SAN ANTONIO – Adversity has been an ally of the 2025-26 edition of the UTSA women’s basketball team, which is headed to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2009.
In a season filled with equal parts high and low, and perhaps everything in between, the Roadrunners completed a span of four wins in four days at the American Conference Championship on Saturday in Birmingham, Ala., giving UTSA its second league title in as many years after winning the regular-season crown last year.
There were points during the season when the Roadrunners had more players sitting on the bench due to injury than they did on the active roster. The team celebrated wins that may have seemed improbable and bounced back from losses that were unexpected. Lineup combinations varied significantly, at times, from game to game.
Despite the periods of tumult, senior Cheyenne Rowe - who has played a starring role for the Roadrunners, leading the team in scoring (14.0 ppg), rebounding (8.8 rpg) and field-goal percentage (44.7 pct.) – always believed that her UTSA team could reach its current destination.
“I’ve always thought this team could be a championship contender,” Rowe said. “Never a doubt in my mind.”
Head Coach Karen Aston has held the same confidence in this year’s team, whose current five-game winning streak began by snapping Rice’s 22-game spree – then the second-longest active streak in the nation – in the regular-season finale in Houston before downing the Owls for the second time in a week to claim the league’s tournament title.
“I’ve said this all year long,” Aston said. “We have an expectation of winning. I’ve never gone into practice and not liked to be around this team. They needed to grow. It was a process.”
Five players who UTSA expected to be in the lineup were out for the entirety of the season, including junior guard Maya Linton, who was a starter on the 2024-25 American Conference regular-season championship team. In addition, junior forward Idara Udo missed eight games due to injury, which included the start of UTSA’s American Conference slate. At that point, the Roadrunners were without all five starters from the 2024-25 championship squad. Their veteran point guard Ereauna Hardaway brought tremendous experience after three seasons at North Texas but was still adjusting to the program.
“When you have a system in place that you feel like people believe in, you can turn the tide at any point,” Aston said. “It took time because of the injuries and Ereauna getting to know our team and our system. And I think the turning point for us was the young players that decided to grow up a little bit. I thought that was the biggest difference for us.”
UTSA (18-15) is headed to the NCAA Tournament for the third time in program history and will face top-seeded UConn on Saturday at 2 p.m. on ABC.
Aston becomes one of only a handful of coaches in NCAA women’s basketball history to lead three different teams (Charlotte, Texas, UTSA) to the NCAA Tournament. She’s won 367 career games at four different institutions over 18 seasons – an average of better than 20 wins per season.
It’s another chapter in her storied career, but it’s one that has been particularly special.
“This has been rewarding in a completely different way than maybe any team I’ve ever coached because of how they put this together late in the year and how they came together,” Aston said. “It’s extremely rewarding to see them as young people stick with something and then get rewarded, because that doesn’t always happen. It’s just a huge learning tool for them for other places in life. They stuck with this and they didn’t have to.”