Bohls: Rori Harmon remains Texas' do-it-all multi-tasker for women's basketball

Rori Harmon’s talents never cease to amaze.

For one, this super athletic Texas junior from Houston remains one of the most dynamic point guards in all of women’s college basketball. That’s a given.

Since she arrived as a freshman, she’s been an elite passer and one who can see the floor and break down a defense. She had an eye-popping 228 assists last season and averaged a school-record 7.4 a game. Know that Harmon and Iowa’s high-profile Caitlin Clark were the only two players in women’s Division I ball who averaged more than 11 points, seven-plus assists and five-plus rebounds a game last year.

But Harmon also takes a ton of pride in being a great defender. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be on the floor, given Vic Schaefer’s unflinching demand for defensive hustle and intensity.

She routinely was given the task of guarding the other team’s star player and as such was the Big 12's defensive player of the year. Clark is great and all, but doesn’t press all over the court as Harmon has to.

When she wasn’t playing basketball at Cypress Creek, Harmon dabbled at soccer but tired of lining up at goalkeeper. Just too idle for her. She ran cross country and track and routinely won the sprints in her PE classes. She even tried her hand at volleyball and had such hops, she played outside hitter above the net. She played some Wii tennis and bowled with her brother. She was so good at math, she regularly won time table competitions. Math.

And, oh yeah, she juggles. Really.

“Yeah, I can. I taught myself how to juggle basketballs in high school,” Harmon said recently. “It’s not that hard. I always like to try something that I’ve never done.”

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But then, that’s always been part of her job description. She’s a multi-tasker.

Texas' petite 5-foot-6 fireball with the cool, electric curls, the irrepressible smile and fiery spirit is used to juggling tasks as well as basketballs.

As the face of the 13th-ranked Texas women’s basketball team, which has an exhibition against Midwestern State at Moody Center on Thursday before the Nov. 8 season opener, she’s in charge of uniting a club that overachieved a year ago in the face of incredible adversity when it seemed everybody but the team trainer got hurt.

The serious injuries included a season-ending knee injury nine games in to stud center Aaliyah Moore, who’s not yet been cleared for action; recurring lower-body ailments for post player Taylor Jones; Harmon’s own toe injury and a debilitating quad hematoma injury that kept leading scorer Sonya Morris off the court for more than a month.

In spite of that, Texas still won the Big 12 for the first time in 19 years and reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament before a crushing home defeat by Louisville.

“All that didn’t stop us from winning 26 games and losing only 10,” Harmon said pridefully.

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At least this year she wishes for better health and hopes to have a little more help after Harmon and five others endured injuries that cost them 60 total games. The team returns 88% of its scoring and 94% of its rebounding if they can all get on the court.

Much of Harmon’s help should come in the form of 6-foot-1 freshman Madison Booker, the 12th-ranked prospect nationally who will share some of the point guard duties but also likely will share the court at the same time together. The five-star Booker’s such a huge talent with physical strength, she’s already won three gold medals with USA Basketball.

She’s also so versatile that her coach claims she can play any position on the court from one to four. And probably will.

“Madison can get her own shot, but she’ll pass it sometimes to a teammate who has a better look,” Schaefer said. “She’s so unselfish.”

Schaefer should know. He used to coach at Mississippi State, a program he took to the Final Four, and began recruiting the Mississippian from the time she was a seventh grader.

“I feel like I’ve known him my whole life,” said Booker, who led her Germantown High School squad in Ridgeland, Miss., to a state championship her senior year and was named the Gatorade player of the year for Mississippi.

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Booker visited Duke and Tennessee before settling on Texas and brings a strong presence to the Longhorns’ backcourt. Unless she’s playing in the frontcourt, of course. She’s that rare specimen who could line up anywhere, but has a nice handle and figures to spell Harmon at the point at times. She’s projected mainly as a small forward with Shaylee Gonzales at shooting guard.

“Rori can point guard all day,” Booker said. “But if she gets tired, I’ll be there to help her out and give her a breather.”

That hasn’t exactly been in her vocabulary. Harmon’s been an iron woman who averaged a staggering 36 minutes a game and played the full exhausting 40 minutes in 10 games last season.

“Forty is crazy,” said her teammate and roommate Shay Holle. “She’s exhausted after games.”

Who knows, with the teammate who goes by “Book” on hand, maybe Schaefer will even cut Harmon’s minutes down from 40 to 39. It’s a thought.

Harmon admits she got worn down as much from her taxing workload as her foot injury that sidelined her for the Longhorns’ first four games, three of them defeats against the likes of UConn and Louisville.

“It definitely did wear me down,” Harmon said. “That’s not hidden. It wasn’t a secret.”

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Asked what she did in the offseason, Harmon had a simple response.

“Rest,” she said. “I took the whole month of May off. I just sat down. I didn’t do anything but sit on the couch.”

She would check out “Saw X” or a Harry Potter flick on Netflix because she’s a big movie buff. In her spare time, she paints and draws. She also has an extensive shoe collection, a stash that includes up to 80 sneakers. She keeps 50 of ‘em in her Austin apartment that she shares with Holle, Jones and walk-on Sarah Graves along with Harmon’s black and gray rescue cat she calls “Patience.”

“Rori attacks everything,” said Holle, a senior who said she might return for her pandemic-restored season in 2024-25. “Everything is competitive with her. She always wants to be the best.”

That also had mitigating factors in the tremendous need for her to stay on the court detracted from her offense.

Harmon’s shooting went awry last season. She connected on just eight of 51 tries from behind the line and was a below-average 56.2% free-throw shooter, but has worked tirelessly at correct that.

“She’s continuing the tradition of really outstanding point guards at Texas,” noted Longhorns coaching legend Jody Conradt, who churned out those like national player of the year Kamie Ethridge and two-time All-Big 12 Jamie Carey like clockwork. “Rori was at this level-ready the day she stepped on campus. She has an understanding of the game that is unusually good.”

That said, Conradt and Schaefer both know Harmon can get so much better.

Her drop-off in shooting last year stemmed from several factors.

“She had a falloff, I think, because her focus was on helping her teammates and just being a facilitator,” Conradt said. “It’s not so much about getting her shot than it is there’s a balance between getting the ball to her teammates and we need her to score. As for free throws, it’s all in the head. It’s all mental.”

And Harmon promises she’s always been a good shooter. And plans to make drastic improvement after living in the gym all summer.

She doesn’t remember the exact number of shots she’d take from different spots on the floor. But she does know she’d show up an hour before everybody else to get in her work. Increasing her range and accuracy will pay huge dividends because opponents will have to focus on more than cutting off her driving lanes to the basket.

“She’s so fast that people sag off her,” Holle said. “But she has the ability to hit those shots so people can’t sag off her.”

Schaefer said there were other things at play in her declining shooting accuracy from the field and the line.

“Once Sonya went down and you lose your leading scorer, someone has to pick up the slack,” Schaefer said. “Rori ended up taking some of Sonya’s shots the last month-and-a-half of the season. I’d love for her to shoot it better, and she will, but her job is to run our team.”

In Schaefer’s world, his preference is for her to reduce her turnovers after committing 99 last season.

“If she can cut it down from three to one a game, that’d be really, really good,” he said. “And if she does, that gives her more accountability with her teammates. It’s hard for a quarterback to get in the running back’s ear about fumbling the ball if he’s throwing an interception or two.”

But there’s no doubt who’s quarterbacking this hungry Texas team that is starved to get to bigger heights. Because, unlike her cat, Harmon has very little patience.

Thursday's exhibition game

Midwestern State at No. 13 Texas, 7 p.m., Moody Center, LHN

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Harmon roaring to get started and try to return Texas to prominence