, any more than she was the coach they’d committed to. Buss made a point of stopping by Moren’s office every day she could, to get to know her new coach and maybe give Moren just a little comfort in a difficult situation as well.

“I don’t think (transferring) ever, ever crossed my mind,” Buss said.

Instead, she became Moren’s point guard, a team captain and a walking, talking symbol of a new dawn for IU women’s basketball.

In her senior season, Buss said she, Cahill and their teammates harnessed both their disappointment at missing the NCAA tournament, and the power of an increasingly crowded, rowdy Assembly Hall. The WNIT title followed.

Win enough this weekend in Indianapolis, where IU is a top-four seed in the Big Ten tournament, and Assembly Hall might host something even bigger in the coming weeks.

Waking a 'sleeping giant'

When Glass offered Moren the job, he only feared another Versyp moment.

“I’ve got to know, are you going to swear off Purdue, because I can’t look like the biggest dumb--- in the world and have lightning strike twice,” Glass said told her.

That’s why he asked for — and Moren accepted — a specific buyout clause to be inserted in her contract. If Purdue wanted to hire Moren away from IU, it would cost the Boilermakers $10 million.

Moren went about making her alma mater pay in other ways.

From 1999-2016, Indiana defeated its northern rival just six times in 36 games. Since the start of the 2016-17 season, Moren’s third in Bloomington, the Hoosiers are 7-1 against Purdue. They won both meetings with the Boilermakers this season, retaining the Barn Burner Trophy that now enjoys semi-permanent residence inside the women’s basketball meeting room at Cook Hall.

Glass can recount on command numbers that contextualize the most-promising opening for success IU’s ever had in the sport.

Moren will soon be responsible for three of the program’s seven NCAA tournament selections. She’s already got five of IU’s 10 20-win seasons all-time. They’ve all come consecutively, a program record. Coupling Ali Patberg, who transferred in from Notre Dame, with freshman Jorie Allen gives Moren two of the four IndyStar Miss Basketball winners in program history.

“When I was going through the recruiting process, Indiana wasn’t at the top of the Big Ten,” Patberg, a Columbus North grad, said. “They weren’t a national team, and I knew I wanted to win. They hadn’t really established that here, honestly. I came back through the recruiting process a second time and I just felt like that could happen here.”

The same state that helped Dunn turn Purdue into a national force could do the same now for her pupil.

“I’ve always felt like IU was a sleeping giant. There was no reason they couldn’t compete and do just as well as Purdue, and Notre Dame, and Ohio State,” Dunn said. “There’s an enormous amount of talent to draw from. You just needed the right person to grow that program into a national power.”

IU enters conference tournament weekend 23-7, ranked No. 20 in the latest Associated Press poll. Landing a No. 6 seed in two weeks would match the program’s best-ever NCAA tournament position, and best in the current 64-team format. A top-four seed would allow Assembly Hall to host women’s NCAA tournament games for the first time.

“I thought (Moren) had the chops to take us where we really wanted to go, but you never know until it happens,” Glass said. “It’s happening.”

The unrelenting catch-22 of Moren’s job is that a program never stands still. It is either moving forward or backward, always. After this season, she’ll lose Brenna Wise, get Danielle Patterson eligible and go again.

“Teri understands it’s a constant journey,” Dunn said, “and you have to work even harder to sustain that success.”

Every step Moren has taken these past six years has built on the one before it. Progress hasn’t been perfectly linear, but big-picture, it has been undeniable. Moren’s next challenge will be to sustain and grow as both become harder, remembering all the time that climbing is easier than hanging on.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.