Hopefully there was nothing flammable in the Columbia locker room at Carmichael Arena in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Thursday, because head coach Megan Griffith delivered a fiery halftime speech. Her team was down by 13 points to Washington in the First Four of the NCAA Tournament, and nothing about how it’d played was good enough.
“They heard what they needed to hear,” Griffith told reporters postgame.
“Coach G knows how to get us riled up,” sophomore guard Riley Weiss told reporters euphemistically. “… She just told us we need to be better, pretty much.”
That halftime speech was enough to snap the Lions out of their funk, and they came all the way back to beat Washington 63-60. It was the program’s first NCAA Tournament win in 38 seasons as a Division I team, sending the No. 11 seed Lions to a first-round matchup against No. 6 seed West Virginia on Saturday.
“This is my home,” said Griffith, who was a three-time captain and 1,000-point scorer for Columbia in the mid-2000s. “And it amazes me what we can do when we have great people understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing. … That’s the greatest reason that I’m coaching is I want to teach these young people how to do hard things together.”
Griffith has been the head coach of her alma mater since 2016, and she has transformed a languishing program into a championship culture. In the Lions’ entire Division I history before Griffith, they’d won just 30.6% of their games, and they’d lost at least 20 games in 14 of 30 seasons.
Now, the Lions have had four straight 20-win seasons and have lost only 10 conference games over that span. They shared their first Ivy League regular-season title in 2023, went to their first NCAA Tournament in 2024 and won their first outright Ivy League title this season.
Last season in the NCAA Tournament, the Lions lost to Vanderbilt in the First Four by 4 points after trailing by as many as 10 in the second quarter. They closed to within 2 twice but couldn’t get the decisive stop or hit the game-changing shot. Afterward, they were disappointed in the result but proud to have gotten the program to the sport’s biggest stage.
This season went even better for the Lions despite graduating guard Abbey Hsu, the program’s all-time leading scorer, in 2024. And when they got back to the NCAA Tournament as one of three Ivy League teams in the field, they felt much more prepared to extend their stay.
“Last year, we were just kind of happy to be here,” junior guard/forward Perri Page told reporters on Wednesday. “Now we know what we need to do in order to execute and adjust.”
Griffith sensed a calmness around her team heading into Thursday’s game, the kind that comes with knowing what lies ahead. In the locker room before the game, she told her players to get into a dominant mindset and focus on the present: “Dominate your next decision.”
It took a half for the Lions to stick to those words, but eventually they got there.
In the first half, they scarcely looked like themselves. They’re known for fluid offense where every player is a scoring threat, but the ball wasn’t moving well and shots weren’t falling. The Lions settled for 3-pointers, taking 15 of their 30 shots from behind the arc, and made only two.
“We were making chaotic decisions — erratic, throwing the ball around, not trusting our process,” Griffith said.
In one particularly telling sequence, senior guard Cecelia Collins gave up an and-one in transition, then airballed a hasty 3-pointer on offense. “Run our offense,” Griffith told her from the sidelines.
Because its shots weren’t falling, Columbia couldn’t press Washington as effectively as it wanted to, getting only 4 points off four Huskies turnovers. Its halfcourt defense struggled, too: It gave up 30 paint points, more than its season average entering Thursday of 28.7 for an entire game. Overall, there seemed to be jitters, despite the Lions’ experience.
The Lions trailed 34-21 at halftime, but as the teams went to their locker rooms, Griffith overheard some Huskies players saying they thought they should be up by 30 points, not 13.
“All right, cool, bet,” Griffith thought. Then she stormed into her team’s locker room.
“I’m like, ‘You’re just getting punked right now,’” Griffith recalled postgame. “‘… This is the game. They think they should be beating you by more.’ And for [my players], I think the sense of pride came back into their heads.”
But Griffith also told her team that whatever the Huskies thought didn’t matter. The Lions had to focus on themselves — and keep what they call “blue heads.”
“Having a blue head is all about clear, confident decision-making, honestly, and trusting,” Griffith said. “And so we kind of wrapped [halftime] up with that, [a] nice little bow, and then came back out ready to attack.”
Senior point guard Kitty Henderson, the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year and a two-year captain, led the charge after halftime. She’d shot just 1-for-8 from the field in the first half, but in the third quarter, she immediately started attacking the Huskies off the dribble, getting in the paint and drawing fouls.
Her defense also helped the Lions’ press slow down the Huskies and get them out of sync offensively. Late in the quarter, she stole the ball on back-to-back Washington possessions, and the second gave her a breakaway layup that pulled Columbia within 3 points. Washington called timeout, and Henderson shouted, “Come on! Let’s go! Come on!” as she gathered with her teammates.
“I just had a lot of fuel coming out of halftime because I knew we weren’t giving them our best … especially me,” Henderson told reporters postgame. “… I just needed to get onto the next thing and started with the defense, and I think we made adjustments. And then from there, I mean, that just fuels everything.”
Columbia won the third quarter 19-11 behind Henderson’s 8 points, four rebounds and two steals in the period.
“Kitty’s an amazing leader,” Weiss said. “She’s like our engine. We go as she goes. … And she’s at her best when she’s being aggressive and looking to score as well.”
From there, the fire spread throughout the team. Less than a minute into the fourth quarter, Henderson stripped a Washington player, crossed halfcourt and found Weiss for an open 3-pointer. Weiss hit it while being fouled, and she landed on her back in front of the Columbia bench. Assistant coach Cy Lippold and several players squatted down near Weiss’ head, leaned toward her and shouted in her face.
Weiss hit two more 3-pointers in the quarter. Her second gave the Lions their first lead with 7:47 to play, and her third helped them keep it. She also helped close out the game by making all four free throws she attempted in the final 18 seconds. In total, she had 14 of her game-high 24 points in the final quarter after having just 5 points at halftime.
“Riley [was] just hitting big shots, wanting the ball, wanting the moment,” Griffith said.
“I just love when Ri plays with confidence. No one can stop her,” Henderson said. “… She’s gotten so much better at knowing when it’s her time, and that was today.”
Page was also a crucial closer for the Lions, even though she didn’t attempt a field goal in the fourth quarter. She had two rebounds in the final 24 seconds and nine overall, seemingly always ending up in the mix when the ball was in the air. And with Columbia nursing a late lead, Page insisted on defending guard Elle Ladine, the Huskies’ leading scorer this season.
All told, Columbia outscored Washington 42-26 in the second half and shot 54.2% from the field. The Lions got 16 points off the Huskies’ turnovers, outrebounded them by three and nearly matched them in points in the paint. They put the first half aside and didn’t let missed shots rattle them — something they’d struggled with at times earlier this season.
The NCAA Tournament experience Columbia had talked about on Wednesday showed on Thursday, at the expense of a team that didn’t have that experience.
“We’re super focused,” Weiss said. “We know we belong here.”
Beyond being yet another first for a program that’s had so many of them under Griffith, the win was also Henderson’s 100th in a Columbia jersey, extending her program record. Henderson is the only senior on the roster who’s played all four years at Columbia (Collins transferred in as a junior), and she has brought guts and grit from her first day on campus.
In fact, when military veterans led the Lions through a training session in only Henderson’s second day of practice as a first-year, one of them told Griffith that he’d never seen someone “suffer as well” as Henderson.
Ever since, Henderson has continued to push the program forward with everything she has. She is the program’s all-time leader in assists and ranks in the top 10 in points, rebounds and steals. And this year, she has become more comfortable telling her teammates when they’re not practicing at a championship level and coaching them up to her standard.
“Wow, what a winner,” Griffith said on Thursday. “What a winner. She’s absolutely my most favorite player I’ve ever coached. … Just the most selfless human and basketball player and leader in this program that we’ve ever seen.”
The bond Griffith has with Henderson and the rest of her players, developed through years-long relationships, is how she knew what to say and how to say it at halftime. She sums up the culture she’s built at Columbia as “Work hard, play hard, love hard,” and though it might not have sounded like it, her halftime speech came from the heart.
“I love these players like they’re my family,” Griffith said. “We spend way too much time with them, but that’s what you do in this crazy profession. … So for me, I know what they need in those moments because I know them. And we’re not just coach and player, but we’re in the fire together. … We love each other and we can trust each other, and it’s ‘No ego, amigo.’ That’s what we like to say.”
After the Lions used that halftime speech to flip the game on its head, they returned to the locker room to celebrate their win. The frustration had been extinguished, and in its place was the exultation of knowing they’d made history.
Weiss and Collins held up a whiteboard showing Columbia’s First Four matchup as their teammates looked on. And Henderson did the honors of slapping a magnet bearing Columbia’s name onto the board — pushing the Lions forward yet again.
