TCU women hosting March Madness for 1st time after Campbell got Prince, Van Lith to join him

By Canadian Press on March 20, 2025.

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Sedona Prince remembers the conversation with Mark Campbell right after he became TCU’s coach, when he convinced the center to join him in a program that had just gone 1-17 in Big 12 Conference games.

On Friday, two years to the day after Campbell was named TCU’s coach and two days after a contract extension through the 2029-30 season, the second-seeded Horned Frogs (31-3) host a women’s NCAA Tournament game for the first time.

“Hey, we could rebuild this. I believe in you, we can do something very, very special here,” Prince said Thursday, recalling and always believing what Campbell told her. “But still, it’s like really, really hard to really fully believe that and understand that, like we could actually do something like this where we’re sitting right now.”

Back then, Prince was rehabbing from reconstructive elbow surgery after a torn ligament ended her three seasons at Oregon when Campbell was a Ducks assistant. She was admittedly 30 pounds overweight and hadn’t even really touched a ball in more than six months.

The Big 12 regular-season and tournament champions play FDU (29-3), which swept the Northeast Conference titles and has a school-record 22-game winning streak. Seventh-seeded Louisville (21-10) takes on 10th-seeded Nebraska (21-11) in the other first-round game in Fort Worth.

“It’s a unique blend of enjoying the moment and enjoying the opportunity and the excitement that’s around it and the feeling, but staying just completely locked in,” Campbell said. “The good thing is we’ve got an old veteran group that has been in a whole bunch of these battles, and there is nobody in that locker room that wants this journey to end.”

TCU, already with a school record for wins, takes a 10-game winning streak into its first NCAA appearance in 15 years. But these Frogs have plenty of tournament experience with Big 12 player of the year Hailey Van Lith and Prince among 11 transfers on the roster.

This is the fifth NCAA for Van Lith, who went to her fourth Elite Eight last season with LSU. She had three that included a Final Four with Louisville, a potential second-round opponent for the Frogs.

Agnes Emma-Nnopu was on Stanford’s 2021 national championship team as a freshman and went to another Final Four there, while Madison Conner (at Arizona) and Prince (at Oregon) have both been on three NCAA tourney teams. Taylor Bigby reached the Elite Eight with USC last season, when Donovyn Hunter did the same with Oregon State.

“I always knew what was coming for this team,” Van Lith said. “You just look at who we have as a staff, personnel on paper, and then you combine that with what happened when we all met each other and the chemistry that came from that immediately. I’ve never really doubted for a second that this was where we were headed.”

Facing a former player

Louisville coach Jeff Walz, now in his 18th season with the Cardinals, was a young assistant in his first season on Nebraska’s staff when Amy Williams was a senior guard for the 1997-98 Cornhuskers.

They now coach against each other in the NCAA Tournament.

“Just full of energy,” Williams, now in her ninth season coaching her alma mater, said of Walz. “The passion that you see … it’s incredible to watch the way that that just has not diminished at all. But certainly as a young assistant coach, he had that fire.”

Louisville last season lost in the first round for the first time in 16 NCAA appearances since 2006. The Cornhuskers got their first tourney victory since 2014.

“Still be willing to bet she’d win a Horse game with anybody on her team right now,” Walz said. “Amy has been around basketball her entire life. Coaching is part of the family and it has not surprised me that she has had the success every place she’s been.”

Streaking Knights

FDU coach Stephanie Gaitley is in the NCAA Tournament with her fourth different team. This group is pretty special.

The Knights already have set a school record for wins and haven’t lost since an 83-58 setback at instate foe Rutgers on Dec. 11. They were 2-12 last season after losing their NEC opener before going on to a third-place finish in the league.

“I knew, because I’ve done this a long time, that the kids stayed together. It was just a great group of kids, and I knew that we didn’t lose them during that stretch,” Gaitley said. “They all wanted to come back … I knew something special was brewing and was coming around in the summer.”

Gaitley has 727 career wins over a four-decade career. This is her second season at FDU after previously going to the NCAA with Richmond, Saint Josephs and Fordham.

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AP March Madness coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness and https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-womens-college-basketball-poll and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25

Stephen Hawkins, The Associated Press