TCU women’s basketball is going viral.
There’s the video of Hailey Van Lith overcome with emotion, crying and hugging her coach. There’s Sedona Prince, putting up near-triple doubles with 20 points and 20 rebounds. There’s the win over Notre Dame, when the Horned Frogs overcame a double-digit deficit for the best win in program history.
Suddenly, people care about TCU.
In between film sessions, practice and trying to grab a bite to eat, Coach Mark Campbell fields phone calls in his car. Madison Conner and Taylor Bigby sit stoically in front of a laptop screen answering question after question on Zoom after Zoom.
Suddenly, TCU is a top-10 team. But there’s nothing sudden about the program’s rise. It goes back three seasons, with three separate, unusual sets of circumstances shaping the wins and losses. And even before that, you can trace each of the players back to their previous stops.
Van Lith spent a difficult season at LSU, falling out of favor after being heralded as one of the country’s top guards. Prince was out of basketball and living in San Diego. Conner was languishing on the Arizona bench, never playing more than 15 minutes a game. Bigby tried two different programs, and at both stops was reduced to a catch and shoot player when she felt she had more to give.
Everyone needed a fresh start and Campbell was there to give it to them.
“We joke and call ourselves CPR U,” he said with a laugh.
The players, the program – they’re all going through a cardiopulmonary resuscitation of the basketball variety. And it’s giving them new life.
The Horned Frogs started the season unranked. Now, after beating then-No. 12 N.C. State and then-No. 3 Notre Dame, they’re undefeated, ranked ninth in the country and staring down a meeting with the defending champion South Carolina Gamecocks on Sunday. The moment feels like a sudden whirlwind, but the journey was a long process. Now that everyone else is here, paying attention to TCU, the Horned Frogs are caught between wondering what took so long and reminding themselves that the season has just begun.
“We have a little chip on our shoulder,” Conner told Hoops HQ earlier in the week. “We know the talent that we have within our group, but it’s also like, ‘OK, it’s cool that we are ranked and it’s cool that we are getting all of this attention, but it’s December. We can’t be happy about December. March is what matters.’”
When Campbell was named head coach on March 21, 2023, playing in the NCAA Tournament was a far-away goal. He inherited an 8-23 squad that went 1-17 to finish last in Big 12 play. The biggest headline associated with that team was an on-court fight on Dec. 6, 2022, where three Horned Frogs were ejected. Meanwhile, Campbell was starting his head coaching career at Sacramento State. He spent eight years on Kelly Graves’ staff at Oregon, playing a crucial role in recruiting players like Sabrina Ionescu, Ruthy Hebard and Satou Sabally, before embarking on his first head coaching gig. It took him just two seasons to go from a losing record to the program’s first NCAA Tournament appearance. Then, TCU called and Campbell had another program to turn around.
He immediately hit the transfer portal, bringing in Prince, Conner, Agnes Emma-Nnopu from Stanford and Jaden Owens from Baylor. Recruiting players to Fort Worth was the easy part. Campbell is a people person, something that comes across instantly when he answers the phone, or shakes hands hello.
“He’s just a good individual,” Bigby said. “He’s genuine, which is a word that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to head coaches, but he really is.”
Women’s College Basketball Top 25 Rankings
Eden Laase’s rankings for Week 11. Ohio State slides and three new teams move in.The Horned Frogs began the 2023-24 season with the best start in school history, opening at 14-0. Then, chaos ensued. Owens suffered a season-ending injury. So did Prince. Conner missed time as well. One by one, more players got hurt. Then, less than a month after its 14th win, TCU was forced to forfeit back-to-back games because it didn’t have enough healthy bodies. “Everyone’s thinking, someone in the universe doesn’t like us, someone’s out to get TCU,” Emma-Nnopu said at the time. Eventually, Campbell held open tryouts and added four walk-ons so his squad could finish out the season.
“That experience laid a foundation of grittiness and toughness in this group,” he said. “So even with injuries, even with adversity, it ended up being a great season. Then, you springboard it to this year, we added some more kids out of the portal. Now we have depth and all of the pieces fit.”
Van Lith was the headlining piece of his puzzle. Campbell had recruited her out of high school when he was at Oregon, and even after her arduous season at LSU, he still regarded her as one of the best guards in the country. He also believed that at TCU, she could become even better. He approached Van Lith’s recruitment the same way he does every player. “I don’t have a sales pitch,” he said. “I just think transparency and realness works really well.”
He was right about Van Lith. One of her biggest critiques when entering the portal out of Louisville was that she lacked skills as a facilitator. Her assist to turnover ratio hovered around one-to-one at Louisville and as a junior she averaged more turnovers (3.7) than she did assists (3.2). But at TCU, Van Lith is a passer. She still has that same scorer’s mentality — and 19.4 points per game to show for it – but Van Lith approaches the game differently. When she drives to the hoop it isn’t an all or nothing. Now, she probes and finds the best option, her eyes darting around the court instead of being focused on the rim. Van Lith is averaging 6.6 assists per game (double her previous average), just 1.7 turnovers and for the first time in her career, she recorded double-digit dimes in the win over N.C. State.
That was when the viral video took place. In the video, Van Lith can be seen crying, while Campbell hugs her. The two can be heard talking about her assist numbers, but according to her coach, it was about much more than just stats.
“Those were tears of joy,” he said. “That is a young person who is happy and comfortable in the environment she’s in. She’s playing basketball at a high level and having fun doing it. That was Hailey letting her guard down.”
Van Lith’s experience is not unique among the TCU players. During her two seasons at Oregon, Prince averaged 9.9 points, 4.4 rebounds and 1.4 blocks per game. This season, those numbers are up to 19.4 points, 10.8 rebounds and 4.3 blocks, with the best game of her career coming against Notre Dame. Prince finished with 20 points, 20 rebounds and 8 blocks to help TCU defeat the Irish.
Other transformations are more subtle. In high school, Bigby was able to handle the ball and impact her team’s offense in a variety of ways, but at both of her previous programs – Oregon and USC – the junior guard was told to be a catch-and-shoot player. At TCU, Bigby is free to showcase her versatility. “(Campbell) has pushed me to get back to what I was before I got to college,” she said.
Conner had never operated in a pick-and-roll offense before coming to TCU and originally she struggled coming off screens. Campbell spent hours cutting film of WNBA, NBA and college players coming off a pick and roll and he and Conner poured over it in his office. “Guess what she’s great at now,” he said with pride.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Campbell said. “Watching them get their confidence back, their swagger back, get their joy for basketball back. It’s really, really rewarding.”
That’s why the Notre Dame game meant so much. It was a 40-minute representation of each player’s journey. They came in with confidence, but part way through found themselves in a seemingly insurmountable hole. Then, each player looked deep within themselves and within each other. They made a comeback, just like they’d done for their own careers, but this time, they did it as a team.
Now everyone is back in the spotlight. All eyes will be on the Horned Frogs when they play No. 3 South Carolina on Sunday and despite their rocket-ship rise to the top of the college basketball world, the Horned Frogs will certainly be the underdog.
“They’re the best program in the country,” Campbell said. “Our kids are going to go in there with a humble spirit, but they’re going to go in and believe we can win this game. There’s no question about that.”
Part of that confidence comes with experience. The Horned Frogs are one of the oldest teams in the country, with everyone falling into the 21-24 range. Most of them are on their second or even third program. They’ve played teams across conferences and at every talent-level. They’ve also done the song and dance that comes along with being on a team. They’re a “sisterhood,” Bigby says, but there’s none of the fake closeness some squads feel the need to project.
“We like each other a lot and when we hangout, there are no cliques, but we don’t feel the need to be together 24/7,” Conner said. “We chop it up in the locker room, but then it’s like, ‘Alright I’ll see you guys again in three hours, let me go have some time to myself.’”
Conner says the Horned Frogs act more like a professional franchise than a college team. They run a pro-style offense, and each player has her own identity which Campbell encourages to flourish. “I treat them like pros,” he said, “But they are still kids to me.”
Kids that needed a coach who believed in them. One who pushed them in different ways, while also teaching them when to pull back. Since coming to TCU, Bigby has started journaling and Conner has learned to take days off when she needs them. Van Lith feels comfortable enough to cry in front of a camera.
Most of the Horned Frogs are reaching the end of their college careers, but for Campbell and TCU, he hopes this is just the beginning.
“We are here to build one of the best teams in the country,” he said. “We want to attract the elite-level kids, whether that’s out of high school or from the portal. We’re doing that, we are playing a fun brand of basketball, so the sky is really the limit.”
Campbell has dominated the portal in the last two seasons. But it wasn’t his intent to field the oldest team in the country. The intent was to build a competitive team and then a competitive, long lasting program.
“My thought process was always survival,” he said. “You approach it one offseason at a time, one team at a time.”
One game at a time. Right now, that’s South Carolina. Whether or not the Horned Frogs can beat the Gamecocks, on Monday, Campbell will collect his team and together, they will look to survive another day. They’ve already made it this far.
