It’d been 1,861 days and 13 head-to-head matchups since Texas conquered Baylor when the two programs met in the 2022 Big 12 Tournament Championship.
The Longhorns maintained control with 4:24 left in the first half, forcing a Baylor offense averaging 83 points a night into a 28-21 deficit. A Texas trademark defensive slugfest. After a missed layup, Baylor’s NaLyssa Smith used her 6-foot-4-inch frame to grab a defensive rebound. Smith was Baylor’s lifeblood, the unanimous Big 12 Player of the Year who’d averaged over 22 points and 11 rebounds per game. Now, she raced down the court instead of passing to a guard.
“It sometimes takes one play to change the dynamic of the entire game,” Joanne Allen-Taylor, Texas’s senior guard, said.
Over a year later, the ensuing sequence is still seared into Texas head coach Vic Schaefer’s memory.
Smith led a four-on-four fast-break. Multiple Longhorns had their backs turned to her, sprinting to get into position. Smith sensed a vulnerability and put her head down, driving to beat them to the basket.
She never got there.
At the top of the paint, Smith recognized too late that Texas’s freshman point guard impeded her path, all 5-feet-6-inches of her standing ramrod straight to take a charge. Smith, almost a foot taller than the roadblock, attempted to cross over to avoid fouling. But the collision was inevitable.
“Rori Harmon steps in and gets run over by a freight train,” Schaefer said.
Harmon flew to the ground as a sharp whistle signaled Smith’s third foul, relegating her to the bench. With Smith out of commission for the remaining half, the Longhorns built a 39-28 halftime lead off a Harmon buzzer-beating layup and never wavered. Texas won its first Big 12 Tournament championship since 2003.
That night, Harmon earned the Big 12 Championship Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player Award. It was a legendary three-game stretch - 66 points, 13 assists and zero turnovers. But the gaudy stats don’t define Rori Harmon, the basketball player. The willingness to take a charge on someone 10 inches taller than her with a full court of momentum does.
It’s why she’s the state’s best basketball player. The embodiment of the new era for Texas Basketball.
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Rori Harmon was a second grader hoisting as many jumpers as possible before halftime concluded at her older brother Rodney Jr. ‘s game when a man approached her under the basket and handed her a business card.
He was a coach for the Katy Rebels AAU basketball organization, inviting Harmon for a try out. The Katy Rebels’ youngest team technically consisted of fourth graders, but Rori was used to competing with older kids.
She didn’t come out of the womb clutching a basketball. But she begged her father, Rodney Sr., to start playing the second she could talk. So, dad let daughter hop alongside her older brother for dribbling drills in the driveway when she was four.
“We were working on crossovers, behind the back and between the legs,” Rodney Sr. said. “The only thing about between the legs, usually it was the last one to come because their legs were so short.”