NEW ORLEANS -- By this time, Leon Barmore was hoping to have become familiar with the 19th holes at golf and country clubs near his Ruston home.

Instead, this week he'll meet with members of the media here for the Sun Belt Conference media days. Later, he'll be back in Ruston and back running the Louisiana Tech Lady Techsters basketball team.

	“	(Retirement) is pretty much what I had decided I wanted to do. But after 17 days at home, I certainly had some second thoughts. I get bored very easily. Other than golf, I don't have anything else that I can do. I'm not good at anything else. ”
		— La. Tech coach Leon Barmore

"I saw a lot of my golf clubs this summer," Barmore said Monday, "but I'm beginning not to see them now. We took the staff out and played one day last week. Then I pretty much said, 'Put 'em up. That's it.' "

Last spring, with the Lady Techsters on the way to a seventh straight Sun Belt championship and an appearance in Tech's ninth Final Four, Barmore retired.

Then, assistant coach and former Tech player Kim Mulkey-Robertson, Barmore's logical and anticipated successor, decided to take the head coaching job at Baylor.

Barmore's retirement at age 55 lasted 17 days.

Insiders close to the Louisiana Tech program that Barmore helped build and nurture say Barmore was concerned about the direction the basketball team would take under someone else.

Barmore has his own simple, straightforward explanation.

"There's no complicated story to it," he said. "At the end of the year, (retirement) is pretty much what I had decided I wanted to do. But after 17 days at home, I certainly had some second thoughts. I get bored very easily. Other than golf, I don't have anything else that I can do. I'm not good at anything else.

"I never expected to coach here again. I thought I'd pass it on to Kim, and that would be the end of it. Now, I'm not back for a temporary few minutes. I'm here as long as my health will hold out. We lost a lot of players, and we're short of some bullets."

A 1967 graduate of Tech and a Ruston native, Barmore enters the 2000-01 season, his 19th, with a 520-77 career record but without guards Tamicha Jackson and Betty Lennox, who graduated, and without forward Catrina Frierson, who is out for the season after suffering two torn ligaments in her left knee during an intra-squad scrimmage last month.

It's Tech's last season in the Sun Belt. Next season, Louisiana Tech joins the Western Athletic Conference. And, Barmore says, he expects to be the coach.

"There's a five-year contract on the table, in writing," Barmore said. "The (university) president said 'lifetime.' Heck, my lifetime might be six months. Who knows?"