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ESPN Daily

Did Open Tryouts and Four Walk-Ons Save a Season?

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.63.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Big 12 Women’s basketball tournament starts today, but of all the teams in attendance, none have had a season of ups and downs like the Texas Christian University. After starting out the year surprisingly strong and entering the top 25, a series of injuries sidelined several players, including stars Sedona Price and Madison Connor. By mid-January, the Horned Frogs had only six players available. So head coach Mark Campbell put an emergency plan into effect: hold open tryouts. Today, Dave Wilson, who wrote about the team for ESPN, joins the show to explain how things got so dire for TCU, what it was like to walk-on to this team midseason, and why this real-life-sports-movie-in-the-making may still have a crazy final act. The bracket for the Big 12 Tournament can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Dave Wilson, we're talking today about four young women, all college students who have gone through an abnormal experience this school year.

0:08.0

Paint a portrait for us. Where would these women as our story get started?

0:12.0

Yeah, Clinton, these are just four college students at T.C.U. in Fort Worth, Texas.

0:17.2

Two freshmen, two sophomores.

0:20.0

For the most part, they're just there trying to be college students, still figuring their way out around campus and where to eat and where to hang out.

0:28.0

What did they all have in common?

0:30.0

All of them had been standout basketball players in high school.

0:33.1

They just happened to come to TSU to continue their education

0:36.2

with no designs on continuing their collegiate athletic career. Well, then something happened that would bring them all together and make them kind of

0:49.9

famous on campus and beyond.

0:53.0

An unusual situation for the T-S2 Women's Basketball Program to forfeit some of the games this week.

0:59.0

Really, this is a huge blow to what's been an incredible turnaround in Fort Worth.

1:05.8

So the TSU basketball team, which had started out the season surprisingly strong,

1:10.9

was decimated by injuries by the time January arrived and really only had about six available players.

1:17.0

So the Horn Fox put out a call for open tryouts and our characters, more or less typical college students, were a few

1:26.1

of the many who he had to call.

1:29.4

I just got sent the article that they had to cancel two games, and I sent it to my dad and he said you

1:34.9

should just go introduce yourself like might as well.

1:38.9

You had to be a full-time TC student and you had to have high school basketball experience.

1:43.6

And you're talking about a campus that's the second smallest student body and the Power Five

1:48.4

with about 12,000 students.

1:49.9

So they weren't real sure how many people they were actually going to find that met all these requirements.

...

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