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Michael Voepel
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, while Rori Harmon — back this season after missing most of the previous campaign with a knee injury — had 13 points and five assists.
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, finished her career with four points and nine rebounds, as Texas did a fantastic job guarding her. TCU guard Hailey Van Lith also saw her five-season college career end, with 17 points and eight rebounds. Both 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. 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.
South Carolina opened as a 4.5-point favorite 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).
Defense was the name of the game all season for Texas, which forced TCU into 21 turnovers Monday night while committing just eight.
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.
ESPN Research contributed to this report.
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