After several seasons of seeing her biggest dreams get dashed in the postseason, Columbia head coach Megan Griffith hadn’t fully processed what had happened when she sat at a podium on Wednesday in Wichita, Kansas, wearing a WBIT championship shirt. And when she was asked how she planned to celebrate, she took a beat to decide.
“We’re gonna paint Wichita red, I think?” she told reporters. “Is that it? Paint the town red? That’s what we’re gonna do. I don’t know, blue?
“I think we’re painting it Columbia blue tonight. I don’t know. We’re gonna have fun. That’s all I know.”
The fourth-seeded Lions earned that celebration by beating top-seeded BYU 81-64 in Wednesday’s championship game. Columbia led by as many as 27 points and held off a frantic BYU comeback in the fourth quarter.
The win capped the Lions’ dominant run through the WBIT: In their victories over St. John’s, North Dakota State, California, Wisconsin and BYU, they led for 190 minutes and 44 seconds, or 95.4% of the time. They trailed just 1.6% of the time. And they won by an average of 23.4 points per game.
Those final five games were the most complete stretch of the Lions’ season — the goal for any coach. After winning a third straight regular-season title in 2025, Columbia graduated Kitty Henderson and Cecelia Collins, two of the most impactful players and leaders the program has ever had. The 2025-26 roster was young, with just two seniors and eight underclassmen. There were five juniors, but only two had been with the program throughout the two previous seasons.
The Lions had an uneven nonconference season, starting 4-4 before rattling off five straight wins. Then Cornell upset them in historic fashion to begin conference play. Columbia regrouped with two impressive wins over Princeton, but losses to Penn and Harvard put another regular-season title out of reach.
Then the Lions fell to Harvard again in overtime in the Ivy League Tournament semifinals, which was the final blow to their NCAA Tournament hopes. After that loss, a devastated Griffith questioned whether her early-season decision to pull back a little from her usual hard-charging style had been counterproductive.
“I was so dialed into being the most patient coach I could be,” she said. “… Look where it got us. So part of me is like, ‘Maybe I should have gone a little harder and faster.’”
But the Lions knew that the loss to Harvard wouldn’t end their season, and they kept dreaming about lifting a trophy. Immediately after the loss, senior guard/forward Perri Page told reporters, “We are winning the WBIT. I can tell you that right now.”
“We knew that we had made our bed, almost, and this was what was next for us,” senior forward Susie Rafiu told reporters on Wednesday about the aftermath of the Ivy League Tournament. “So … that day, we had our mind set up and had a clear goal in mind.”
“This team had some really big goals, and that’s amazing,” Griffith said on March 24, after wins in the first two rounds of the WBIT. “… I always say this to them: If your dreams, if your goals don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.”
That doesn’t mean it was easy for the Lions to turn the page. Griffith said on Wednesday that the weeks surrounding the Ivy League Tournament were probably the toughest of her career as she tried to cope with her own emotions and those of her team. But the Lions seized their new mission and wouldn’t let it go, knowing it was all they had left.
As they chased a different prize than the one they’d originally wanted, they also had to adjust to new lineups. Junior starters and point guards Marija Avlijas and Fliss Henderson both missed the entire WBIT with injuries, so sophomore guard Mia Broom and junior forward Hilke Feldrappe moved into the starting lineup.
Columbia got bigger with the 6’3 Feldrappe on the wing, and Broom and junior guard Riley Weiss — the Ivy League Player of the Year and the conference’s top scorer — shared the point guard duties. Broom generally brought the ball up and navigated pressure, and Weiss directed a lot of the offense off the ball.
“She’s our mind,” Broom told reporters about Weiss after Monday’s semifinal win over Wisconsin. “… So I know that even though I might be bringing the ball up a lot, I can always check in with her, like, ‘What play are we running?’ and stuff like that.”
Weiss embraced the challenge of expanding her game and being a more vocal leader, and Broom was a breakout star in the tournament. Before the WBIT, Broom had averaged 6.6 points, 2.6 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1.5 steals in 22.6 minutes per game. In the tournament, she averaged 17.4 points, 6.2 rebounds, 5.0 assists and 2.4 steals in 36.2 minutes per game.
“Mia’s been a dog,” Page said on Sunday, ahead of the semifinals. “And I think she also has been pushing the pace in our offense a lot more and really looking early in transition. … And then just also being a great energy giver. That’s always a great way for us to stay connected on the court.”
“I think I just got a lot of confidence from my [teammates], especially Marija and Fliss, helping me throughout the entire tournament,” Broom said after Wednesday’s game. “… I learned that I’m a tough player.”
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As the Lions pursued their new mission, they found an extra level of cohesion on the court. That was what Griffith had long thought was missing during the season: Her team would be connected 80% of the time, but sometimes the players would drift apart when things got hard.
Not in the WBIT.
Importantly, that cohesion came from the players. Griffith has long said that any truly great team of hers has to be player-led, not coach-led. That was the key difference that separated her championship teams from the rest.
Late in the season, the players doubled down on holding players-only meetings the night before games to review the scouting report. Kitty Henderson had started holding those “chalk talks” weekly in the 2024-25 season, and co-captains Page and Rafiu put their own stamp on them this season. The players continued the meetings throughout the WBIT, knowing they had to be dialed in.
“We tried to implement that kind of in the second half of Ivy League play,” Page said on March 12. “It’s just kind of getting with our positional groups and just talking about … what we need to follow and execute the game plan, but also … stay more locked into it as well and understand why we do those things.”
“We have the game plan; we have the strategy,” Griffith said on Wednesday of the coaching staff. “But when they’re taking that over and making it their own and making the adjustments in real time, that’s when you know you have a real team.”
Throughout the WBIT, Avlijas and Fliss Henderson coached their teammates up from the sidelines. Page and Rafiu also took their leadership to another level — and brought their teammates along. On Wednesday, Page listened intently to feedback from Henderson and first-year Alicia Mitchell at the end of a timeout. Though Mitchell played just 40 minutes all season, Page responded the same way to her as she did to Henderson: “Got you. Got you.”
Armed with that cohesion, leadership and belief in one another, the Lions grew up fast in the WBIT. A team that Griffith had previously criticized for not handling pressure well became a team she praised on Wednesday for being “tremendous” under pressure.
Columbia blitzed BYU right away in the championship game. The Lions led by 11 points just 9 1/2 minutes in and by as many as 19 in the first half, despite some foul trouble that prompted Griffith to play lineups she’d never or almost never used.
“This is what this tournament has been about is [our] strength in numbers,” Griffith said. “… They all practice and work so hard for this. … I think we have the best culture in the nation, and every single one of those players is a testament to that.”
Weiss and Broom led Columbia on Wednesday, with Weiss setting the standard early and Broom delivering late. Weiss had 20 points — 16 in the first half — along with seven rebounds, four assists and two steals.
“Really impressed with [Weiss] and how she just scores kind of in a quiet way,” BYU head coach Lee Cummard told reporters postgame. “You watch it on film, and it’s quiet, and then you come out here and you look up and … it’s like, dang. We knew she could score, but dang.”
Then Broom, who battled foul trouble in the first half, had 14 of her 23 points in the second half. She added six rebounds, four assists and two blocks on the night. And she made nine of 10 free throws, one more than the entire Cougars team.
“Broom was just solid. They were a completely different team in the first half when she went out with three [fouls],” Cummard said. “… And Broom just kind of stepped to the line and just buried everything, just kind of buried us.”
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The ultimate test of Columbia’s growth came in the fourth quarter, when BYU forced 11 Columbia turnovers and went on a 13-0 run to pull within 9 points. The Lions took a few timeouts in that span and emphasized keeping their cool, which they call having “blue heads.”
“Having our bench repeat that to us, having our coaching staff repeat that to us, I think really settles us,” Weiss told reporters postgame. “… It reminds us to be where our feet are, take a breath, and we know how to break a press. It’s just bodies.”
After BYU clawed within single digits, Rafiu made a putback for Columbia’s first basket in almost three minutes, and Broom and Feldrappe closed out the game with free throws. Their poise helped Columbia win its first-ever Division I postseason tournament in Griffith’s 10th year at the helm.
The Lions had come within inches of winning their first Ivy League Tournament in 2025 and also made the tournament final in 2022 and 2024. In 2022, they made the WNIT quarterfinals, and in 2023, they lost at Kansas in the WNIT final.
So this year’s WBIT Final Four brought Columbia back to the Sunflower State for some revenge — and if Kansas had beaten BYU in the semifinals, it would’ve even been against the Jayhawks. But the Lions didn’t care who they’d play. They were ready to steamroll anyone.
Broom knew the Lions had done it when she saw the stoic Rafiu crack a small smile as the clock wound down. Weiss took a breath when she heard Cummard tell his team not to foul anymore.
When the buzzer sounded, Griffith immediately strode toward the BYU bench to shake hands. Page and Rafiu embraced, knowing they were ending their careers in the rarest of ways: with a win.
“Me and Perri found each other really quickly,” Rafiu said. “So just finding her was really special to me [with] just all we’ve been through. We’ve been together all four of our years, so … being able to share the moment with Perri was definitely a highlight.”
After they went through the handshake line, Griffith and her staff wrapped their arms around one another near the scorer’s table and bounced up and down in jubilation. The players ran over and bounced, too, as if buoyed by the momentum left over from the game.
Then it was time to get celebratory shirts and hats, in between hugging everyone in sight. Page could barely take a step before finding another teammate to hug, from first-year Shay Shippen to sophomore Marta Jaama to a particularly long embrace with Broom. She made the rounds with most of the coaching staff, too, then raced over to Griffith and hoisted her in the air.
Griffith would later say that Page was the most fun senior she’s ever coached. That’s because of how Page bought in and then showed up in all the biggest moments, including making game-winning baskets against Seton Hall, Harvard, Brown and Cal.
As Griffith tried to absorb the championship win during her postgame press conference, she was asked whether she wanted to revisit the idea that taking things slower with this team had been a mistake.
“It’s hard to say because I think every team needs to come into their own at their own time,” Griffith said. “… But I would say our players, again, [being able] to step up and be the leaders that they were [after Ivy Madness] allowed me, allowed us, to move on and know that it was the right decisions the way that we handled the season.
“Now, of course, you want it to click sooner. I think every coach wants it to click sooner, but this was the process we needed to go through. This was the journey we needed to go on.”
That journey took the Lions from New York to North Dakota to California to Kansas in the WBIT — flying nearly 6,000 miles before they even played in the semifinals. And it took Griffith to a chair at a podium in Wichita, a freshly cut net draped around her neck, pondering how she could properly celebrate something that was so hard-won and so long in the making.
Ultimately, she came back to the connection that propelled Columbia past five teams in a row with the season on the line.
“I want to celebrate with our team. I want to celebrate with my staff,” she said. “I just want us all to be together.”
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