In early October, before any team’s habits were revealed to the world, Louisville began practice with a continuous shooting drill. Up and down the floor, sprinting into layups and midrange jumpers and 3-pointers, racing to a preset point total before the clock ran out. The Cardinals fell short on the first try, which was bad enough. When the second attempt was another failure, a heaviness set upon the Keuber Center. Like the air itself constricted, wringing all the oxygen out of the space.
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The coaches weren’t happy. This was abundantly and vitriolically clear. They also were not alone in that. Hailey Van Lith stood on the baseline with hands on hips, annoyed and breathing heavy, shifting her weight from side to side. She waited for her opening. Then she filled the silence with the subtlety of a vault safe dropped from the mezzanine.
“If y’all can’t run, hold yourself accountable and sit out,” Van Lith declared to her teammates. “If you can’t hang, don’t run.”
So this is what LSU is getting, if anyone had any doubts, in the most consequential transfer portal result of the women’s college basketball offseason: A fire-breather in braids. A personality asteroid that won’t wipe out the atmosphere in Baton Rouge as much as turn it into colors heretofore undetected along the spectrum. It was not possible to make the defending national champions any more provocative, in every sense of the word. Then Hailey Van Lith decided she’d go there now.
GO DEEPERHailey Van Lith transfers to LSUOh, what fun it is. “Everything she’s about, she backs it up,” said Morgan Jones, who spent four years tangling with Van Lith at Florida State before teaming up with her at Louisville in 2022-23. “Like she’s not just a player who talks to talk. She walks it, too. You can’t really argue with it, because she puts the work in and it shows on the court. She lives up to every expectation she has.”
Those expectations spike with this decision. But that’s probably the point.
LSU exists in a different basketball context after the events of April 2, 2023. It is a program in which better-than-the-best is the only standard that applies anymore. (People at Van Lith’s former school would argue the bar there isn’t any lower, but LSU has a trophy that Louisville still doesn’t.) LSU doesn’t need Van Lith in order to prove anything. Her 1,553 points and two appearances on NCAA Tournament All-Region teams aren’t the final word about her value-add. They’re the starting point of the discussion.
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Van Lith goes from being everything to being part of a thing, while simultaneously pressured to exceed anything she’s done before.
She is a 5-foot-7 guard with a career scoring average of 15.7 points per game fueled by, as one ACC coach put it, a “lethal” midrange game. She also likely has to be a playmaker to thrive at the next level, and Van Lith collectively has more turnovers than assists over her college career. It’s probably not fair to set Van Lith’s career-best assist rate of 17.5 percent last season against the nation’s leader in that category – Caitlin Clark, at 48.4 percent – but even the 10th-best figure, posted by Drexel’s Maura Hendrixson, came in at 37.1 percent. Meanwhile, Van Lith’s Win Shares per 40 minutes (.170) were both the lowest of her career and nowhere near the realm of All-American peers such as new teammate Angel Reese (.435), Villanova’s Maddie Siegrist (.404), South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston (.380) and Clark (.367).
Still, those women didn’t play for teams with double-digit losses while also carrying singular burdens for production. Louisville, from a basketball perspective, might’ve needed Van Lith too much. LSU might need something else. “She’s at her best in clutch situations, when an opponent pisses her off and when she decides to put the team on her back end-of-game,” said the ACC coach, who was granted anonymity for an unvarnished scouting report on Van Lith. “Her focus and efficiency can waver throughout the game, especially if she doesn’t feel involved, is disconnected with teammates or is struggling to score. And she needs to improve her 3-point shooting and assist-to-turnover ratio.”
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We don’t know what the results will be. We absolutely know what the approach will be.
Van Lith is not confident. She is, more accurately, unaware it’s possible she cannot be the best at stuff. To wit: While discussing the accommodations at brand-new Denny Crum Hall last fall, the conversation turned to brownies. And, specifically, how Van Lith makes the most delicious brownie anyone has ever tasted. Her grandmother’s recipe, which Van Lith keeps on lockdown. Made only every other month, because that’s all the world deserves. Or if she’s feeling generous, she’ll whip them up on special request, like when her brother Tanner asks for them for his birthday every year. “It’s, like, famous, I will say,” Van Lith said. “Everyone says it’s like 11 out of 10. So it’s pretty good.”
Her baking skills, of course, are not the point. Nor, really, is an obsession with being better than everyone else. Any high-functioning athlete has that.
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It’s more that most humans understand it’s possible they could be less-than, in the end, in whatever they do. This does not occur to Hailey Van Lith. There’s a big empty space where that prospect should be. She lives in willful denial of any other reality. When she and the other kids in her Wenatchee, Wash., neighborhood played games, she made the rules and kicked people out, if necessary. “I was just the queen, I guess,” she said. “I had to rule the playing field.” When her family played the game of Life, if Van Lith didn’t wind up as the doctor, she demanded a restart. “I had to (have) the top job,” he said.
It is her way, and there is no other way. Because the ending has to be the ending, and there is no ending other than what she conceives. And if you don’t like it, well, maybe you can’t hang and you should sit this one out. “I just bugged people,” Van Lith said, wearing that self-assessment like a badge. “I was so ornery and wanted to say I was better than everybody else. I was always born with this super-competitive edge to me. And that’s what grew into what it is today.”
If you imagine it’s difficult to deal with this, consider the burden of dealing with Hailey Van Lith when you are Hailey Van Lith.
Her own impossible standards nearly turned her into a husk early in her time at Louisville, when a poor shooting game was world-ender, spiraling into a night of mental self-immolation with the lights out in her room. Particularly as a freshman, she couldn’t process that college basketball is actually hard and doesn’t always bend to her whim. “It honestly made me hate basketball,” Van Lith said. She gave so much to the sport. Why didn’t the sport give her what she wanted in return?
“Everything was the end of the world or the top of the mountain,” Van Lith said. “There was no middle. Mentally, I would destroy myself for any failure, or what I perceived to be failure. It was, like, traumatic. That’s all I can say.”
She’ll arrive at LSU somewhat freed of that load, but probably only somewhat. Midway through her sophom*ore season, Van Lith started to let herself feel joy in the game again. She no longer punished herself for a bad practice by shutting herself in her room to watch film and do homework. “I’ve let myself be a normal person,” is how she put it. But that 2021-22 season also ended in a Final Four run she couldn’t totally enjoy. From Van Lith’s perspective, outsiders thought Louisville wasn’t necessarily supposed to be there, and then the Cardinals lost to South Carolina in the national semifinals, which left her with the nagging feeling that she’d let everyone be right. Even months later, with all possibilities on the table for her junior season, Van Lith couldn’t deny she was still bothered. No one is supposed to be right, except her.
It’s probably reasonable to expect Van Lith doesn’t feel much less bothered now, even after she and her team washed away 11 pre-NCAA Tournament losses with a run to the Elite Eight. At some point, clearly, she decided Louisville no longer was a place where she could get what was coming to her. So, yes, she had to leave. Because it is coming to her. This is her dogma. This is undeniable.
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Now the defending champs, seemingly in need of not much, benefit from the healthy tension of Hailey Van Lith’s world. There’s work to be done at LSU to fit in, to become what she expects to become as a player, to prove herself right, to rule overall. Just as surely, she’s coming to Baton Rouge thinking there’s only one way this is going to end.
(Photo of Hailey Van Lith: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
Brian Hamilton joined The Athletic as a senior writer after three-plus years as a national college reporter for Sports Illustrated. Previously, he spent eight years at the Chicago Tribune, covering everything from Notre Dame to the Stanley Cup Final to the Olympics. Follow Brian on Twitter @_Brian_Hamilton
