KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Up by two points, with just over 50 seconds to play, TCU needed an insurance bucket.
The Horned Frogs’ opponent, Baylor, had played the better fourth quarter. The Bears were surging at just the right time to complete a comeback in the final moments of the 2025 Phillips 66 Big 12 Women’s Basketball Championship title game.
TCU, on the hunt for the first Big 12 tournament win in program history was determined not to let that happen.
With 53.1 seconds on the clock, TCU guard Hailey Van Lith started her attack. Van Lith, guarded by Baylor’s Jada Walker, skipped one step closer to the 3-point line on the left wing and accelerated into a full-speed drive to the left side of the rim.
In five steps, Van Lith had Walker beat. Van Lith picked the ball up a step outside the paint, planted her right foot just above the restricted area, pushed off her right leg and with her left hand, kissed the ball off the center of the backboard. As the shot gently fell through the net, the TCU fans, players, coaches and Van Lith erupted in cheers as the possibility of a Horned Frogs victory became even more lucid.
It didn’t matter that Baylor’s Aaronette Vonleh hit a layup of her own 37 seconds later. Van Lith’s work in the paint had put the game on ice, and Vonleh’s scoring effort was too late.
When the final buzzer rang, TCU, by a score of 64-59, realized its goal of becoming Big 12 tournament champions for the first time ever.
“That game was everything you hoped for a Big 12 championship,” TCU head coach Mark Campbell told media postgame. “Just so proud of this group and everything they have accomplished. They’re just so resilient and gritty and tough and it’s happened all season over and over. They just find a way.”
Without periodically looking at the scoreboard, it certainly wasn’t obvious that TCU held the lead for 34:42 of the Horned Frogs’ matchup against Baylor Sunday evening. Due to Baylor’s relentless defensive pressure that forced 20 turnovers, the game seemed like much more of a back-and-forth affair than it truly was.
However, while Baylor’s defense found ways to challenge TCU and force them into mistakes, its offense couldn’t keep up. The Bears scored 11 and eight points, respectively, in the first and second quarters on 25.9% shooting from the field.
“Becoming Caitlin Clark” is out now!
Howard Megdal’s newest book is here! “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar” captures both the historic nature of Clark’s rise and the critical context over the previous century that helped make it possible, including interviews with Clark, Lisa Bluder (who also wrote the foreword), C. Vivian Stringer, Jan Jensen, Molly Kazmer and many others.
Their offense found its groove in the back half of the game, outscoring TCU 40-34 in the final 20 minutes, but the first-half deficit was just too large for Baylor to overcome. Still, the Bears kept fighting, disrupting possession after possession for TCU. They brought themselves back within two with 11 seconds to go and on her team’s last offensive possession of the game, with three seconds left, Vonleh got a solid look from the top of the key to tie the game. The shot rattled around on the rim before bouncing out of the hoop and into the hands of TCU’s Agnes Emma-Nnopu.
“I think it was the easiest way to get a clean look for three. And I’ve seen [Vonleh] make a lot of those,” Baylor head coach Nicki Collen told reporters postgame. “We made her shoot them in preseason a lot and I’ve seen her knock down a lot of them. … It was a good look, and it looked like it was going in.”
Sunday’s tightly-contested game held similarities to the Horned Frogs’ and Bears’ other matchups this season, both of which TCU also won.
In those games, Baylor had to battle back from being down early and managed to close the gap in the final moments. Ultimately though, TCU always came out on top, just like they did Sunday.
“Baylor is a really good team, great coaching staff,” Campbell said. “We have had three great games against those guys. … It’s hard to beat a team three times. Shoot, we didn’t beat them in 35 years, and now we beat them three times this year.”
The win means everything to TCU and Campbell and marks one of the quickest turnarounds of a program in recent history. In the 2022-23 season, TCU won just eight games, only one of which came against a Big 12 opponent. That offseason, the program hired Campbell to take over as head coach.
Using the transfer portal, he built a roster that started 14-0. Then, the injury bug bit. Just weeks later the Horned Frogs were forced to forfeit games due to a lack of available players and held open tryouts just so they could fill out the roster enough to finish the season.
They regrouped and retooled last offseason, adding three players with tournament experience in Van Lith, Emma-Nnopu and Donovyn Hunter. The most eye-catching of the new additions was Van Lith, who was – and still is – one of the biggest names in college women’s basketball. When she first visited TCU, Sedona Prince and Madison Conner made it a point to speak with Van Lith and get a feel for what she wanted in her new team.
“We all three sat down in the conference room when Hailey was on her visit, no coaches, just us,” Prince said. “Her spirit going into the room and talking to her, we were immediately like, ‘We can do something special here, Hailey.’ And the way she spoke to us, she was like, ‘I want to make history, I want to win, I want to be a part of a great team.’
“And that’s when I knew … we’re going to do something special and something people talk about forever. That was the moment for me. I was like, ‘This is it.’”
Van Lith’s impact on this year’s TCU squad was evident from the game’s opening tip. For the game’s opening basket, Van Lith, from the other side of the paint, found Hunter in the right corner, who knocked down a three to break the 0-0 tie 13 seconds in.
Van Lith, the 2025 Big 12 Player of the Year, started slow scoring-wise with just four points in the first half due to the constant double-teams Baylor threw at her. Coming out of the break, she unlocked a new gear and tacked on 16 more for a team-high 20 points on 5-for-9 shooting from the field and a 10-for-10 day at the free-throw line. What Van Lith did Sunday, combined with her performances in the two games prior, earned her the tournament’s Most Oustanding Player belt.
“It’s my teammates really. They make it easy,” Van Lith said during the postgame celebration on the court. “When teams double me, [my teammates] hit shots in the first half, so [Baylor] had to change, and when they (get out of) the double, it’s my turn. Without [my teammates] playing well and doing what they do, [Baylor] would stand in it, so it’s really [my teammates].”
Van Lith’s overt willingness to give credit to those around her is a clear example of the closeness Campbell has built within his locker room. It doesn’t matter that only three of the team’s 14 players started their NCAA careers at TCU. It doesn’t matter that only two of the team’s starters – Conner and Prince, who also made the All-Tournament team – had played together in Campbell’s system before the season started. All that mattered was that each player on the team bought into what Campbell and his staff were trying to do from day one.
“They came to TCU because they wanted to build something and they had a chip on their shoulder and they wanted to hoop and prove something,” Campbell said. “[Van Lith, Prince and Conner] came to TCU, and that’s our whole roster (as well), for the right reasons.”
And in a season, and a Big 12 tournament that all “was about TCU,” according to Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark, the Horned Frogs leaned on each other to reach accomplishments that have never been done down in Fort Worth.
Winning the Big 12 punched TCU’s ticket to the NCAA Tournament.. Whichever way the 68-team bracket shakes out, Campbell says he trusts the selection committee to get it right. And with Sunday’s win, it’s hard to imagine the Horned Frogs anywhere below the No. 2-seed line.
No matter where they end up, TCU is ready to do the work. And if they continue to follow the path they’ve been on all season, there just might be an NCAA National Championship trophy with the Horned Frogs’ name on it.
“Sometimes, you need rain to get to a rainbow,” Campbell said. “Last year, even though it was hard – the Underfrogs is what we coined ourselves – that group was so resilient. … It laid the foundation of hard work and no excuses and not folding and rolling up your sleeves. That foundation that was laid carried over to this. … And that’s why we’re champs.”
