Now that the dust has settled on an acceptable — but otherwise unremarkable — football season, we’re free to retreat to climate-controlled locales and discuss other Frog sports as we venture into 2025. Different from other years, which are traditionally centered on men’s basketball to start, all eyes are on the Lady Frog hoopers right now. Women’s college basketball in general has enjoyed contemporary popularity thanks to the star power of athletes like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, both of whom have since joined the professional ranks. TCU women’s hardwood profile arrived for the wrong reasons last season, as a roster decimated with injuries was forced to hold open student-body tryouts to fill their bench, which in the era of professional amateur athletics is one of the signs of a program’s apocalypse.
The shrewdest and most publicized off-season acquisition by second-year Head Coach Mark Campbell was the addition of point guard Hailey Van Lith. The graduate-student transfer has one of the most impressive resumes of any active collegiate player and as much celebrity cachet as any man or woman dribbling in a college jersey right now. The Olympic medalist was tabbed the top transfer player by ESPN rankings, and the splash signing was an indicator that Campbell was staying true to his track record of turning around programs hastily and effectively. Even with last year’s depleted roster, Campbell was able to log the longest win streak in TCU women’s hoops history (14) and secure an invitation and first-round win in the NIT.
That was then, and this now. Despite Van Lith’s star power and impressive stat line, it’s a different player with whom Campbell was able to reconnect and who has proved the most pivotal piece. The difference between a promising squad and potential champion, Sedona Prince — a 6-foot-7 center — is the engine that makes this Frog truck rumble.
Prince has accumulated her own celebrity. Aside from being a dominating baller and the eighth-ranked overall prospect out of high school, Prince became known as a pioneer in highlighting different and unequal facilities and investment between men’s and women’s hoops with her social media presence. The graduate student is playing with her third school. She spent her first year at Texas, where she rehabbed a broken leg suffered while playing for the U18 U.S. National Team, then she transferred to Oregon before graduating and returning to her home state to grace Frog fans with her grit this season.
Campbell was the associate head coach at Oregon for Prince’s first two seasons in Eugene, and their familiarity with each other is benefiting every hoop-head in Fort Worth. The Frog women are 21-2 so far this season. They lost only by three to second-ranked South Carolina and made a one-point whoopsie at Oklahoma State last week. TCU leads the conference and shows no signs of slowing after winning against Baylor to snap a 37-game losing streak against the Bears. During the 21 games Prince has played in, she’s scored more than 20 points on 11 occasions and 30 or more twice. As expected, it’s also a center’s charge to rebound dominantly, which she does with impunity. The Liberty Hill native has 10 double-doubles (10 or more points plus 10 or more rebounds) this season. The team’s anchor even logged 20 and 20 against third-ranked Notre Dame, a win that catapulted her team into the conversation as a bona fide Elite Eight contender. Add in Prince’s 72 blocks for the season on top of her other gaudy stats, and she’s an irreplaceable force amid a team with guard play that’s borderline elite.
Van Lith compiles her own impressive stat lines. The graduate student has scored double digits in all but one game this season and is 13th in the nation for number of assists per tipoff. Both Prince and Van Lith are in the Top 50 for individual scoring averages. There’s also senior Madison Conner. In her second year with the Frogs, she continues her deadly sniper ways. She nabbed TCU’s record for made triples last season and is simply picking up where she left off with 83 so far and shooting a percentage just less than half from behind the arc. Conner logged 16 double-digit stat lines this season, along with three games in which she scored 29 or more. Coach Campbell has managed to fill other holes in the roster from his West Coast connections coaching for Oregon and Sacramento State.
As good as the guard play is, none of this works without Sedona Prince. If you’re an avid Buck U reader — which I really assume no one is, so I’ll expound — you’d know my most common and consistent criticism of TCU men’s basketball is Coach Jamie Dixon’s inability to find and/or retain power forwards and centers. To be fair, they don’t grow on trees, because you’re looking for one the size of one, but it never fails that after a respectable season, with the TCU men trudging their way through a competitive conference and agitating hope among the fan base, the Frogs and their supporters are dashed at the oversized mitts of some lumbering 7-footer dominating the paint in the first round of the tournament. A good coach with a roster equipped with capable big (wo-)men can stymie the run-and-gun style necessary of teams based around talented guard play and shooting forwards.
Prince is the type of player I’ve been hoping the men’s team could nab for years, the baller you ride when outside shooters can’t buy a basket. When nothing is going your way, you need length and grit to bring that basket within reach, which is exactly why these Lady Frogs have the legs to improve upon their Top 10 ranking and compete in the women’s dance far beyond what this program and fans have experienced before.
