On a night Bailey Maupin defined as “bigger than basketball,” her words felt fitting in more ways than one. Texas Tech didn’t just win another Big 12 slugfest. It revealed, once again, why this season has become something far greater than a collection of wins.
These things don’t just happen.
Not 23 times in 26 tries they don’t.
The Lady Raiders moved to 23-3 overall and 10-3 in conference play with a 70–65 victory over Kansas inside United Supermarkets Arena on Tuesday. Fifty fouls along with countless additional stoppages. It was the type of game that begs a team to give in. To quit.
Some would have. Some teams here have.
But not this group. Instead, they refused to lose.
“What a grind of a game. So hard fought, so intense,” head coach Krista Gerlich said afterward. “Those are the kind of slugfests we have with Kansas. We just go blow for blow every time we play.”
That’s the coaching line, right? And it’s true. That is what happened Tuesday night.
But why doesn’t it always end in a win?
Why is this team continually able to ignore the noise, good or bad, and simply find a way?
Texas Tech’s leading scorer had zero points after the first quarter. Senior Bailey Maupin was being guarded in a way that suggested Kansas wanted her to do anything but touch the basketball.
Instead of frustration, she found fuel.
Maupin battled her way to 23 points, 17 in the second half and 12 in the fourth quarter when it mattered most.
Snudda Collins faced similar early game struggles but like Maupin she carried late for the team, as you expect from your two leading scorers. But it was more than stars being stars. That’s how you win a handful of games, not how you find yourself in the fight for a Big 12 title with five games to play when preseason national pundits couldn’t even find the energy to name your full roster.
It takes everyone being everyone.
Adlee Blacklock plays fewer than 10 minutes a night but stepped in again when called upon, drawing a charge, securing massive rebounds, and hitting clutch free throws.
Sidney Love seemed to read the room better than anyone on the floor at times, knowing when her team needed a tough bucket and going to get it.
Jalynn Bristow battled foul trouble all game yet never let it get in her head. Instead, she delivered a key late block and two free throws of her own.
Then, with Kansas looking to tie a game already defined by whistles, Denae Fritz didn’t play cautiously. She got right into the shirt of one of the nation’s best foul drawers, so tight that Kansas was whistled for an illegal screen trying to knock her off.
It’s easy to talk about why those moments matter. Coaches preach togetherness. Team chemistry. Buying into roles. Playing for each other instead of the scoresheet.
But this team actually lives it.
So where does that kind of buy-in come from?
“There’s so many things that I can say about that because it takes a lot of time and effort to build chemistry and to build unity amongst the team, especially with the transfer portal,” Gerlich said postgame. “I think we did a great job of recruiting, evaluating our needs, but also evaluating the character of kids that we wanted. I think we did a great job of selling to them our vision and they bought it. Hook, line, and sinker.”
That vision has produced something few predicted. Let’s be honest — no one predicted it. No one outside their locker room, at least, thought Texas Tech would be sitting in the top two of the Big 12 with five games remaining.
Long before the wins started stacking up, the belief was already inside that locker room. Even from one of those that came over in the portal mentioned by Gerlich, in Ole Miss transfer Snudda Collins.
Before the season even began her message of what the locker room belief was shined clear:
“Nobody on this team is a loser… I hope not or they’re in the wrong program.”
At the time, it sounded like confidence. Some naysayers even said delusion.
Now, it reads more like foreshadowing.
Most expected the Lady Raiders to finish near the bottom, a place this once-storied program had lived for much of the past two decades.
Picked 13th in the preseason Big 12 poll, Texas Tech has now secured just the program’s third winning conference record in 20 years, while 23 victories mark the most since 2004.
A national championship program, arguably a blue blood of the sport under Marsha Sharp, had fallen into such a deep hole that some seemed ready to throw dirt on top of it.
Mentally, that’s not an easy place to exist. Especially for athletes who had nothing to do with that history but were tasked with carrying its weight anyway.
This team, though, hasn’t just climbed out.
It may have planted something strong enough to build on, the early framework of a new era of Lady Raider basketball.
And Gerlich believes the foundation of that success is rooted in relationships, learning how to work through hard together instead of walking away from it.
“We had an off day during the bye week and played pickleball together,” she said. “Most teams would have said, ‘Coach, we just want our own time.’ … They understand that it’s about building relationships and continuing to work on those relationships.”
She even went beyond the here and now.
“They’re learning that that’s how you develop great relationships. And that’s how you develop great chemistry. And that’s how you do special things. We got the right kids with the right coaches around them, and they’re taking us on a magical ride right now.”
Magical rides don’t happen by accident. And they don’t happen overnight, this one certainly hasn’t.
Krista Gerlich knows that better than anyone.
On a night dedicated to the Play4Kay game, the symbolism was hard to miss.
“It was bigger than basketball,” Bailey Maupin said afterward.
Gerlich coached much of her first season at Texas Tech while undergoing breast cancer treatment, a fight she largely kept private at the time. Few people saw it. Her players, however, do now.
Resilience is not something she has ever needed to teach. She has lived it. And it shows up in the way her team competes.
For that reason, it felt fitting that the win also marked her 100th at Texas Tech — another quiet milestone in a rebuild shaped as much by perseverance as vision.
“More than anything, it’s just the win for the girls that they’re just continuing to believe in each other,” Gerlich said. “It’s more about them finding ways to stay together, compete, and keep playing… I’m so proud to be at Texas Tech, and I’m so proud to have this team be 23 and three — like that’s been my dream.”
But even in that moment, her focus drifted forward.
“Since I took the job, it was my goal to get it back to those days,” she said. “But we’re not close to being done.”
Because seasons like this don’t come from nowhere.
They are built in grueling summer workouts, uncomfortable conversations, and the off days when teams choose connection instead of themselves… long before anyone was paying attention and when expectations outside their locker room remained firmly planted near the bottom of the conference.
What Texas Tech is doing right now isn’t luck.
It’s alignment.
A locker room that believes. A coach who understands what this place once was and what it can be again. A program no longer trying to outrun its past, but strong enough to build on top of it.
Twenty-three wins confirm what this team has become, and for the first time in a long time, Lady Raider basketball isn’t being discussed for where it once stood, but for what it is proving right now.
And whatever comes next, this group has already made sure this season will be remembered for exactly what it is.
Special.
Join the conversation with other Red Raiders on the Inside The Double T forum.
Subscribe today to get the most in-depth Texas Tech sports and recruiting coverage.
Follow us on X: @RedRaiderSports
Like and follow us on Instagram @rrs_rivals & like us on Facebook.