Rori Harmon is ready to run it back with Texas one more time

Harmon, who missed most of the 2023-24 season after she tore her ACL in December, will play brace-free this season, a decision she said was always the only one she could make. Playing with a brace on her leg at this point is “just not me,” Harmon told The IX Basketball via video call Tuesday. “I think if you see me play basketball … that’s just not it. I sound like Coach [Schaefer], but it’s just not it. It’s not going to work out.”

After spending 15 months as somewhat of a bench coach for the Longhorns, Harmon led the team to their first Final Four in over 20 years in 2025, not even a year after suffering that season-ending injury. Wearing a brace was a non-negotiable last season, but these days it’s “not something I want to look at or think about anymore,” she stated matter-of-factly.

The 22-year-old two-way guard arrived at that conclusion after putting in tremendous work on the court as well as consulting with a life coach who asked her a question that stuck: Why would she want to be the same player she was pre-injury? “You want to be better,” Harmon said. “So when I started talking to him about it, I was like, ‘why would I want to be the same? I want to be better.’ Like, it started to make sense.”

In the immediate aftermath of an injury, “it’s hard to make sense of things because you’re under so much stress and sadness and [there’s] probably a whole bunch going on mentally,” Harmon explained. “So you don’t really make too much sense at that moment. But once I started getting out of that, I was like, ‘yeah, I want to be better.’ And it’s really … that’s what I feel like right now.”

While speaking to The IX Basketball last week, Schaefer said Harmon’s improvement is measurable — but even he is surprised by her confidence. Two years ago, she was “training to be recovered from her knee and heal up to where she could play,” he explained. “This past summer, she was training to improve her skill set. She was already healed. And so now she’s playing without a brace. She seems to be very comfortable in that. I’m not so much comfortable in it, but she is. And so I think she’s able to go out, and every day work on just becoming a better basketball player.”

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The Longhorns will need the leadership Harmon can provide. As a fifth-year athlete, she’s seen a new team each season, which means she knows how to approach each season with a fresh perspective.

“My thoughts change every year because the team changes,” Harmon said .”The expectations are the same, but my thoughts change based off the team, and it’s not in a bad way. It’s always a good way, because it’s like, we have to learn again because there are new people. Every team has to learn again. There’s somebody added, somebody left, a whole bunch of stuff. So I think that’s what really excites me, is that this team, that we have the newbies and then, obviously, the returners.”

The Longhorns ultimately lost to the South Carolina Gamecocks in the Final Four last season, a game that gave the team “an edge,” Harmon added. “Now we have a chip on our shoulder to get back to where we were — and even further.”

As she put it, the team has high expectations but “nobody wants to pick Texas … they hate us because they ain’t us. It’s fine; nobody’s feelings are hurt at all.” Harmon paused, and then added, “I think I’d rather it be that way.”

The Longhorns are currently ranked fourth by the AP, just under the UConn Huskies, the South Carolina Gamecocks and the UCLA Bruins, and second in the SEC. While the hopes of a championship and the disappointment of last year’s loss are both still the air, the team’s focus this year is on “what is now and what we have to do every day,” as Harmon explained.

To that end, she’s ready to meet the moment. When asked what fifth-year Rori Harmon would tell her freshman self, she quickly noted how much more of a challenge the experience has been than she expected.

“I knew that it was going to be challenging, but I don’t think nothing could really prepare me honestly to have such a transition from high school to, like, this caliber of [play],” she continued. “Nothing really could’ve prepared me, but I probably would tell her, ‘get ready to be somebody that people are going to look up to and look for — that person to be the voice.’ I think sometimes in the past, when I was younger, I was a lead by example type person.”

“I wasn’t really that vocal, I didn’t really … I wasn’t a leader,” Harmon continued. “I would tell her, ‘get ready to be that, because you’re going to be it immediately.’ As soon as I got here freshman year, immediately there wasn’t any ‘oh, let me just, let’s just get a year underneath you, try to figure it out,’ — Coach picked me up and threw me into the fire and said, ‘you need to start now.'” 

Clearly, Harmon accepted that challenge. The Texas Longhorns will kick off the regular season Monday, Nov. 3, with a home game against the Incarnate Word Cardinals.

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Editor’s note (Oct. 22, 8:45 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this story misstated who ranked Texas fourth in the preseason. The AP did, not the NCAA.