BIRMINGHAM—Hailey Van Lith has played a lot of great basketball and competed in five straight Elite Eights, but when the last one ended, she kept thinking about the pain. She was a superstar in high school, a phenom when she arrived with the Louisville Cardinals, and a starter on a defending national champion with the LSU Tigers, but by the time she joined the TCU Horned Frogs last year, she was broken.
“I wasn’t necessarily in a place where I knew who I was anymore,” Van Lith said.
She struggled at LSU and received blowback for it. An individual’s mental-health journey is complex and nuanced, and it would be too simple to pinpoint a single cause. But after TCU lost to the Texas Longhorns on Monday night, Van Lith said there were “nights when I didn’t want to be alive anymore … I was on medication because I couldn’t sleep or eat without it. It’s painful to talk about it.”
Van Lith has been an elite basketball player for most of her life. TCU needed her to be that, but coach Mark Campbell also wanted her to be something else. Van Lith said Campbell taught her “how much better life can be if you just let people see who you are. And that’s hard for me.”
Campbell said that with a one-year transfer like Van Lith, “to peel back the layers and really get to know ’em, it’s hard to do.” It was especially hard with Van Lith, because the layers were so thick.
“She came in with a wall,” Campbell said. “She opened up and became vulnerable.”
Van Lith said: “He has just breathed life into me. That took a lot of work on his part that he did not have to do. He could have told me to screw off when I was giving him problems.”
Van Lith repeatedly thanked God on Monday, and a teammate said she recently “shared her testimony” among the group.
The Horned Frogs got to see the best of her, and the best of Hailey Van Lith is a force. She set TCU single-season records for points (680) and assists (204), and she transformed the program by rediscovering her will.
“I have a hard time believing that anybody in one sport in one year can have a greater impact than what Hailey Van Lith has had at TCU,” Campbell said. “Not many humans could go through what she’s gone through and keep fighting and keep going and keep grinding.”
Van Lith will now try to forge a career in the WNBA, which is no guarantee. She is only 5' 9", and she isn’t a great three-point shooter or an electrifying athlete. But it will be easy to root for her—and if she doesn’t make it in the WNBA, she has shown she can handle that disappointment.
“When I was a sophomore I was like, ‘Who would ever want to take a fifth year?’ ” Van Lith said Monday with a laugh. “ ‘Why would anyone want to be in college for five years?’ ”
She didn’t. But then she did. And she will be better off for it forever.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Hailey Van Lith Rediscovered Her Will at TCU.
