BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — On Monday night, the Texas women’s basketball team and TCU will meet at Legacy Arena during the fourth round of the NCAA Tournament.

Texas and TCU didn’t play this season, but the two teams are quite familiar with each other. Texas was TCU’s conference rival in the Big 12 from 2012-24, and TCU center Sedona Prince is a Liberty Hill native who played at UT during the 2018-19 season.

The game will tip off just after 6 p.m. at Legacy Arena in Birmingham on ESPN. Those in the Austin area can listen on the radio, via 103.1 FM.

The winner moves on to play either South Carolina or Duke in the Final Four.

Here is everything that TCU said Sunday about Texas during pregame news conferences for Prince, head coach Mark Campbell and senior guards Madison Conner and Hailey Van Lith:

GOLDEN: How freshman Bryanna Preston kept Texas basketball’s national title hopes alive

TCU vs Texas: Frogs’ first impressions about the Longhorns

Campbell: “There’s not many holes. They’re incredible. They have size and great post play. They have depth, really athletic, have one of the best point guards in college basketball. And they’re a 1 seed for a reason. So we’re going to have to play a heck of a game and Coach Vic and his staff obviously do a tremendous job with their system, style of play.”

Elite Eight matchups: TCU thoughts on Texas post players Taylor Jones and Kyla Oldacre

Campbell: “Oh, incredible. Taylor Jones is an athletic, strong, versatile post player and the depth they have at the post position, they got a lot of big bodies that they can throw at you. They’re a load. They’re a load down there. They wear on you.”

What does Texas point guard Rori Harmon have left to prove?

TCU vs Texas: Horned Frogs’ familiarity with Longhorns

Campbell: “Yeah, Coach Schaefer, his system and what they do, he doesn’t really change it. He’s really good at it. It helps to be familiar with his system but we have a whole new team and obviously they have new players. So you can look at some film a little bit from last year, but really you’re just scrubbing this year’s team and trying to figure out what we gotta do to have a chance to beat these guys.”

Texas vs TCU: Sedona Prince’s much-publicized departure from Texas

Prince: “I don’t think it I really realized how much it affected me until probably this year, to be honest. But, yeah, I mean, I’m from Austin, raised in Austin, committed in eighth grade. Texas was my dream school, 40 minutes from where I grew up, and my family. I won’t go into details, because it’s a long time ago, and there are things if you want to go research it but — yeah, I mean, it was a very, very difficult year for me as a young woman, as a young player to be thinking I was a part of a family and to be treated in the way that I was.

“So I held a lot in my heart and my soul that I didn’t know I was carrying around for a long time, and you don’t really realize how much trauma can affect you until all of the sudden you’re hit with a wall and then it’s like, oh man, this has been, you know — this has been weighing me down for a very long time.

“So the staff isn’t there, but I have so much respect for Vic and what he’s done with the program. I think he’s an amazing coach. I have no hard feelings. I’ve healed from it. It’s shaped me into a better person. I’m grateful for that and where it led me to go to Oregon, to leave college and come here. There is nothing else that could have led me here and taught me so many valuable lessons and shaped me into the person I am today without going through those atrocities that I went through.”

NCAA Tournament: TCU’s Hailey Van Lith beating Texas in 2023 while playing at Louisville

Van Lith: “What I remember — mostly we didn’t get to host that year, we had to go into Texas. They were supposed to beat us by a lot. And, you know, it was kind of like Louisville DNA came out there where we scrapped out on defense, and I think we ended up winning by double digits at least.

“But it was a great game. We played really well. I think, you know, Rori (Harmon) might have got hurt at some point in that game, she didn’t play the whole game. But I mean, all I remember — it was a great win for us. We pulled off an upset on their home court, which was huge.”

TCU vs Texas: What about the Longhorns’ current backcourt?

Van Lith: “I think, again, they’re elite defensively, their backcourt, they have a lot of athletic, strong guards who can do different things. They’re versatile, they have a lot of different personnel. So scout — like personnel and knowing the scout will be huge, and at the end of the day the theme of the NCAA Tournament is toughness. So they’re going to be tough. We know they’re going to be tough. They have that DNA in them, so we’re going to have to match that.”

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Tooling through Mueller, have you ever wondered how the streets of this 21st-century neighborhood, such as Camacho, Taniguchi and Scarbrough, earned their names?

We offer partial historical answers in today’s column.

By way of background, a stroll through the American-Statesman archives reveals several strata of history about Austin street names.

• 1839: The original map of Austin, drawn by master surveyor L.J. Pilie, reveals three types of street names: 1) north-south streets named after Texas rivers, which is still the case; 2) east-west streets named after Texas trees (changed to numerals in 1886, but a change adopted slowly); 3) other names, including the grand-sounding Congress Avenue for the wide street that bisected the new capital of the Texas Republic, as well as names that represented different types of boundaries (East, West, Water).
• 1886: City leaders replaced the tree names with numbered streets on Sept. 21, 1886. Edwin Waller, charged with hacking the city out of the wilderness, had actually preferred numbers for east-west streets, as a July 11, 1839, letter to Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar proves. Some maps from the late 19th century and early 20th century show both numbers and tree names for the same streets.
• Late 1800s-early 1900s: As Austin slipped outside of the downtown grid and the garden plots to the east, more streets were named after early Texas leaders and Austin residents (Lamar Boulevard, Barton Springs Road); or nearby towns already named after early Texans (Burnet Road, Cameron Road); local landmarks (Asylum Road, later renamed Guadalupe Street); or nearby communities (Dessau Road, Old Fredericksburg Road, later renamed South Lamar Boulevard).
• Late 1900s: Three major trends: 1) New freeways named by federal, state or city transportation entities (at times confusing, such as the doubly dubbed MoPac, named for the parallel Missouri Pacific railroad, but also known as Texas Loop 1); 2) new suburban streets named by developers after faraway, fanciful or imaginary people and places, or conversely, actual local geography; and 3) throughways, some later expanded, named after local politicians (Ben White Boulevard) or highway officials (Ed Bluestein Boulevard).
• 2000: The new Mueller redevelopment provided a singular opportunity to name a lot of new streets under the scrutiny of a public-private project. The plateau east of Interstate 35 had already been associated with several key historical events — the scalping of settler Josiah Wilbarger in 1833, the purchase of land by twice-enslaved Newton Isaac Collins in 1872, and the opening of the city’s first civilian airport there in 1930. It was named after City Council Member Robert Mueller (pronounced Miller), who died in office in 1927.

Austinites revved up efforts to move Mueller Municipal Airport, located a few miles from downtown, in 1984. A leading candidate for a replacement was land near Manor, which helps explain some of the industrial, commercial, office and hotel space built on speculation during this period near Interstate 35 and U.S. 290. The city, however, chose the federal offer of Bergstrom Air Force Base in Del Valle. It became Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, which opened in 1999.

At that point, what to do with the hundreds of acres that had been the main footprint of the Mueller Airport?

The city of Austin entered into a partnership with Catellus Development Corp. to create a neighborhood based on ideas associated with “new urbanism.” Those ideas included urban-like density, walkable streets, sensitive landscaping and a mix of resident incomes. Also clustered around the former airport were movie studios, a children’s hospital, a children’s museum and Rathgeber Village, home to several social service groups.

Meanwhile, a committee was convened to choose Mueller street names from the names of significant Austin figures, some of them not well known, especially to newcomers.

Here are just a few of those street names (I’ll return to the subject in future “From the Archives” columns):

• Zach Scott Street: The movie and stage actor Zachary Scott (1914-1965), son of a prominent Austin family that included Dr. Zachary Scott (1880-1964), is perhaps best remembered for film roles in “Mildred Pierce” and “The Southerner.” He is the namesake for Zach Theatre, formerly known as Zachary Scott Theatre, the city’s largest resident theater company.
• Barbara Jordan Boulevard: The former U.S. congresswoman’s early life and career are associated with Houston, but the fearless defender of the Constitution spent her later years in Austin as a professor at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs. Two large statues of Jordan (1936-1996) can be found in the city, one on the University of Texas campus, the other at Austin-Bergstrom.
• Camacho Street: Lorraine Fuentes “Grandma” Castro Camacho (1917-1999) worked in food service for the Austin school district, but more than that, she was a volunteer and community organizer who took care of the youth in the Holly Street neighborhood for decades. Mother of beloved community historian Danny Camacho, she lent her name to the Lorraine “Grandma” Camacho Activity Center.
• Taniguchi Street: A native of Japan, Isamu Taniguchi (1897-1992) immigrated to the U.S. as a teen. During World War II, he was forced into an internment camp at Crystal City, about 115 miles southwest of San Antonio, where he worked in the carpentry shop and maintained gardens. He retired to Austin in 1967, where his son and grandson became prominent architects and educators. In gratitude to the city, he almost single-handedly created the Isamu Taniguchi Japanese Garden at the Zilker Botanical Garden.
• Scarbrough Street: Named after Lemuel Scarbrough (1889-1965), part of at least four generations of his family who turned a farmer-oriented general store into the city’s most glamorous and comprehensive department store. Like his relatives, Lemuel became a philanthropist and civic leader. The Scarbrough Building, including its art deco additions, still commands the southwest corner of Congress Avenue and Sixth Street.
• Emma Long Street: While Austin city government was led by a club of white businessmen for more than a century, Emma Long (1912-2011), an American-Statesman reporter, broke that mold in 1948 by becoming the first woman elected to the City Council. Long was unusually progressive for her time and promoted many of the changes that redefined Austin during the 1950s and ’60s. She reactivated the Austin Parks and Recreation Department and is the namesake for Emma Long Metropolitan Park in Northwest Austin.

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The Texas Democratic Party’s governing board on Saturday elected Kendall Scudder to lead the party forward as its new chair after a devastating performance in November and years of electoral defeats.

“The challenge that we’re facing right now is terrifying for this country and for this state, and a lot of people are counting on us to come together and do the right thing and make sure that we are building a Texas Democratic Party that is worthy of the grassroots in this state,” Scudder said upon taking the gavel. “Let’s build a party that the working men and women of this state can be proud of.”

Scudder took 65 out of 121 votes, an outright majority in the seven-way race.

Scudder will take over as chair of the state party at a moment when Democrats are grasping for a way forward after blowout losses up and down the ballot last year, including President Donald Trump’s victory and a surge to the right by traditionally Democratic groups, such as Hispanic voters in South Texas.

After proclaiming Texas a competitive state where Democratic candidates had a fighting chance of winning statewide for the first time in three decades, party leaders instead watched as Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz trounced their Democratic challengers by roughly 14 and 9 percentage points, respectively. Democrats also ceded ground in the state Legislature and lost nearly every contested state appellate court race, in addition to 10 judicial races in Harris County — eating away at years of Democratic dominance in Texas’ largest county.

That left many Democrats concerned that, after appearing to come within striking distance of winning statewide in 2018, the party was back at a sobering low.

Longtime Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa announced his resignation shortly after the election, acknowledging the party’s poor performance and a need for a new direction.

That push for a fresh vision defined the race for party chair. Scudder will be the incumbent come 2026, when a broader group of delegates will elect the next full-term chair at the party convention in Corpus Christi. The 121-member State Democratic Executive Committee chose Hinojosa’s successor at the Saturday meeting, its first quarterly meeting of the year, because he resigned in the middle of his four-year term.

During his campaign, Scudder, an East Texas native, emphasized the importance of listening to the “grassroots.” Even before he launched his candidacy, he had accused party leadership under Hinojosa of ignoring those voters and activists. He wants to “recalibrate” the party toward a focus on working people.

“The reality is simply that Democrats on the ground don’t have a lot of confidence in party leadership anymore,” Scudder told The Texas Tribune in an interview on Thursday.

He wants the party to pay attention to areas he says it has previously written off, like rural communities, and put a priority on Spanish-language communications.

Scudder has worked in affordable housing and real estate. He came onto the state party stage through the SDEC, although he began his political activism with the Texas Young Democrats and the Texas College Democrats.

Scudder’s leading opponents, former Harris County Democratic Party Chair Lillie Schechter and former Annie’s List Executive Director Patsy Woods Martin, had offered similar but competing visions to re-establish Democratic credibility on kitchen table issues and reconnect with voters in their communities. During the campaign, Schechter and Woods Martin emphasized their experience getting Democratic candidates elected.

The SDEC hosted a candidate forum in Austin on Friday evening before toasting Hinojosa, the outgoing chair.

There, and at the panel’s meeting on Saturday, party insiders discussed how to rebuild credibility with working class voters, engage young people, fundraise and build a party infrastructure that better facilitates elected officials’ involvement in races around the state.

“The problem is that every Democrat thinks that if they had 10 more minutes, they could explain it to you,” Scudder said on party messaging during the forum. “We’ve got to get to a point where we’re speaking to people at their gut, because people vote with their guts and not their brains.”

While most party chair contests are shaped by region and race and decided at the party’s convention during midterm election years, this race was a more insular affair whose outcome was determined by a small group of the party’s activists, many of whom are progressives dissatisfied with the party’s strategies and operations.

Although the SDEC was prepared to go multiple rounds with their ranked choice ballot, Scudder’s 65 allowed him to win in the first round. Woods Martin took 27 votes, and Schechter took 26. Denton County Democratic Party Chair Delia Parker-Mims took two votes, and Meri Gomez rounded out the count with one vote. Eight candidates appeared on the ballot, but one dropped out before the election.

As the votes were tabulated, members passed out to-go shots of blue liquor — and non-alcoholic options — in an effort to liven spirits after a difficult 2024 election and an unprecedented chair race.

The candidates were largely aligned ideologically. And they especially all agreed on the need for change in the party’s direction.

“We are at an inflection point right now,” Schechter said, “and if we don’t learn lessons from the last election, and continue doing things status quo, we’re never going to win in Texas.”

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