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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Kellie Harper, back in her element.

Missouri’s first-year women’s basketball coach spent Wednesday afternoon in familiar territory, doing the rounds at Southeastern Conference media days.

Harper’s reunion began just a few minutes after landing on the Birmingham tarmac — she knew the shuttle driver from her days coaching at Tennessee — and continued as she took questions from former SEC Network colleagues on the event’s main stage.

Asked what attracted her to Mizzou, Harper pointed to the university’s administration, her pre-existing knowledge of the state from her tenure at Missouri State and her ability to bring in the coaching staff she wanted.

“Then, the last thing,” Harper said, “I’ll be honest with you. This. The SEC.”

She gestured around the Grand Bohemian Hotel ballroom that holds the event, where conference logos adorned podiums, microphones, backdrops and plastic cups.

“I’m very familiar with what we’re up against,” she said. “I get it. There’s something to that. This is home for me.”

Harper, whom MU hired in March after deciding not to renew Robin Pingeton’s contract, is back in the industry after a year away. Tennessee let her go after the 2023-24 season, and Harper wound up spending the next year as an in-studio analyst for the SEC Network.

Now, she’s a just a few weeks from tipping off her first season rebuilding the Tigers. Missouri hosts Central Arkansas at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 3 for Harper’s debut.

In the meantime, she’s installing something new for Mizzou players. Harper wants to play a quick-moving, aggressive style of basketball.

“We do want to play fast,” she said. “A lot of people hear that (and) think, ‘How fast can you run up the floor?’ That’s part of it. What we’re also trying to do is teach our players how to think quickly, how to react quickly, how to make reads quickly. I think that is where playing fast should help us down the road.”

That particular learning curve means different drills in practice.

The drills were going to look different anyway, with a whole new coaching staff in place, but now they come with added challenges like 12-second shot clocks for the offense.

“Most teams say that they want to play fast, but you can’t just say (it),” point guard Abbey Schreacke, one of five returners from last season, said. “You have to actually do it. For us, that means sprinting to your spots, getting there faster. When somebody gets a rebound, we’ve got to get that ball over to our point guard, and we’re pushing the ball and looking up the floor, looking for the next play.”

“We have some growing pains,” guard Grace Slaughter, another returner and MU’s leading scorer last season, said, “whether it’s turnovers or just getting used to it. But it’s been a lot of fun.”

The hope, it seems, is that speed will help Mizzou keep up once SEC play rolls around in January. The Tigers have won just five league games across the last two seasons, so that’s the most obvious place for Harper to make an inroads.

Her ultimate task at MU is to get the program back to the NCAA Tournament, where it hasn’t been since 2019 in Sophie Cunningham’s final season. It doesn’t need to happen immediately, and Harper isn’t over-prescribing expectations for Year 1 in Columbia.

“Sometimes that can be really challenging,” she said. “... As we go, as we get a little bit further, we can maybe set some goals out there for this team. Right now, we’re trying to be the best we can possibly be and see where that takes us.”