Longhorns' harmony comes from Rori

The energetic point guard leads Texas into the Final Four Friday night.

Rori Harmon, Texas guard

The economy-sized guard is disappearing from every level of basketball these days, deserving of a mournful Sarah MacLachlan song. There just isn’t much daylight on today’s courts, either vertically or sideways.

Fortunately for Texas, Rori Harmon brings her own LED panel.

Although Madison Booker is the headline player, Harmon leads Texas into the women’s Final Four Friday night against UCLA. She is 5-foot-6, which means she’s closer to basketballs that are loose on the floor, many of which she liberates. Harmon has 105 steals in 38 games this season, along with 241 assists. She is the program leader in both categories, and is the only player in women’s college hoop history with 1,500 points, 900 assists, 350 steals and 600 rebounds. And when Texas handed UCLA its only loss, 76-65 in November, Harmon unfurled a scoring touch, getting 26 points with her five assists.

In that game, Texas held Lauren Betts to four-for-eight shooting. Since then Betts has been the game’s ultimate weapon, and that stumble against Texas remains the Bruins’ only loss. With undefeated Connecticut meeting South Carolina in the other bracket, this is a Final Four that could have been penciled into reality months ago. The average victory margin in the Final Eight games was 23 points.

Texas’ only national title came in 1986, when the Longhorns were 34-0 and coached by the pioneering Jody Conradt. That team beat USC, 97-81, and held Cheryl Miller to 2 for 11 shooting. Fran Harris and Clarissa Davis were the headliners, along with Kamie Ethridge, whose team assist record is the one Harmon broke. Conradt’s last Final Four was 2003, and Vic Schaefer came from Mississippi State in 2020, after two other coaches had gotten Texas near the hump but not over it.

Schaefer’s Bulldogs had ended a 111-game win streak by Connecticut in the 2017 Final Four. When Texas came calling, Schaefer had already reached his allotted number of hours on Mississippi State’s athletic department airplane, trying to recruit Harmon from Houston. Harmon was leaning toward Baylor when Schaefer came to Austin. She became his point guard from the first practice of her career, all the way through a stress fracture in her foot and then an ACL tear, which she suffered in a shootaround before a game with Jackson State, and into last year’s Final Four, where Texas lost to South Carolina in the semifinals.

But it isn’t the numbers, it’s the light. Harmon has never believed in hiding it under a bushel, or pretending she isn’t having the time of her life. She hurls herself onto the floor to get a tie-up that redeems the possession arrow for Texas, and then she blinds the opposition with her smile. She is also a demonic presence on defensive in-bounds plays, even after the most routine layups.

“People on this team want to play defense because they see her play defense,” said Booker, earlier this season. “We want to play like Rori.”

“I want to be the epitome of Texas basketball,” Harmon said. “When you think about Texas basketball, what do you think about? Do you think about defense, about a player with discipline and passion and focus?”

Since Schaefer and Harmon joined forces, Texas has won 158 games and lost 29, and Harmon was 44-0 in her last 44 games at home. It’s been five years, yet Schaefer still remembers when his freshman proved there was steel behind the smile. At the 2022 Big 12 tournament, Harmon scrambled to get in position for contact with Baylor’s NaLyssa Smith, who was the league’s player of the year. Smith is 6-foot-4. The bigger the tree, the more firewood. Harmon took the charge in full, and Smith went to the bench with her third foul, and Texas went on to win that game and the entire tournament for the first time in 19 years. The little general was the tournament MVP.

“She steps in and gets run over by a freight train,” Schaefer said that night.

“If something is challenging one day but you really love the game of basketball, it’s not a chore anymore,” Harmon said. “It’s the perspective of looking at something a different way. Not as a chore, but something you get to do.”

But there were days, and games, when the labor was hard. Schaefer gave Harmon all the responsibiity and, thus, all the blame if an offensive possession went haywire. Schaefer reminded her that she could dodge such responsibilities if she wanted to play the 2-guard position, which neither he nor she wanted. And Harmon would get no privileges whatsoever if she neglected defense.

That, Schaefer said, was never a problem. “She picks your ass up at the city limits and she shows you the door when you’re done playing,” he said.

Schaefer, like Harmon, stays in character. When his players aren’t confrontational enough defensively, he’ll say, “I could read a newspaper in the space between you and her.” When he’s teaching them to jump out on screens, he throws his hands up and out, wanting them to be “like Batman.”

But when Vanderbilt spanked the Longhorns, 86-70, on Feb. 12, he was more fiery than folksy. Schaefer accused his players of having “no heart” and said they “whine and complain” too much.

That’s pretty much the daily message from UConn’s Geno Auriemma, but it was a bit of a shock to people around Schaefer’s program and some of the players themselves. “We didn’t like the words he said,” Booker said, “so we went out and changed it. We wanted to make sure that he never, ever again said through his mouth and his lips that we didn’t have heart. Because we honestly do. But we all heard he was a very hard coach before we came here, and we still came here because that didn’t scare us.”

The players listened harder when the truth came from Harmon. “I’ve been here five years,” she told them. “The standard is (holding teams to) 60 points. Y’all ain’t living up to the standard.”

Texas wore out Michigan, 77-41, in the regional final, so Schaefer had lots of time to contemplate. He was born in a hospital across the street from Erwin Center, the Longhorns’ former basketball home. Even though Texas’ incoming recruits are ranked best in the country by those who purport to know, Schaefer gave Harmon an unusually long hug when Monday’s blowout was over.

“Whenever this thing does end, it’s going to be different for the old ball coach to be walking into the gym after five years, and Rori isn’t going to be there,” he said.

Leaving a championship banner would be Harmon’s way of staying forever. And her flag would be as big, or small, as anyone else’s.