If anyone knows how difficult it is to develop a basketball program into a consistent championship contender, it is Texas women’s basketball head coach Vic Schaefer.
“I’ve said this a million times. The only thing harder than building it is sustaining it,” Schaefer said.
On Sunday, after the Longhorns’ Sweet 16 win over Kentucky to advance to its fifth Elite Eight in six years under Schaefer, this sentiment again appeared in relation to Texas’s upcoming Elite Eight opponent: No. 2-seeded Michigan.
Wolverines head coach Kim Barnes Arico has adopted a contender before champion mindset for her team, urging a process-oriented thinking that has paid dividends. Michigan is making just its second Elite Eight appearance in program history, but also its second in the last five seasons.
Schaefer’s trajectory at both Mississippi State and Texas parallels what Barnes Arico is shaping at Michigan. He knows the toll that competing at the highest level takes.
“It’s tough to live in that neighborhood consistently year in and year out,” Schaefer said. “We all embrace it. We all love what we do and who we do it with, but the fact of the matter is this isn’t easy. Winning is really hard.”
Before he was hired by Texas, the Longhorns spent over a decade on the outside looking in.
Between legendary head coach Jody Conradt’s retirement in 2007 and Schaefer’s arrival in 2020, Texas made just one Elite Eight appearance in 13 years. It suffered double-digit losses in all but three of those seasons.
But now, Schaefer has returned Texas to the national prominence that Conradt launched and maintained decades ago.
“That was my charge, to try to get them back to that elite level,” Schaefer said. “So for me, I’m all in. I was all in at Mississippi State. I’m all in at Texas. And I knew that when I took the job. … I knew what the expectations were, and I wanted that. I embraced that.”
Schaefer first met Conradt in Dallas right after he took his first head coaching job at Sam Houston in 1990 when, in his eyes, he was a “green,” young coach.
When Texas came calling 30 years later, he felt it was essential to have Conradt’s blessing and support. Growing up in Texas and being present in the sport for decades, it’s never been lost on Schaefer how much of a legacy Conradt left, not just in Austin, but on women’s basketball as a whole.
And maybe to his surprise, his players are aware too.
They understand the sky-high expectations that come with representing Texas, especially in a program built on Conradt and her famed 1986 team. They embrace the privilege that Conradt is still part of the program as a special assistant in the athletic department.
“I feel her presence,” graduate guard Rori Harmon said. “I feel that national championship presence. It’’s that undefeated (1986) season presence around us. … To feel her energy all the time, that’s something I think we need as a team. The historical, traditional runs at the University of Texas, that’s really good. We really take pride in our tradition here.”
Schaefer, Harmon and company still have their work cut out for them to live up to Conradt’s caliber. But a win against Michigan on Monday will be an important step toward doing so.
Advancing to another Final Four would bring Texas even closer to reaching the pinnacle of women’s basketball, something not done at Texas since Conradt’s days or yet in Schaefer’s head-coaching career.
“As a team, we all feel very locked in and we don’t want it to end right now,” Harmon said. “I think that’s the type of urgency that you’re seeing and what you saw in yesterday’s game. We’re just going to keep playing as hard as we can and leaving it all out on the floor.”
