After the end of his second season at Arkansas in 2019, Razorback women’s basketball coach Mike Neighbors felt proud of his team — an SEC cellar-dweller just two years before — for playing so well in the SEC Tournament.
In publicly praising his team, with an eye out for future recruits, Neighbors said something that a few old-schoolers might have winced at: “You don’t have to win a championship to be a champion here.”
Since then, Neighbors’ program has become a borderline national contender, knocking off UConn and Baylor in the process and stockpiling a bevy of former four and five-star stars-in-the-making like Jersey Wolfenberger, Sasha Goforth and Maryam Dauda.