When longtime Old Dominion women’s basketball coach Wendy Larry resigned on Tuesday, it didn’t come as a surprise. Athletics director Wood Selig announced several weeks ago that he was not going to extend her contract beyond the 2011-12 season.

Larry, who was an assistant on the great Old Dominion AIAW national championship teams that featured Nancy Lieberman and Anne Donovan in 1979 and 1980, got the Lady Monarchs to the NCAA title game in 1997 and as far as the Elite Eight in 2002.

But that’s a lifetime ago in the rapidly pressurizing world of big-time women’s college basketball. Even at Old Dominion, which had dominated the Colonial Athletic Association until recently, the wishes of a new AD have resulted in a rather quick and contentious change at the top. After 24 mostly winning seasons as head coach at her alma mater, but no NCAA appearances sinc 2008, Larry will see out that last year in a fundraising role.

Selig, who replaced the venerable Jim Jarrett, one of the most passionate ADs for women’s college basketball shortly after the advent of the AIAW era and after it was ushered into the NCAA age, is operating in a very different time. He stepped down from his position on the NCAA women’s basketball committee last year to take the Old Dominion job, which came with a new football program that Jarrett had created in one of the most competitive mid-major conferences in the country.

Larry’s departure wasn’t a pretty one, and is the latest casualty in a busy spring clearance of coaches whose careers have dated back to AIAW times. Debbie Ryan of Virginia and Naismith Hall of Famer Van Chancellor at LSU also were edged out, also unwillingly but a little more gracefully, replaced by younger coaches with fresh recruiting success.

The notables remaining from that pre-NCAA era can essentially be counted on less than both hands: Pat Summitt of Tennessee, Vivian Stringer of Rutgers, Tara VanDerveer of Stanford, Andy Landers of Georgia, Sylvia Hatchell of North Carolina, Jim Foster of Ohio State and Gary Blair of Texas A & M, who last month, at the age of 65, became the oldest coach to win an NCAA title.

In the last decade and a half in particular, the stakes in major women’s college basketball have grown dramatically higher. More schools are getting ambitious about the sport, which has been a good thing, although parity at the very top levels of the game remains elusive. With those ambitions have come bigger salaries — in some cases, astounding pay checks — along with more intense pressure to win. That in turn has ratcheted up a recruiting scene that doesn’t have as deep a talent pool as the men’s game.

And the usual suspects are again scoring big in the current chase for the best high school stars: UConn, Tennessee, Stanford, Duke, etc. Texas, which is desperately trying to elbow its way back into the national picture, had its heart broken last week when a coveted in-state recruit reneged on a verbal commitment and after considering UConn, said she would play at A & M.

What have you won for me lately?

The realities of these greater demands have become enough of a concern that for the last few years, the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association has scheduled roundtable discussions at its Final Four convention to address issues of work/life balance. The money is alluring, but, says WBCA chief executive officer Beth Bass, it also comes with a much steeper price:

“You have to be careful what you wish for. You have to be careful of the devil at the bottom of the wishing well. . . . You’re going to be held to the same standard as on the men’s side. We have make sure we’re ready to go for what comes with that.”

What’s required to be an accomplished head coach while trying to raise a family recently prompted Arizona State’s Charli Turner Thorne to take an unpaid leave of absence for all of next season so she can devote more time to her three young sons.

Not only is that an unprecedented move given her employment at a school in a BCS conference, but Turner Thorne is still in her 40s. She’s one of the younger ones. She’s also richly successful, with nearly 300 wins in 15 seasons, including an Elite Eight finish three years ago.

She’ll miss the first season in the expanded Pacific 12 Conference, which is basking in the glow of a new $3 billion TV contract with ESPN and Fox Sports, the richest ever for a college sports conference. As that was being negotiated, commissioner Larry Scott, formerly the head of the Women’s Tennis Association, said women’s basketball could turn a profit — someday. After the jaw-dropping terms of the new media deal were unveiled, including the addition of a Pac 12 Network, Scott also called it a “turning point” for women’s athletics because of the massive boost in exposure that’s certain to come.

While he acknowledged this development may take years — decades seems more likely — Scott must address first the lack of competitive balance in what has been the Pac 10 and the lowly attendance numbers that have come with it, even at powerhouse Stanford.

But at least he’s stating something that’s rarely heard in his lofty circle of college athletics. He’s raised a very high bar, but it’s one well worth talking about and pursuing at all levels of the sport. Perhaps he can persuade ADs in his conference and elsewhere to do more than just throw money at the game. They need to put more of what I like to call “emotional” support into it, much like Jarrett did at Old Dominion, before money became the element it is now.

Marketing, promoting, boosting attendance and concerted efforts to make women’s hoops a little more commercially viable are lacking, and have been for years. The aggressive young coaches who are getting the plum jobs — and the money and the pressure to win — are in prime position to improve the product, and to broaden its appeal off the court as well. It’s the only environment they’ve known.

Yet the downside of this — the loss of loyal, dedicated coaches like Larry who have struggled to keep up — also needs to be acknowledged. The women’s game is changing — on balance, I think for the better — but some of its finest ambassadors are feeling just than a little more than displaced.

As I wrote during the Women’s Final Four, there’s growing media interest in some of the astonishing pay scales for a growing number of top women’s college basketball coaches.

During that same weekend in Indianapolis, there were quite a few coaches taken aback by the news that UCLA coach Nikki Caldwell was jumping to LSU after just three years in Westwood, where she had developed a Top 10 program while earning an annual salary of around $300,000. On the bayou she’ll pull down $700,000 per annum with incentives taking it to $900,000.

There are no typos or extra zeroes in that last sentence. The commas between those zeroes are placed correctly.

Caldwell reportedly turned down an offer from Virginia, ostensibly to stay at UCLA, and was seen greeting fellow coaches at the Final Four in what turned out to be her final days as the leader of the Bruins. On the same day the semifinal games were to be played at Conseco Fieldhouse, she had traded in her sparkling light blue and gold attire for purple and gold threads (a move which has West Coast women’s hoops blogger Sue Favor thoroughly disenchanted).

At the bottom of his Monday column, Shreveport Times LSU beat writer Glenn Guilbeau asks a question that likely will persist as this trend escalates:

“Still it is somewhat alarming and mysterious that a coach of a non-revenue sport like women’s basketball, which for the most part has not been very popular here, would make more money than the coach of the immensely popular sport of LSU baseball (though not this season) and as much as LSU’s two football coordinators.

“ ‘There’s a whole series of things that sometimes are hard to explain to me,’ LSU chancellor Mike Martin said. ‘We pay football coaches more than athletic directors, and we pay athletic directors more than chancellors. But a lot of it has to do with the market and the fact that we now have a very strong long term investment in women’s basketball. She is certainly a first-rate coach.’ ”

While “the market” for elite women’s coaches figures to grow, where is any semblance of a plan to try to produce a nominal amount of revenue, or at least try to draw better crowds? Despite being one of the best women’s programs in the country — including five consecutive Final Four appearances between 2004-08 — LSU has struggled to get a consistently good home draw.

LSU has already gotten busy trying to reverse that. Caldwell’s telegenic likeness has already been plastered in a billboard campaign underway in Baton Rouge, and that’s a good sign. The school has a very marketable, attractive and dynamic coach who is being paid a generous salary to procure and develop talent and put a winning product on the basketball court. I don’t doubt that the former Tennessee standout will do this, especially in a part of the country that is awash with talent and the kind of football cash not only to compensate her but also to fund her program.

It’s also encouraging that more athletic directors want to be ambitious about women’s basketball and build winning programs. Hence, the increasingly high value placed on the best coaches “the market” has to offer.

But as Final Four weekend stories by Bloomberg and USA Today also illustrate, the sport is one of the biggest money guzzlers in college athletics. Even UConn, which unlike other women’s programs has its own media deal with Connecticut Public Television, is reporting losses and lower crowds, even with the fabulous Maya Moore matriculating.

The stakes in non-revenue college athletics — men’s and women’s — are rising, and so with this comes the demand for the money to pay for them. Women’s basketball is funded as if it were a revenue sport, but the reality is that at far too many schools there’s not enough “emotional” support beyond the money. UConn coach Geno Auriemma sledgehammered this point during the NCAA tournament last year, accusing too many ADs of not caring about the sport at all, dispensing just enough money to keep Title IX hounds at bay and little more:

“What has to happen is that enough athletic directors and university presidents need to make more of a commitment to the women’s game so they will put more pressure on their coaches to coach better. They don’t put enough money into the programs to demand from their coaches that they play at that level.”

Well, that’s certainly changing, isn’t it?

Perhaps the growing expenditures will prompt some ADs to get serious about maximizing their investment. At future hiring press conferences, I’d like to see them also outline how their departments plan to market and promote the program, offer ticket packages targeted beyond the sport’s fan base of seniors and younger families and get the community more interested in women’s basketball.

Some people I’ve spoken with who are involved in the business and marketing side of the women’s game doubt that separate media deals for women’s basketball, at the school, conference and national levels, will ever come to pass. The women’s NCAA tourney package that includes other non-revenue sports (and that expires after next season) probably cannot stand on its own.

So the pattern of “insane jack” being paid to major conferences in new football TV deals will have to become even more insane. And even if attendance grows, revenue for women’s basketball will be paltry because tickets remain at bargain prices. That Caldwell billboard also advertises season ticket packages ranging from $50 to $125.

What isn’t talked about with any kind of candor in the sport is why the women’s game isn’t more popular, even during the NCAA tournament, in spite of so much television exposure and the money that’s being fed into it. But that’s a topic for another time.

For the time being, I’d like to expand on Guilbeau’s question to pose this one:

How high does “the market” for coaches become in a sport that does not, and probably will not, produce any serious revenue?

Because while the laissez-faire ideal may be handsomely rewarding the likes of Nikki Caldwell, the real economics of this sport reflect a far more troubling, and possibly unsustainable, reality.