AUSTIN – It was a routine move during a typical shootaround before a meaningless game. On Dec. 27, 2023, the Texas Longhorns were conducting a light workout a few hours before their home game against Jackson State. Rori Harmon, their All-American junior point guard and Big 12 preseason player of the year, was leading a press break drill. As she pushed the ball upcourt, Harmon attempted a simple in-and-out move, one she had completed thousands of times. She planted her left foot, pushed to her right, planted her right foot, pushed forward…
She feld a sudden, searing pain in her right knee. She heard a pop. Then she crumpled to the floor. “As soon as it happened, I knew what it was,” Harmon says.
Texas coach Vic Schaefer was standing a few feet away from Harmon when she went down. He was pretty sure he knew what it was, too, but like everyone else in the gym, he clung to a glimmer of hope that he was wrong. An MRI the following day confirmed what everyone feared: Harmon had torn the MCL and ACL in her right knee. She was done for the season. Schaefer called Harmon into his office and gave her the bad news. She sobbed for 45 minutes.
Harmon is a model of composure as she revisits that awful sequence some nine months later. She is sitting in a meeting room in Texas’ practice facility. Two small dot-shaped scars decorate her surgically repaired knee. The emotional scars remain, too, although they are harder to see. “Now that I’m nine months post-op, I can look back and say, wow, that kind of went fast, but there were parts of that journey that were not fast at all,” she says. “I just hated that I couldn’t do the thing that I love to do every day.”
The Longhorns did well to put together a terrific season without Harmon – going 33-5, winning the Big 12 tournament title and reaching the Elite Eight, where they lost to N.C. State — but now that Harmon is healthy again, they’re poised to have a season for the ages. Five of the team’s top seven scorers return from last season, and Schaefer has added a recruiting class that includes a pair of McDonald’s All-Americans in Jordan Lee, a 6-foot guard from California, and Justice Carlton, a 6-foot-1 forward from Texas, as well as 6-foot senior guard Laila Phelia, a transfer from Michigan who averaged 16.8 points, 3.6 rebounds and 2.0 assists last season. Texas will open the season ranked No. 4 in the AP Top 25 heading into their season opener on Nov. 10 against Southeast Missouri State. Whether Texas can fulfill those lofty expectations and claim the school’s second NCAA championship, and first since 1986, will depend largely on whether Harmon can stay not only healthy, but also recapture the form she showed before she crumpled to the floor. “There aren’t many two-way guards who impact the game the say she does,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma tells Hoops HQ. “If she’s 100 percent healthy, that absolutely makes them a championship caliber team.”
Auriemma should know, given that he had a close-range view of one of Harmon’s final games last season, a 27-point, 13-assist masterpiece that spurred then No. 10 Texas to an 80-68 win over No. 11 UConn on Dec. 3. Harmon also helped to hold Huskies star Paige Bueckers to just 13 points, prompting Auriemma to call her “the best player we’ve played against this year, by far.”
After Harmon went out, Schaefer moved 6-foot-1 freshman forward Madison Booker to the point. Booker became the first freshman to win Big 12 player of the year while also winning the Cheryl Miller Award, which is given to the nation’s best small forward. Now that Harmon is back to run the point, Booker will return to her natural position of small forward, giving the Longhorns arguably the top perimeter duo in the country.
Asked whether Harmon has recovered completely from her injury, Schaefer expresses cautious optimism. “That’s the million dollar question,” he says. “Physically, she’s going to be healthy. The question is the mental piece of overcoming how painful it was when it happened. That’s the part she’s got to get past.”
Schaefer is hoping that Harmon’s competitive spirit will carry her through. That edge is what appealed to him when he was coaching at Mississippi State and Harmon was carving up defenses for Houston’s Cypress Creek High School. Schaefer knew it would be difficult to pry Harmon away from her family, but when he got the Texas job in the spring of 2020, that calculus changed. Harmon, in turn, liked that Schaefer’s teams have long been defined by their defensive tenacity. “We always say, we recruit a fit,” Schaefer says. “She was a fit.”
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Eden Laase’s rankings for Week Four. Two new teams break into the top 10.As a freshman, Harmon lived up to the hype and then some. The highlight came during the Big 12 tournament, where she averaged 22.0 points and 4.3 assists over three games and committed a total of zero – yes, zero – turnovers while leading the Longhorns to their first championship since 2003. She was named tourney MVP and was the runaway choice for Big 12 freshman of the year. Harmon continued that run through her sophomore season, after which she was named first team all-conference and was awarded the league’s Defensive Player of the Year, and through the first 12 games of her junior season, when she was leading the country in assist-to-turnover ratio (6.64) while averaging 14.1 points and 7.8 assists.
Like her coach, Harmon can be volatile, especially after she makes a mistake, but after she got hurt she had to call on a quality that has never been her strong suit – patience. For starters, Harmon had to wait three weeks for her MCL to heal until having surgery to repair her ACL. She wasn’t even able to sit on the Texas bench during the games because of her crutches.
She finally had the surgery on Jan 17. The following day, a nurse asked Harmon if she could lift her leg a couple of inches. She couldn’t. That was the first indication of just how long her road to recovery would be. Eventually, Harmon was able to move to the bench and serve as a de facto assistant coach. The coaches gave her a notebook with the words “Coach Harmon” printed on the front, and she jotted her notes dutifully. She did her best to maintain a brave face, but inside she was suffering. “The first couple of months were tough,” Harmon says. “I purposely scheduled rehab during practice so I wouldn’t have to be there.”
As the season went on, Harmon shared details of her rehab on Instagram. She was soon deluged with Direct Messages from strangers who had likewise gone through injuries or similar bouts of adversity. Harmon also learned to be more open with friends, family, and teammates, which was not in her nature. “I talked to my parents, talked to people around me,” she says. “It’s just really hard for me to talk about my feelings, but during that time, I was like, I will literally sink into a hole if I don’t.”
On the flip side, watching all those games from the sidelines gave Harmon an invaluable basketball education. “It was kind of like watching film,” she says. Schaefer has noticed the change. “In my mind, she’s become even more coachable,” he says. “She’s like her coach – she lives and dies with every possession – but now that she’s been sitting over there with me for a year, she understands things a lot better.”
Harmon continued to attack her rehab through the spring and summer. The first time she was able to do a simple single-leg squat, she felt like she won a national championship. She gradually returned to the court for individual and small group workouts, and was cleared for full contact practices on Oct. 18. Harmon has received a medical waiver from the NCAA that granted her a redshirt year and will thus allow her to play again next season. However, she is projected to be a top-10 WNBA draft pick. If she has the season she is capable of having, this will likely be her last go-round in Austin.
If that’s the case, it could be a very well-timed exit. Texas will be playing its first season in the SEC, the powerhouse league that has claimed the last three NCAA championships (two by South Carolina, one by LSU). The Longhorns’ roster is teeming with talent and Schaefer is among the elite coaches in the country, but in the end, this team will go as far as Harmon takes it. That’s a lot of pressure, but after the year Harmon has had, she welcomes that kind of stress.
“I don’t want us to be comfortable,” she says. “I like playing against the big dogs, because if you’re not, then you can’t say you’re good. I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m going harder. I’m not going in saying, oh, we’re gonna win a national championship, but I do fear for other teams.”
