BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For the first time since 2003, the Texas Longhorns are going back to the women’s Final Four.
The No. 1 seed in the Birmingham Regional 3 wore down No. 2 seed TCU 58-47 in the Elite Eight on Monday night and now heads to Tampa.
Madison Booker, the SEC Player of the Year, led Texas with 18 points and six rebounds, and Rori Harmon — back this season after missing most of the previous campaign because of a knee injury — had 13 points and five assists.
As the closing seconds ticked away, Harmon had her hands on her knees and her head down as she took a moment to reflect on what she and the Longhorns had just done.
“I just was thinking about what I’ve been through as a player,” she said. “To come back from my ACL injury in 10 months … obviously it’s physical and mental. So just to see us get to the Final Four … [it’s] an amazing thing, and I was just really proud of myself in that moment.”
This was Texas’ fourth regional final in the past five years; the Longhorns lost in the previous three to South Carolina (2021), Stanford (2022) and NC State (2024).
Fifth-year senior starter Shay Holle has been at Texas for all of that and was thrilled to finally pass the Elite Eight test.
“I know it means everything to every single one of us,” Holle said.
The Horned Frogs, appearing in the program’s first Elite Eight, end the season 34-4.
TCU center Sedona Prince, who fouled out with 6:32 remaining in what was likely the final game of her college career, finished with four points and nine rebounds, as Texas did a fantastic job guarding her. Prince said afterward that facing Texas, where she had a difficult start to college before transferring, had a negative effect on her.
TCU guard Hailey Van Lith also saw her five-season college career end, with 17 points and eight rebounds.
Both Prince and Van Lith are expected to be picked in April’s WNBA draft.
The last time Texas played in the season’s final weekend, Hall of Famer Jody Conradt was still coaching the Longhorns. They lost to Diana Taurasi and eventual champion UConn in the national semifinals.
Now, 22 years later under coach Vic Schaefer, Texas hopes to add a second national championship trophy to the one Conradt’s team won in 1986 to cap a 34-0 season.
Conradt was one of many happy Texas fans in the stands at Legacy Arena on Monday.
“Coach Jody, she is the standard,” Harmon said. “She has that aura to her. I mean, she laid the foundation for us.”
These Longhorns, in their first season in the SEC, are now 35-3 and will face conference regular-season co-champion South Carolina on Friday. The Gamecocks opened as 4.5-point favorites at ESPN BET.
It will be the fourth meeting this season between the Longhorns and Gamecocks, who split their regular-season games before South Carolina won the SEC tournament final over Texas.
Friday will also mark the first time two SEC teams have met in the national semifinals or later since the 2017 title game, when Dawn Staley and South Carolina beat a Mississippi State squad then coached by Schaefer.
This will be Schaefer’s third trip to the Final Four as a head coach; he also took Mississippi State to the championship game in 2018, losing to Notre Dame. And he was an assistant on the Texas A&M team that won the 2011 national championship.
Schaefer becomes the fifth head coach in women’s NCAA tournament history to take multiple schools to the Final Four, joining Gary Blair (Arkansas and Texas A&M), Kim Mulkey (Baylor and LSU), Marianne Stanley (Old Dominion and Stanford) and C. Vivian Stringer (Cheyney, Iowa and Rutgers).
“I think he deserves it. He puts in the work,” said Booker, a Mississippi native who has known Schaefer since his days with the Bulldogs. “I watched him at Mississippi State, and I’m happy to be part of it at Texas now.”
Defense was the name of the game all season for Texas, which forced TCU into 21 turnovers Monday night while committing just eight.
“I’m so proud of them, how hard they played today,” Schaefer said of the Longhorns. “Anybody that watched that game today when they turned the TV off they had to go, ‘Wow, that freaking team plays their ass off.'”
Texas held TCU to 26.7% shooting after beating Tennessee 67-59 on Saturday in the Sweet 16, a game in which the Longhorns held the Lady Vols to 37.9% from the field and their second-lowest point total of the season.
“When I think about the summer workouts, the conditioning — it’s paying off,” Booker said of the shape the Longhorns have to be in to play Schaefer’s style of defense. “We’ve been through everything … tired, on the ground, in the locker room, gassed out. But these are the moments that you work for … and it’s fun.”
ESPN Research contributed to this report.